For real. Well, kinda.
It’s been a long time since I checked in here; life has been busy for me. Between my day job, learning to develop iPhone games, and recently being contracted to do the soundtrack for another iPhone game, I haven’t had a lot of free time.
But I miss the place, y’know? So time for me to check back in. Mainly I just wanted to share the news that I kicked the butts for good. Tobacco is a thing of the past for me. I’m still getting nicotine though, but rather than going with a patch or gum or Chantix or something, I switched to electronic cigarettes. And man do they work.
I was concerned about whether or not they’d be a suitable replacement for cigarettes, but I did a lot of research on them before diving in, and the more I read about them the more I liked the idea. I took the plunge a little over a week ago, and the first “vape” (the eCig term for it) followed the last cigarette I smoked. Well, almost.
Yesterday I conducted a little test. I like my data empirical, y’see, so I had to find out for myself. Yesterday represented my one-week anniversary of quitting smoking by way of vaping with eCigs, and I was feeling better than I had in years. I smoked for 21 years, so this was a huge change. My sense of smell was bouncing back, my sense of taste was perking up, my sinuses were clearing, my lungs were clearing, and I even found I have more energy than I have in a long time, and that’s flippin’ awesome.
But had I really kicked the butts for good? I had to know. I effectively didn’t need cigarettes anymore the moment I started vaping, and with all of my senses coming back from the dead, I wanted to know how they’d taste, how they’d feel, and whether they still had any hold on me, even though I really didn’t have any craving for them.
So I sparked one up.
And it was nasty.
The first drag I took transported me back to my dumbass 17-year-old self when I first took up smoking. It smelled like smoke, it tasted like smoke. Like an ashtray. Like a smoker’s breath. It was quite unpleasant. And I realized, this is what I smelled like to other people. It had quite conclusively confirmed that not only did I not want cigarettes anymore, I didn’t need cigarettes anymore.
So just like that. I switched from smoking to vaping, and in that transitional instant, left tobacco behind forever. And I’ve never felt better.