Not Uplifting
So we've been sick for-fucking-
ever and only made it to one thing at the SF film festival. Lucky for us, it was
Murderball. This is most emphatically
not a happy-crappy uplifting look-at-the-brave-crippled-kids movie. It
is a damn fine documentary.
I laughed. I cried. I wanted to go smash into stuff.
The film got picked up for distribution. Check it out.
Nonsmoker?
I've smoked nearly every day for at least a year, but I still thought of myself as a semi-smoker — a chipper — like I'd been for ages. I didn't just smoke in bars or at parties any more, but I conveniently forgot to change how I thought about my smoking. Then I noticed that whenever I smoked less, I coughed more. And it was an icky "productive" cough. Which made me think about what I was doing to my lungs. Which made me stop smoking. I smoked with J this weekend while finishing last year's taxes, but that's been it for a good long time.
Thanks to whatever genes made it easy for me to be a sometime-smoker for years, stopping has been a breeze — although I bet the next time I'm really stressed or out for drinks with smokers, I'll have to face down a craving. (Why isn't food the same way? The continual slight hunger of dieting feels like steady torture, but simply not smoking, for me, is only about as hard as remembering where the car is parked. It's just not something that stays on my mind.)
The icky hacking has kept on, though, and now I've got me a cough with
attitude. Even Walter's magic lemon-ginger tea can't defeat it. But I hear this isn't unusual. My lungs are trying to regenerate, and clear out a whole bunch of crap. It's un-fun. I freaked a client out today (after continually interrupting our phone convo with my vile-sounding cough) by saying I was going to go smoke so I'd feel better. He tried to keep me on the phone and away from the phantom cigarettes, earnestly talking about cancer and emphysema until I convinced him I'd been kidding. Californians, sheesh.
Also, the plants in bloom around here smell
great. I naively thought I wasn't smoking enough to mess with my sense of smell. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Cigarette smoke still doesn't smell bad to me, though. But it never has.