Despite high-quality support from the in-laws, last and this week’s coincidence of the convening of the *ahem* conference on *ahem* and abandonment by my wife (allegedly she’s coming home on Friday, but seeing is believing) has proved more fatiguing than expected. At my cello lesson yesterday evening, my teacher couldn’t believe it when I told him how little sleep I was getting by on. I told him it was okay, I didn’t really feel like sleeping anyway and it was partly research for a story I’m writing about a guy with sleeping problems. And he told me about how tired he would sometimes get on tour (so tired you’d have to drink a cup of coffee before a concert!) and I told him about sitting at the conference yesterday, taking coherent notes, and simultaneously dreaming: it dawned on me after a couple minutes that these were not normal background thoughts I was having, but actual dreams.
So I went and got a cup of coffee.
What can I tell you about the conference? Style-wise, the Africans are once again setting the pace. The shoes on the female delegates! The hats on the men! Wonderful. And several of the women are still doing this thing with their hair, wearing it in long, thin braids that are natural-colored at the top, and get lighter towards the ends, say the last six to eight inches, said light ends of braids being worn open as well, so these black/brown braids gradually turn into loose brown/blonde hair. It looks really cool, I might try it myself.
Also, in general, the delegates — male and female — are about 25% hotter this time than the ones at the last convention I attended. I fell asleep only once, next to one of my bosses unfortunately, but fortunately he fell asleep too.
Anyway. No one is hanging out in the press gallery, which means I can’t either, without looking like the last fish in an aquarium because although quiet, comfortable and climate-controlled, said gallery is a sort of big glass box hanging up in one corner of the ceiling of the conference room, and a lone person sleeping up there would be too conspicuous.
So, yeah. Lots of work getting done at the conference.
No one has written asking what progress I’m making on the quitting smoking. This morning I filled the tank of my car and when I was paying I bought some Altoids, some Fisherman’s Friends, some mints and several packs of gum. The cashier gave me a look that I figured required explanation, so I said, “quitting smoking is expensive.” She said she’d tried to quit once, she knew. I said, that’s nothing, I’ve quit several times. She said customers had recommended those fakey plastic cigarette things. I said I’d give them a try if the mints didn’t work.
They weren’t working earlier this week. Yesterday I was like, chewing gum and smoking at the same time. I got so disgusted I threw the pack of smokes into the garbage can and said, That’s it, no more cigarettes.
Five minutes later, of course, colleague walks in, sees me rooting through my garbage and is all, “lose something?”
“Somehow my cigarettes fell into the garbage, imagine that. Gotta light?”
God, quitting smoking is awful, isn’t it? My fiance and I are desperately trying, but he’s a bartender, he can’t escape it at work. Every time he buys another pack, I froth furiously all the way to the corner store to buy my own. He can’t seem to quit because people smoke around him at work; I can’t seem to quit because he comes home and smokes around me.
Man, it’s frustrating. (drag, puff, drag puff puff drag) I’ve never really been a smoker, see, I’ve just been a serial quitter. Gah.
Sheesh, Mig, that’s a bit of a disappointment. Yesterday, I once again tried to convince myself that I was the Queen of all Smokers, smoking no more than that wonderful first cigarette of the evening – until I smoked the second one, and the third, and the ones after that. It’s a terrible thing, addiction.
Well, I managed to go without smoking any today…
You’re doing it the hard way. I did it the easy way. Everything you do that requires a burning tobacco accompaniment clearly must go. Fox’s bartender love has got the worst situation possible, and I will be thinking happy healthy-lung thoughts for him, but for you I have a plan. Do it the way I did it: I decided to quit all my vices at once. But I had a really good collection of vices going, see, and none of them really troubled me except the smoking. List the things you do that just aren’t the same without a cigarette in your hand: a) drinking wine, b) drinking beer, c) driving really fast late at night in a downpour, d) listening to Norwegian death metal, e) taunting the cat… then quit doing those things. My list was more like “a) doing speed, b) hanging out in dark spooky dives at four in the morning, c) walking home from anonymous sexual encounters, d) donning dark sunglasses and headphones for said walk,” so the changes I had to make {just for a couple weeks. but I was young, and detoxed pretty fast}) easy. Maybe you can pass cat-taunting duties to Gamma for a few months? And learn to love apple juice? And let Beta pick the music for you, for a while?
Also I hear getting long blonde extension braids helps tremendously.
I’ve been doing it all wrong! Thanks, Jessica. Must do the speed/anonymous sexual encounter thing for a while, etc., so I can stop them all at once.
I’m not really much of a cat taunter lately, even. They’re such sweet little guys right now.
Generally I only smoked at work, and didn’t miss it at home, not even on the weekends.
Man, the very idea of a weave… there was a man at the conference with an aggressively bad toupee… it was scary. And a lady with a wig she wore like a coon-skin cap, with her own hair sticking out in front and brushed back up over the wig, for sort of a natural look, only the hair so didn’t match.