Your Screaming Agony Quizo Update

As you may or may not have heard, today was the first day of the new "campus-wide non-smoking policy" here at the hospital. Well, technically, the first day of the policy was yesterday, but as I'm not one of the poor bastards who has to come in on the weekends ( i.e. "nurses") it started for me today. I gave the matter a lot of thought and came to the conclusion that I'd rather be miserable for a week while I stop smoking altogether - well, more miserable than usual - than me miserable every day for the rest of my life.

And so, on my first day enjoying the new policy I'm sitting here, the woman who also sits in this room who NEVER FUCKING SHUTS UP I MEAN CHRIST ALMIGHTY DO YOU REALLY THINK I WANT TO LISTEN TO YOUR PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS ALL GODDAMNED DAY FOR GOD'S SAKE JUST STOP TALKING FOR FIVE FUCKING SECONDS will be here any moment, I have forgotten the headphones for my iPod (which is the only thing that makes being in this room all day with that cursed woman bearable), and I have to sit through three hours of training later today for software that a) I never, ever use, and b) I already know how to use. Instead of cigarettes to deal with all of this, I have a bag of Tootsie Roll pops and the knowledge that I'm pretty sure I could successfully murder someone if I have to. This is not as comforting as you might think.

Now some of you may be wondering what the big deal about this is. If you are it's likely you've never smoked in your life (good for you!) and have thus never tried to quit smoking (go fuck yourself!). Let me try and explain what quitting smoking is like.

First, imagine you're standing barefoot in the desert. I'm not talking some candy-ass desert like the Mojave or the Gobi or shit like that. Serious desert. Super-desert. The Sahara. Victoria. Real badass desert. We're talking Tatooine here, except instead of two suns there's, like, five. Okay, so you're standing barefoot on the surface of Tatooine. You don't have any sunblock and you've been standing out in the desert for, let's say, seventeen days, so what little actual skin you have left looks like the original copy of the Declaration of Independence that somehow got basal cell carcinoma. While you're standing there, your mother-in-law is standing behind you reciting bad knock-knock jokes while repeatedly jabbing you in the kidneys with a #8 crochet hook. Small desert imps chase each other around your shoulders with mini desert imp flamethrowers which occasionally catch your hair and ears alight, and you are constantly fed undercooked Thai food which causes gastrointestinal convulsions that could power a small automobile. Finally, boll weevils slowly eat your fingers and a large desert crocodile sits in a lounge chair wearing a jaunty straw hat, sipping an appletini and reading Gravity's Rainbow, occasionally looking over at you, licking its lips and saying, "you know, I think I'll eat you tomorrow. Or, you know, perhaps not. Got to keep you on your toes, old boy."

The situation I describe there is, in fact, PREFERABLE to quitting smoking.

Yeah, I'm going to be a real peach for the next week.

On the plus side, the new season of Doctor Who started so, you know, yay.

JLK