2008.

I was glad to see 2007 go, it was a rough year for me.

I think 2008 will better.

This new year, I tried to get away with the resolution "I will live life to the fullest". Which is, I'm sure, a good resolution for some people. It's just sort of general, kind of like, I resolve to like pudding. It also doesn't have that much bearing on MY life, as I really don't have a problem living life to it's fullest. I'll wipe the sarcasm off that last sentence later, because I digress.

Then I tried to resolve to "continue being celibate for another year". The minute the words come out of my mouth, I'm thinking "come on! don't be an idiot" No, both of these resolutions were really an avoidance of a much more important issue, which I'm afraid I'm going to have to face.

I've been feeling somewhat ill since new years eve. I think I caught a little bug, probably set off by a night of drinking and smoking, then getting to the Rose Bowl at 6am New Years day, in order to sell enough T-shirts to pay rent for February. But this little bug hasn't gone quietly. It has lingered on, I still feel it. It's a sore throat, but not too sore, and stuffed up sinuses, but not too stuffed up. This is not my regular bug, what makes this different is: muscle pain. I've been feeling it mostly in my lower back, but here is the kicker: Sunday I woke up in the middle of the night with a pain in my chest by my left arm, and I'm thinking "Jesus christ, I'm 30!"

But no, it's probably just flu related muscle pain. Right?

A couple years back, a friend of mine, in his late twenties was hospitalized with a heart attack. He was in coma for a couple months. Heavy smoker

Another friend of mine just got back with spending the holidays with her family, and worries that this might be the last Christmas she'll spend with her father who has been battling cancer and heart disease for the last 14 years. He was also a smoker.

Weather now or later, I'm going to have to deal with the consequences of my smoking. It's the resolution I had alway said I'd make when I was thirty. I'll quit by age thirty.

Well, 30 is here, and I've still been puffing away. When I try not to smoke, every moment I am wrestling with this addiction, that only another smoker can understand. Even smokers who have quit, I honestly believe they are wired differently from the hard core addict. Or perhaps they were able to re-wire themselves in the process, and can now smugly say to the rest of us "You have to WANT to quit smoking"

Fuck you. We know what this is doing to us. We know this is killing us. We all WANT to quit. We just want a cigarette more! Because right now I want to rip your head off and stick it on a spike, or at least spill coffee over the work you did this morning. Right now, a cigarette is all that is standing between me and totally unsocial behavior and random acts of violence.

Smoking in this day and age isn't the practice of some decadent pleasure filled lifestyle that it once was in from the 20's to the 70s. That's why most non-smoking propaganda doesn't work, because non-smokers still think that we are holding on to some forbidden "pleasure".

People who do get it, are the one's who've quit other drugs. I've had friends who've kicked pot, coke, heroine, X, meth (seriously, meth) and they've all claimed smoking was the hardest to quit.

This is not about pleasure, and it's more than addiction. Because in order to start smoking, you have to have something so personally painful in your life that you want to go through the coughing, wheezing, and stinging eyes to force yourself into addiction in the first place. Smoking is a badge of pride and shame at the same time. A Shame that is hidden, but so powerful that you don't really care for yourself any more (let alone your health), and then reinforced by the shame of needing the cigarette as the visible crutch. But there is also a Pride in the fact that you can say "To Hell with it all, i'm going to do what I want, I don't care what anybody else thinks"

That's how I started smoking. It was an act of pure rebellion against growing up feeling trapped in a ethos of being just to damn good for my own good. So, to hell with it, I'm going to do what I want.

A good dose of heartbreak also can help. I think behind every cigarette is a broken heart, a pain that will not heal.

Perhaps that's why I have to quit. So I can heal. Not simply because, I don't want to have a heart attack when I'm 35. Its because I want to care about not having a heart attack when I'm 35.

Most of the people who deal with the brunt of the repercussions of our smoking are the people who love us. Like my best friend Marcos. He once asked me to stop smoking, and I irritably said "Why?", and he said "10 years of loneliness". If I can learn to care about myself as much as the people I love do, if I can learn to value myself as deeply as my parents, my sisters, my best friends do, then maybe I can really want to quit smoking.