Smoking

I bought my first packet of cigarettes in year 10.  I would have been 14 at the time.  Probably the most illegal act I ever committed, as back then you had to be at least 16 to get yourself addicted to carcinogens.

I’m now 28.  That means that fully half of my life has been spent with my mouth wrapped around a filter tipped tube of filth and death.  Yet I’m supposed to be clever.  Hmmm.

So why did I start?  Amusingly, I think my impetus to buy cigarettes came from a biology lesson illustrating the dangers.  The teacher connected a vacuum pump to two tubes, drawing air through both them and the cotton wool they were stuffed with.  One tube had a cigarette in, one didn’t.  To absolutely no one’s surprise, the cigarette tube coated the cotton wool with brown gunk.  We agreed it was horrible and disgusting, and I resolved to buy cigarettes at the first available opportunity.  Partly from peer pressure, and partly because I was always the one who did strange things.  And let’s face it, smoking is pretty strange when you think about it.  Not being cool, good at sports, good looking, or remotely popular, I was stuck in the ‘clever person wiuth hardly any friends’ niche.  Not a brilliant place to be.  So I tended to be rather odd, as some form of ‘look at me!  You might not like me, but at least you’ve noticed I exist’ statement.

Now I actually write that down and think about it, it seems even more pathetic than I thought it would be.  What a loser.

So I started smoking.  When I went to university, I was free from my parents (who being ex-smokers themselves, were almost fanatical in their disdain for the hobby).  I smoked.  A lot.  Because I finally could.  I think I got up to 60 a day at one point, though I’m struggling to understand how.  I must have stunk.  When I eventually became interested in running and fitness a few years later, I was made to pay the price for ‘looking cool’.  I’ll leave the hacking, retching, phlegm covered details to your imagination, but suffice to say it wasn’t pretty.  So I cut down massively.  I even quit for year in 2005, as the SO at the time disdained smoking in all its forms.  Yet the ex she had been besotted with smoked.  I think by not smoking I pretty much handed her my balls.  When we split up I started smoking again.  If I’d had any sense I would have smoked until we split up, and then stopped of my own accord.

In any event, I’m still a smoker.  I don’t think I ever stopped being one, even when I wasn’t smoking.  I was a smoker who wasn’t smoking at that moment in time.

With all this amazing brain power inside my skull, the ability to walk, think, feel, fuck, eat, drink, write and pass judgement on the stupidity of others, you’d think by now I’d have managed to stop being such a fucking fool.

But I haven’t.  I smoke when I’m bored.  I smoke when I’m annoyed.  I smoke when I want to be anti social.  Given that I dislike my current placement, find my course aggravating, and don’t like people very much, I’m tempted to smoke a lot of time.  I also secretly think it’s cool.  When I hear the word ‘non smoker’, the first person who pops into my head is Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman.  I think he’s an absolute arse.  When I hear smoker, I think Bill Hicks, Slash, Kurt Cobain, Richey Edwards, Tyler Durden.  They’re cool.  Admittedly most of them are either dead or fictional, but they’re still cool.

Now that I think about it, most the things I do regularly (running, listening to my ipod, going to the gym, smoking, reading, writing), are activities that are performed in groups of one.  I’m a solitary creature it would seem.  Yet I teach.  A career that cannot be done in solititude.  Phah.

All of which general rambling brings me gently to my point.  This morning, I smoked my last cigarette.  Not ‘hopefully’ my last.  My last.  I threw away my lighter.  I moved all the matches out of site (the SO likes candles, so I’ll keep them).  I don’t smoke any more.  If I do, Tysdaddy gets something from his amazon wish list.  If he smokes, I get something from mine.

I’d like to add another condition to this.  When we make it to three months, we’ll buy each other something from the wish list anyway.  We’ll easily have saved that much money in three months.  Plus it’ll keep me honest.  And I like free stuff.

This week I have been mostly…

…marking time, if I’m perfectly honest.  I have three days to go until I finish my Post Graduate Certificate in Eductation.  Or tirty miles on a bicycle.  Or, more pertinently, 300 muttered expletives.  Grin and bear it.

Then 2 days of pointless lectures, and I’m done.  I’ll be a Newly Qualified Teacher.  After which I have to go and do some real work for a bit, meeting my new class of 9 year olds.  Then six weeks of holiday.  Which I intend to spend being very busy, that I start my new academic year fit, healthy, and in a much better mental place than I am right now.

To do:

• Start running again.  As I won’t have to ride a bicycle to work every day, I can start doing this again.  Properly.
• Plan (and stick to) a healthy diet.
• Buy a kettlebell.  So I can train like a Russian superman.
• Paint warhammer models.  It’s probably the only chance I’m going to get.
• Read up on the new curriculum my school will be using next year.
• Buy everything on my amazon wish list.  Then read them all.  I need serious brain food to get my cerebellum started again.  The last few months seem to have battered my neurons into an unresponsive pile of grey synaptic goo.  Go on, loyal reader.  buy me something.  It’ll make you feel good, and I promise to thank you profusely, and blog on anything you wish.
• Quit smoking and being a miserable git
• Not such a bad plan overall.  It’s just sticking to it that’ll be the problem.  I’m also going to try and blog a lot more, so that the rest of the world knows what I’m up to.  Not that the rest of the world particularly cares, but it’s worth a shot.

Later.

The perfect fridge

Whilst musing on what I intend to do with my life over the summer (when I get six weeks of being paid for not doing anything), my thoughts inevitably turned to food.  You see, I like food.  Always have done.  And at the moment I have neither the funds or the time to give it the attention it deserves.  So when I get paid I intend to buy food.  Which got me to thinking.  What exactly would I have to buy, to make it possible for me to open the fridge and guarantee that I don’t think ‘there’s nothing here that I want to eat’?  For my current fridge, this is a depressingly regular occurrence.  Current contents?

