Dogsitting

I’m currently in Old City Philadelphia watching my brother’s dogs while he’s down at the shore with his wife and her family. One of them is a long-legged Boston Terrier named Huxley and a meatball of a French Bulldog named Olaf, which he and his wife recently adopted.

During my time here I will likely play a lot of Wii and continually attempt to resist the urge to smoke, which so far has resulted in five cigarettes, all American Spirits. I was excited to read on the side of the box that American Spirits are addictive free, assuming this meant nicotine-free, only to very shortly after realize that I misread the word additive. Honest mistake, I suppose. According to the Wikipedia listing for the item, this is a common mistake:

Their products are marketed as being “100% Additive-Free Tobacco”, though the company warns that they are as hazardous as other cigarettes and openly dissuades others from taking up smoking. This was part of an FTC ruling and agreement stemming from allegations that the advertisement of additive-free cigarettes made consumers feel that the product might be less addictive than regular cigarettes.

I would only assume from this paragraph that they are equally addicting as the Camel Lights I used to smoke. Then I found a study on nicotine levels in various brands of cigarettes, which also explained the difference between acid and base nicotine. I wont go into the difference between the two right now but it should suffice to say that free-base nicotine is more addictive and, according to the study, Camel cigarettes contain 2.7 percent free-base nicotine (verses the naturally occurring acid nicotine), Marlboros contain 9.6 percent and American Spirits contain a whopping 36 percent. In other words, I was better off smoking the Camels.

Also while in Philly, I plan to reconnect with a few friends that I have not seen for awhile. I plan to grab some drinks, get some good food and do my work at the Cafe Ole on 3rd Street instead of my normal office, which is my bedroom at home. If you’ve read the first post in my General Blog category you already know that I am an SEO Analyst for an online Internet Marketing Firm by the name of Reciprocal Consulting. If you haven’t, now you do, and furthermore I must reaffirm the following:

I love my job.

I Quit Smoking

I might as well start this blog off with a bang…of my head against the wall…repeatedly.

That’s right, after eight years of paying a nominal fee to kill myself slowly and being welcomed in fewer and fewer public locations since the year 2007, I quit smoking. On Wednesday, June 18, I decided to never smoke another cigarette again.

Now is the part where I admit that I’m merely human, as a sort of prologue to the inevitable “I can’t do this, dammit, I give up!” I made it a full week without a single cigarette, then I had a few out at the bar with some friends and a couple more the next night.

Before, I was a smoking over a pack a day, so I’d say the 160 cigarettes I normally would have smoked in a week verses the five that I actually had in this past weeks time is a huge accomplishment. Furthermore, despite most opinions on the matter, I don’t feel any more of a need to smoke a cigarette than I did after a week.

Supposedly, 72 hours into quitting is the height of nicotine withdrawl. After two weeks, the physical dependency on nicotine completely subsides and from that point on there will only be psychological urges. I, however, did not experience this exactly.

The first three days, yes, they were hell. But after that I didn’t have a single physical urge to smoke. After the first week I was fine, was out at the bar with a friend who smoked and I didn’t want a cigarette. Nor did I feel a desire to smoke the previous few times I was out at the bar around other smokers and drinking.

But I was curious to see if I could have a few cigarettes at the bar and not fall back into the habit. I like the idea of being a social smoker because I always enjoyed smoking the most with other people with a drink in my hand. I don’t care what “professional quit smoking specialists” either. I’ve known plenty of people who could smoke a half of a pack of cigarettes at the bar and have none after that. I want to do that.

So far I have little to no desire to smoke during the day and I only feel a remote urge when I drink or am really bored. It seems promising but we’ll see how it actually goes.