Broke Bites 1.30.10

Fried up some turkey bacon in hamburger grease so it got nice and crispy. Put some in with the pork ’n’ beans and the rest went in the quesadillas with a couple kinds of cheese, grated.

This was an easy meal to make. Very little active cooking time and it comes out pretty tasty.

Medicated iPad

Holy christ is that thing cool. All I have to say is WANT!!!!

I have to tell you people right now, I am going to buy one of these. Think of it as a gift from President Obama who just raised my grant money for me, or maybe because my iPod broke and I quit smoking or something, but what ever.

The truth is, this, for me, is like Obi Wan’s lightsaber, or Freddy’s glove. Micheal’s mask or Jason’s machete. This’ll allow me to edit drafts of my screenplays in their native file format the same way I do now on paper, but better since I correct as I go.

This is the device I have always dreamed of because I HATE HATE HATE being tethered to a desk for the entire creative process. Anyone who writes knows it can take up all your free time and it sucks being in the same place all the time.

Anyway I know it’d be cheep of me to try and play this off, and I am firm on this, so I just thought I’d let you cats know. I will own one these later this year.

Off smokes a month!

Can you believe it? I’m off cigarettes a month and nicotine two weeks now. I think I finally found the product I needed to help me quit my own way. I’m flying blind here folks, into a future without cigarettes or that fine smell smokers sport. I don’t think I’m going back to it either because at this point there is no reason to start again. This past month I’ve gone through a lot and the world generally shits on me more than other people, and I can honestly say I haven’t slipped once, not even one puff.

And I feel great. I have better circulation, especially in my legs, and and my chest feels more open and I have more lung capacity now too. My vision even is clearer. But you know what feels the best? Having actually done something. I’ve been on a bad streak since I started this blog, maybe a bit earlier, but such is life. By doing something big I feel rejuvenated and ready to take on more things everyday.

My food portioning is going well and I’m eating less than before by far, and the vast majority of the food is healthy now, and that adds to how good my body feels. My skin is more lively and I have more energy and I think more clearly now.

So where to from here? Well, I am going to start exercising, did today in fact, and it’s really nothing big — at this point anything that gets my blood pumping for a spell is a good thing, and I can’t join a gym or even the Y for now, so it’s isometrics and aerobics. Pretty boring stuff, no flashdance or jazzercize up in here. In the summer I plan to go for walks.

My accident is settled already, so that’s another huge relief. School starts next week, and somehow even that feels good. Buying nothing is no big shake, but it may be soon. I am still going strong on the “buy nothing” thing, and the good thing that came out of my run of bad luck is I need to buy a new phone (the one I’m using now is a massive POS, a loaner) and hopefully I’ll like this one more.

And I’d like to thank Tanya for her very kind and inspiring comment. I really appreciate it. This blog is about a project that proves my madness, but I am all about the writing. I really dig it when people comment on that.

Well, that’s all for now folks. I’m doing better now, so you can stop looking at me like that.

Broke Bites 1.17.09

Salad taco
Soft tortilla shell on the bottom, then beef and ham lunch meat, alfalfa sprouts, baby spinach, tomatoes and cheddar cheese topped with Kraft Free blu cheese dressing. Fold it up and eat it like a taco.

broke bites 1.11.10

Pork sirloin chops (not expensive at all BTW) fried and seasoned, broccoli w/ margarine and salt and some baked french fries with BBQ sauce. The 10 oz bottle holds homemade iced coffee.

Fail-Spin

I quit smoking 3 weeks ago and since then my entire life has been in tailspin. First, my cat got sick and had to be put down. Then my iPod went and then my wireless modem died. Then my phone rebooted to factory settings and locked up on a loading screen and I lost all my numbers and photos. Now today I got rear ended and my car is totaled. All in three weeks.

And I know this isn’t going to stop. I am in the process of losing everything again and there is nothing I can do to about it. I have no way of knowing what’s going next but this has all revolved around money and convenience, so who knows.

Haven’t I done enough by rebuilding my life to deserve one good day? Or maybe at least just one day where nothing directly fucks me in the ass?

I can’t take much more of this. I have no urge to smoke at all, but I’m quickly losing my urge to ever leave the house again, which is worse.

Broke Bites 1.8.10

Cold Crispix cereal and coffee.

