Week 14, Day 3: Dreams of Candycane Tobacco Leaves

Not sure how to report on this week. Not a lot to say other than that I feel tired and antsy and have been "getting headaches" each of the past two days. Which is odd mostly because I pretty much never get headaches for any reason, so obviously I am curious if they are related to the deprivation of caffeine and nicotine from my system. All day at work I yearn for cups of coffee and all night I yearn for cigarettes and maybe a beer.

Returning to the point I brought up in my post yesterday, here's a funny anecdote from a friend:
[ED. NOTE, after the fact: SAID FRIEND HAS CORRECTED MY MEMORY AND REMINDED ME TO INCLUDE THE INFO BELOW IN RED THAT I LEFT OUT THE FIRST TIME.]

"Two things about my dad: 1)he is kind of OCD, and 2) he has a gluten allergy. However, despite his allergy--which he has had his whole life--he loves pasta, beer, bread and other things he isn't supposed to eat. When I was growing up, he would occasionally decide to have an evening of eating these foods, for the love of the game; this would then result in him spending two hours that night in the bathroom, before finally exiting and leaving the room smelling as if someone just relieved themselves of a giant, decomposing rat carcass.

"Finally, after years of these increasingly sickening shenanigans, my dad's doctor said to him, 'You have to stop this, seriously. NO MORE GLUTEN.' So my dad finally stopped. After a little while, he slowly began to find ways around his allergy--rice beer, wheat-free pasta, etc. But even after much searching, there was still no solution to the fact that you can't have wheat-less bread. What's hilarious is that before he had fully committed himself to a lifestyle of "living right" and seeking for healthy alternatives, he DIDN'T EVEN LIKE BREAD. But once he wasn't allowed to have it, he became OBSESSED with the idea that he needed to be able to eat bread and began a quest to find bread that he could digest. Obsessed. He even drove six hours away to enroll in "Gluten-free Baking Program" at a culinary school. I could see a look in his eyes that said everything about how badly he thought needed to eat bread (while somehow still "not breaking the rules"). I thought of you when I read your blog post and began imagining seeing the same look in your eyes."

One reason I decided to have this week begin Sunday after I woke up rather than Saturday night at midnight (and have the week run until I wake up next Sunday) was because I wanted to avoid what would I imagine would have been an otherwise pathetic experience of midnight hitting and me lighting up a cigarette. This was fun and cute after a week of not listening to music--which, trust me, was WAAAAAY harder than this--but I'm self-aware enough to understand that this would just be sad.

On related topics, I've been mulling over the thought of quitting smoking (don't get too excited yet, mom). I haven't really reached the point yet where I actually want to never smoke, but it seems sort of silly/crazy that I've been smoking as long as I have, and I feel like i'm beginning to reach the endpoint where anyone will believe me when I assure them that I'll be able to quit "when I'm ready" (my "ultimate end" is always "when the baby is on the way", but at the pace i'm at now, who knows when that's gonna be). This past fall I had gotten to a point where I was as close to quitting--only one or two a week--as any point since my year of quitting six years ago, but since then things have gone back to the way they were, and here I am now. Wishing I could break some rules.