I Hate Machines and I Can't Stop Smoking. Yet.

So, my computer had a complete meltdown about 10 days ago. At this point it is old news, but I simply could not face facts for a while there. For the first couple of days, I was in complete denial, even laughing when I considered the implications of lost writing, lost photographs, and skewed deadline.

It's a very long, very involved, and boring story if I go into all the details, so I won't. The point is that one day all was fine, and the next it wasn't. Then I had to bring it to a repair shop, and when I got it back 4 or 5 days later everything was gone. This isn't even the first time something like this has happened, as evidenced by the conversation I had with my publisher, after I had to call and tell him Chapter 7 was going to be late:

Me: Yeah, so everything's gone. Completely erased.
Him: Again?
Me: No, see, you're thinking of the time someone broke into my apartment and stole my computer. This is different.
Him: Oh, right.
Me: Yeah.

I find it funny that directly after getting more work done on a tattoo of a typewriter, my fucking computer revolts and screws me but good. I am NEVER getting a tattoo of a laptop, ever.

The very day I got my stupid empty computer back from the shop, I had attended a focus group for smoking. Or, rather, I got paid $75 to show up, but I didn't have to actually take part, which is by far the best sort of focus group, and happens a lot more often than me having to do the focus groups. I mean, I told them (a lot) I don't smoke menthols, but either they didn't understand, or they didn't care. So I got to the office, filled out some paperwork, ate a free cookie, and 15 or so minutes later, was given an envelope with cash in it and told I could split. In that 15 or so minutes, though, I had developed a headache, which almost never happens. If it does, it means I am getting sick. And I didn't even feel like smoking at that point. Not that the focus group would have been me sitting around smoking menthols, but I didn't even really want to sit around talking about smoking, either. So I went home and got sick for a couple of days.

And then, with considerable aplomb, bounced right back. Despite the fact that aside from that initial headache day, I continued to smoke just like I always do, right throughout an abundance of snot issuing forth from wherever snot comes from, clear through the next two days of fitful sleeping, even while I was drinking my 8th or 9th glass of EmergenC. (Not with Theraflu, though. That's gross.) My theory is that far from it being beneficial to stop smoking while sick, that would just fool my body into thinking it's entering into something it's really not, i.e. an immediate future of healthy lungs. I shouldn't give my body the false, misleadingly easy way out. It needs to learn how to tough through the conditions I impose on it. It's got no choice.

That being said, I am hereby making the very bold statement that I think I'm going to quit soon. For real. I mean, not while I'm working on this book, because when I get into my self-imposed writing exile, I desire nothing more than a vast well of coffee that is perpetually hot and an endless cigarette that forever burns loyally next to me. But soon. I have never committed this promise in writing. Oh, wait, yes I have. But I was 16, and so that doesn't count. Who quits smoking at 16, anyway? Only squares.