Quitting chronicles

I haven’t had tobacco in 18 days. I used a nicotine inhaler to quit. Now I’m off that for 3 days and this honestly is the hardest day. Day three is the peak for number of cravings (I’ve read it’s 8 on day 3) and their intensity. Oh it’s rough, but I’m getting by just fine because  my wife is supportive than I could hope for. She still smokes — she wanted me to quit first so I could help her — but it doesn’t bother me.

The reason this quitting thing is working this time is because I actually quit the old habits. This time I was careful to totally quit all aspects of the habit simultaneously. In the past, I have tried to keep the routine and rituals that go along with the habit but this is WRONG WRONG WRONG. Just walk away. Give up, admit it’s over and focus on the good that is coming from it.

When I quit smoking I stopped all my habits. Things like taking a 5 minute (smoke) break, smoking first thing in the morning and when driving (without baby) were the big things for me, the things I thought I would miss, but when I stopped doing all of them at once via using the inhaler as medicine and not a cigarette replacement, I was able to step right out of those habits and start forming new ones. Same with the inhaler. In the 2 weeks I used it, habits developed but they were easy to stop since they didn’t have time to get ingrained in my head.

I see it like changing lanes on an interstate. You just make a lateral move, step out of one stream and into another. Looking at it like that is what it took for me to get past these milestones where I have fallen in the past, like the second day of quitting.

So keep wishing me luck, readers, because this is the time I really quit. And yes, caffeine is next. Then I’ll let all you addicts know what it’s like to have a completely sober brain … possibly for the first time!

Anatomy of a craving

On top of everything else, now I’m restricting my food intake in order to not continue to be the giant puddle of lard I currently am. What I did was put a lot of thought into what I eat, exactly, and how much of it and realized my daily food consumption could easily satisfy a European family or feed half a starving third world village. I hide from my feelings with food, and I also compensate for my inadequacies with food. I eat, therefore I am (a lard ass).

And then I quit smoking I blimped out further and here I am, the Bloat American, which I guess makes me the most American I’ve ever been.

Now I’m focusing on eating enough. It’s so hard that it knocked out my cravings for cigarettes: I only hit my inhaler once so far today, which is crazy. But I do crave food and in a big, naughty way. So here is a craving, and right now I’m getting about eight of these a day.

I was spacing while washing dishes, an hour and a half before work, and my wife and child are gonna leave before me. Suddenly it all came together — I’ll just go to the store and buy a pizza when she leaves and come back here and eat it before work. Sounds good, right? No, that’ll take too long. I could stop at Subway and eat it in the parking lot before work. No. That would be wrong. Better eat here. But I could use a Bigby’s coffee and one of those plastic cups would be nice since the one I have leaks. Sure. But it would be quicker and cheeper if I bought all that at Kwik Trip, right?

And on and on like that, a constant internal dialogue, for like fifteen minutes at a crack. My head just twisting around what to buy and where to spend all the money I have on food. I have been meditating them away but it doesn’t always work. And I do, in fact, know how to meditate. I’ve been doing to for over a decade and a half so my mind normally is scarily quiet. Cravings come in like a bulldozer full throttle since there is no background noise in my head, they end up being all I think about when they happen and that makes them so fucking hard for me. They’re spinning balls of want circling in my head and they fester under my mind’s watchful eye to become this almost solid kind of distinct evil I wish I could just beat the shit out of but alas, it’s all in my head.

But they pass. Here’s how the day went in reality: Did the dishes, ate leftovers here and went to work. Went to the store and got WIC, came home and cooked supper for us. I stayed totally on track and bought nothing excessive or greedy, though I did have to buy some things for the family. I stayed on track even though my brain is spewing that crap all day, and over food. What is my real addiction here? It’s almost like I’m layered in addictions. I think I have to quit caffeine next just to see what it’s like to be an addiction free human being (except for oxygen, but that’s a though one to beat).

So the most important message here if I’m back in the fight, fair reader, and I’m in this to win. My December sucked beyond compare, but I shot out that clump of ugly into January, born again … well, sort of.  I’ve landed strong and on my feet, still the warrior of Broke but now I’m focused enough to cut a bottle in half like in Big Trouble in Little China, and I’m gonna kick all these habits in the face.

Broke Bites 1.3.10

Fried rice (beef), lotsa broccoli and an iced tea for wash.