Cigarettes, Blogs and Smart People

Before I get back to trying to document for posterity my trip to Ireland I'd like to share something I'm trying to do. I decided a couple weeks ago to try and quit smoking. I went to my doctor about something unrelated and asked him if I could try to quit using Zyban. After we talked for awhile about it he agreed and wrote me the prescription. He suggested that my plan be to gradually decrease the number of cigarettes I smoke each day over time.

I must admit that the first week I didn't decrease much, maybe one or two less a day. Then I started consciously telling myself anytime I felt like a smoke to just wait another half hour. That usually stretched out some and yesterday I didn't have my first cigarette until 2:00 in the afternoon.

Lest you think this is because I slept in I'll state for the record that I woke up at 8 am. Deferring the morning smoke is very hard. Also not having a smoke after I eat. So anyway I had 13 cigarettes in my pack (oh, I'm buying them one pack at a time, too) this morning from a pack that was newly opened yesterday, that means I only smoked 7 cigarettes on Sunday.

It's 7 pm Monday night and I have 6 left so that means I've only smoked 7 so far today. I'll try to only have 1 or 2 more before bed. Then tomorrow I need to try and skip either the smoke in the car on the way to work or the morning break smoke. The latter might be easier because I have a bunch of meetings in the morning and probably won't have time to go downstairs and outside. I should also try and skip either the afternoon break or the drive home smoke - I was able to skip that one today. Anyway by the end of the week I'd like to be down to just 5 a day. If I can do that I think I can quit all the way.

In unrelated musings, I noticed something today as I was reading the blogs I've bookmarked as favorites. (another tangent: cool thing about Firefox, you can drag the icon beside the url down to a row in the browser called 'bookmark toolbar' and put your favorite favorites right there so they are easy to find and use)

I'm sure everyone else has noticed it and like always I'm the last one to get it. A lot of blogging is about other blogs. Blogging about something you've read in a blog or linking to a blog or a comment in it that caused the blogger to want to have their own extended piece of the conversation and their own comments. Don't get me wrong, I don't object to this at all. I discovered a number of my new favorites because an old favorite linked to them and said "you should read this blog" and I did.

I would take some time here and now to talk about how smart and witty and interesting some of these blogs are and the comments to them as well, but MacAllister has already done it so much better. (see July 7th for her post Smart People)

I used to think I was fairly smart, at least above average. I had a college degree (yeah, English Lit, wanna make something of it?) and I read voraciously in a number of genres as well as non-fiction. I kept up on the news by reading newspapers instead of watching TV (this was in the late 70s early 80s btw so I didn't have the internet like I do today).

After college I ended up working in a series of jobs where some of the skills I learned were useful (good grammar, attention to detail, interpreting what I'd read) but many of my colleagues while not unintelligent, were not intellectual. They didn't read much and got snotty or defensive if I tried to have a conversation about substantial topics or even about something I'd read in a book. I don't discount that I might have come off as pompous and annoying, I probably was, but since I didn't find *any* kindred souls it does make me think that maybe it wasn't entirely my fault.

At home my husband (now ex) was totally engaged in becoming a lawyer and then actually being a lawyer. He didn't want to talk about literature or philosophy or even politics, at least with me.

So at some point in my twenties I stopped exercising my intellect. I continued to read but I didn't have anyone to talk about my reading with. Iron sharpens iron. If you don't have anyone to challenge your thinking it atrophies.

I think mine did. I now feel very much less intelligent than most of the commenters on the blogs I read. And there are some people who take great pleasure in calling condescention in their responses to something I've posted "candor" and making me feel inadequate to the conversation even when I don't think I've said anything stupid. Thus I will probably not try to post in any thread that discusses current events or anything weighty. I know my place in the world and it's all fluff.

Posted by Dawno at July 25, 2005 07:45 PM