13 to 13

So it's been a month since I smoked. I haven't really been counting, other than I remember it being a Tuesday evening. For kicks and giggles, I looked on a calendar to see how long it's been as of today - and discovered that the fateful Tuesday in question was the 13th of July. And here we are on August 13, so I guess that's a month.
Some harder-core smokers (if there is such a thing) and/or foolish young people will get a tattoo of the number "13" - the 13th letter of the alphabet being "m" for "marijuana". As in Pretty Fly for a White Guy by Offspring - "Now he's getting a tattoo yeah, he's getting ink done. He asks for a 13, but they drew a 31." This is the sort of logic stoners use, and probably seems more or less clever depending on what you're smoking at the time. Of course, there are plenty of other people who get a 13 tattooed on them: members of the Mexican Mafia, tattoo artists who have been pro's for 13 years, guys who are trying to remember what 6+7 equals, etc.
Not that 13 ever had a lot of significance w/r/t weed for me, personally - it's always been one of my "lucky" numbers, or at least the default when someone asks me to think of a number between 1 and 20 (or higher). Which once you get out of grade school doesn't happen very much... I guess for the 13 to make sense, I would've had to smoke at 4:20 on that day, which I'm pretty sure I didn't.
Part of me thinks that keeping track makes a bigger deal of quitting than it needs to be. But the other part thinks it's probably good to have SOME sense of how long it's been for measurement purposes. These are probably the same parts of me that respectively like the healthy/frosted sides of Shredded Wheat. But I digest...
I will say that keeping track is becoming less important as time goes on - like birthdays, I guess. Which is good - seems to me that it makes the whole affair less hysterical in general. And there's always been enough hysteria attached to the mighty herb:


So, in summary: yippee-sh!t, it's been a month since I quit. Yay, me.

stupidthoughtsinmyheadaremovingtoofast

SIGH. I've been doing that (sighing) a lot lately. I think it's pretty much the stress-related kind, punctuated by the boredom kind. Most of the time I do pretty well, but increasingly I've been getting lots of memories/thoughts/etc. running through my head at an alarming rate. Fortunately no voices other than my own (yet). I feel like the habit of smoking gave me a bit of a slow-down, thoughts-wise, and let me concentrate on one thing at a time a little better. Could just be the anxiety of everyday life, exacerbated by quitting the usual relaxant.

Still doing a lot of fidgeting/thread-twisting, etc. I used to have a pretty bad habit of doing those things ALL THE TIME, but managed to wean myself off those habits using the smoking one. Nice work, Rusty - swap out the annoying OCD-type habits for the illegal drug-type ones. Hopefully I will learn to slow the thinking, and thereby slow down the anxiety/fidgeting/etc.

This isn't helping my depressive tendencies much, either. Give a depressed person enough time with his/her unbridled thoughts, and you'll get a person who's even more depressed, with the added bonus of obsessive thinking patterns. At least with this depressed person, that's how it seems to work. And with the obsessive thinking patterns being mostly along the lines of humiliating memories and "woe is me" themes, I end up feeling down AND self-absorbed, which makes me feel MORE down and guilty about being so self-centered. What a wonderful cycle of self-degradation I have discovered!

On the plus side, thanks to the whole CBT thing I am at least recognizing these patterns of thinking, and hopefully I can take steps to modify them for the better. This could be difficult considering that "clearing my head" of smoke has resulted in crowding my brain with negative thoughts, but hope springs eternal. Also springing eternal will be my amazement at the weirdness of my dreams this last few weeks. Some seriously bizarre pent-up sh!t in that subconscious of mine - and (according to my wife) I've been kicking and/or screaming in my sleep a lot, too. Sheesh.

Ennui is a bitch.