wine and brownies

I am still smoking, it still tastes vile, yet today I was happier and more upbeat than I have been since I quit. It feels strange, like putting on an old pair of jeans and realizing they no longer fit.

I began smoking three years ago at the end of a very long and, in the end, deeply unsatisfying relationship. I had a plan, a purpose, goals, a vision for what would happen when I finished graduate school - somehow a Master's degree was going to make my life better, more important.... This began to unravel about 1 year into the program and 6 years into the relationship.

The quiet disintegration of love takes effect slowly so that the victim doesn't really realize what is happening. My summer in Ecuador was the catalyst for this realization, and by the time I watched him walking towards me in the airport in Quito, 3 months after my arrival, I knew what had to be done. It took another 3 months; logistically leaving the love of your life is difficult, especially when you've recently relocated to a city in which the only other living soul you know is the one whose heart you're about to break.

We were finished and I had to find my way. Smoking became my new boyfriend, my new lover, my new confidant. One doesn't feel quite as lonely with cigarettes by her side when she is drinking a bottle of wine and watching old movies.

Smoking is a destination, a place to go to, an ever-present pull towards the future. You keep going on because you need that next cigarette. There's a fucking point to life, even if it's as minuscule as lighting one up.

It's a mask, really, covering up my real issues with life. I am a confident and charismatic woman with no real self-esteem. Each day I tackle new challenges in my chosen profession, excelling and doing 'important' things. Each night, though, I come home to myself and find it a big empty space.

The curling bend of the smoke rising out of my ashtray fills that void. I don't think anymore. I used to be a big thinker, content to spend her time contemplating the universe's giant unsolved questions. Nowadays, if I do think, it's about whether or not I should send out that press release to a certain blog, and how to politically maneuver the constant demands upon my time.

Academia is my haven, my Valhalla, but I just didn't go there. Every chance I got, I turned in the opposite direction.

And now here I am, living at home with my parents because I don't make enough money to support myself and pay my bills, alone each night with the inescapable reality of myself.

At the bottom of it all is my greatest fear that I am insufferably boring and irrelevant. Knowing from an early age that I wasn't a genius but remarkably smart, I have never actually been able to accept this.

This is perhaps why the physicist held my attention - he is smart in a way I can never be. Sure, give me a debate on the feminist conception of the 'home' as it applies to international spheres of influence, but ask me to construct even a simple workhorse and I will fail.

So I smoke. And I smoke. It saves me from myself. I don't want to think about myself. I don't want to be presented with the acute horror of who I really am. This delusion is scary, actually, because I have always ascribed to the tenet "know thyself." Only as you get older do you realize what an impossible challenge this is.

I drink my cabernet, surprisingly good, and eat the brownies my mother made (still soft in the middle), and smoke a stolen pack from my father. I can't possibly recall the fortitude with which I first gave up cigarettes 3 weeks ago.

The physicist will not call me, which sucks, because I truly wanted to inhale his very presence. Goat boy is an ass, but a lovable ass, and at this point it's comforting just to know that he exists out there, loving me. The dork, well, I am seeing him tomorrow. Zombie boy is on the books for Sunday. I keep seeing these men for no apparent reason other than to distract myself from reality.

I am working all weekend - it is campaign season after all. I cannot wait to walk outside in the drizzly northeast cold dropping off literature Saturday morning, and attend fundraisers and award dinners that night. At least free booze is involved at the latter of those events.

Summing up this ridiculously self-indulgent pity party of a blog post, I will very likely soon try to quit smoking again. I just took my good wool winter coat to the cleaners today, don't want to sully its magical cleanliness with stinky cigarette smoke.