• 3 pints of semi skimmed milk
• 2 roast chicken legs (tomorrows lunch)
• 2 tubs of cottage cheese
• 1 jar very elderly mayonnaise
• 1/3 of a jar of mustard
• two sticks of celery that I can bend into a circle without breaking.

Pretty uninspiring , I’m sure you’ll agree.

So, after much thought.  The perfect fridge.

• 2 pints semi skimmed milk
• 1 jar grainy mustard
• 2 lemons
• 2 limes
• half a dozen free range eggs
• iceberg lettuce
• cucumber
• half a dozen asparagus spears
• 3 bulbs garlic
• 1 bottle white wine
• 6 bottles brooklyn lager
• 1 block high quality cheddar cheese
• 1 goats cheese
• 1 mild goats cheese
• 2 prime sirloin steaks
• 6 cumberland sausages
• black pudding
• sliced roast turkey breast
• pastrami
• cold roast chicken
• tonic water
• smoked salmon
• mackerel pate
• 2 dozen large tiger prawns (shell on)
• shitake mushrooms
• bean sprouts
• green beans
• spring onions
• unsalted butter
• dark chocolate
• Orange juice
• Plus a bottle of really good vodka, ice, and a bag of prawns in the freezer

Did I miss anything?  What would be in your perfect fridge?  Let me know.

Neon time…

For the benefit of Tysdaddy, who insisted I should publish these, I shall.

Last weekend was the birthday of Louise.  She’s a friend of the SO’s.  Apparently they’re very good friends.  I have very good friends.  At least two of them.  I deal with these friends by not speaking to them for much of the time, then randomly calling out of the blue to suggest some form of alcohol related escapade.  This then leads to the kind of rambling conversation where everything is discussed in a frank and honest fashion.  Most importantly, never has one of these random suggestions been turned down, other than in the event of personal injury.  Partners have been abandoned, deadlines missed, and livers severely tested.  Some things are important.

Louise is not one of these friends.  Louis is the sort of person who will ring up, blather rubbish for half an hour, hoping against hope that somehow the SO is able to psychically sense exactly what she wants to talk about.  The person who leaves meaningful statements about ‘a special someone’ on her facebook update page.  I think this is so that we become curious.  If you have something to talk about, say so. If I rate my conversations (with those few friends I haven’t terminally offended over the years) and those of the SO (with Louise), I think I’m ahead in the ‘minutes of conversation which was actually useful’ stakes.  As a consolation, the SO is ahead in the ‘total minutes talked’ and ‘minutes of meaningless blather’ categories.  Lucky.

Anyway, this rotund and somewhat melodramatic individual added another year to her age.  The theme was neon.  We went.  We dressed up.

Damn we look good.  If you looked at us in the dark, all you’d see would be big glowstick glasses.  Seriously, compared to the monstrosities everyone else was wearing, we were by far the best dressed belles at the ball.

They’re just …nice.

It’s technically lunch time, but I’m not eating today.  I figure if early caveman types could go an occasional day without food (owing to mammoths not coming prepackaged as burgers back then), I should be able to as well.  Chances are, the meat machine that I employ to carry around my ever more frustrated brain is at least partially adapted to deal with this.

This is probably the last sliver of free time that I’m going to have in the next month and a bit.  I’m currently on my last school placement.  All I have to do is get to the end of this without smashing a chair over my teachers head, and I’m finally qualified to educate young minds.

Not smashing a chair over my mentors head.  This could be the tricky part.  As you may have guessed, I tend to be a somewhat cynical soul at the best of times.  While all children are still far more innocent than grown ups, they’re also fulkly in tune with having the shit patronised out of them.  Or at least I think they are.  Other people think that every child is a beautiful and unique snowflake.  These people are known (to me at least) as fucking morons.

Somehow, I’ve ended up in a school full of fucking morons.  They sing.  If I tried this sort of shit I think my head would probably explode.  I fit in there like a dog turd at a dinner party.  Annoyingly, these fucking morons are the people who dictate whether I pass or fail.  not only that, my lesson planning has to run the gauntlet of their criticism before I get to use it.  They never seem to like it.  Part of it is simply my planning being a bit crap on occaision.  I’ll admit that.  The other part of that is that I’m so demotivated and bored by it all that I’d rather be anywhere elese than working there.

I’m trying to think of a description for my ‘fellow’ members of staff which builds on my initial ‘fucking morons’.  I think the best I can come up with is that they’re ‘nice’.  By which I mean that their lives trundle on a long and boring parabola from birth to death without ever touching any highs or lows.  Things are either ‘nice’, ‘quite nice’, or ‘not very nice’.  This isn’t living.  It’s filling in the time until you eventually stop breathing.  You just know that the cd collection is full of middle of the road chart boredom, with not a genuinely expressed emotion in the entire bunch.  I always feel sorry for nice people.  They never appreciate a good tune.  Fuck that.  Life pisses me off so much that I end up screaming in sheer frustration, but at least I know how to fucking feel.  Being me may well make my life a lot harder than it necessarily needs to be.  But being remotely like the ‘nice’ people would send me in a swan dive off the nearest building as soon as I realised.  I may be annoyed a lot of the time, but you should see me when I’m genuinely engaged in something.  That’s a real emotion.  ‘Nice’ people never get that, the poor fuckers.

So as you can imagine loyal reader, it’s going well.  A lot of me realises that I should knuckle under and just get through this.  The bigger part of me wants to break the furniture and give my headteacher the finger.  The sheer mind numbing aggravation of it all is driving me insane.

So how’s things with you?