Anniversaries
Calm down, Brendan, I don’t mean ours. Just general anniversaries of important events in my life. Er, other important things in my life. Our anniversary is, of course, important. Whew, smooth-talked my way out of that one.
A little over a year ago, I quit smoking. Well, we both did, but you know, if Brendan wants recognition Brendan can post about it on Brendan’s blog. This is all about me, baby. 12 nicotine-free months and counting. I should light up to celebrate! Oh, wait, that won’t work. The only real side-effect I’ve noticed is a strange urge to set everything I see on fire. That, of course, could just be a subconscious attempt to justify the continuing existence of my old lighters.
As a side note, do you know how many half-full lighters the average smoker will have in their house at any given time? More than they could conceivably need, that’s how many.
The timing might suggest that the cessation of smoking, my ultimate decision to follow the sage advice on cigarette packages, coincided with New Year’s Day, thus indicating a rare success of a fairly common New Year’s Resolution. Well, shows what you know. The timing actually coincided with the date last year where the nausea caused by the combination of smoking and my crohn’s flare outweighed my tolerance for said nausea. It’s said that when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me. Well, I hate to be the one to break the bad news but mostly it’s just u.
For the record, I’m not a big believer in New Year’s Resolutions. I think that being drunk, in a room full of other drunk people, is a poor time to make life-changing decisions.
Here’s the thing. People usually celebrate anniversaries. The significant ones, anyway. I mean who cares if it was five years ago to the day your final wisdom tooth came out? Pfeh. For someone with a lifetime of nicotine exposure, the anniversary of the day I quit smoking is significant. The first one anyway. If I’m still making an issue out of it in twenty years there’s something wrong. So the question I pose is this. How does one celebrate this sort of anniversary? A bottle of wine? Sure, replace nicotine addiction with alcoholism. A big meal? Trust me, I’ve had more than enough of those in my time.
I toyed with the idea of celebrating by training myself to be one of those militant anti-smokers. You know, the ones who do that fake-cough, and extol the health virtues of their virgin lungs. I quickly realised, though, that, while entertaining for the briefest of moments, I’d be forced to consider myself just a short step up from spammers and “inter-species erotica” pornographers. Add to that the fact that it would quickly alienate me from the Matriarch (and then where would I get my entertainment?) and you have an idea which, for now at least, doesn’t appeal. I’ll keep it up my sleeve, in case I ever do decide to alienate the Matriarch, but for now she’s more or less on my “Do not throw out” list. Right up there with circulars and those plastic pill pottles the hospitals use.
Perhaps I’ll think of something between now and the next anniversary.
Tagged: aging, health.