Tomorrow at 2:30pm Saskatchewan time (which isn’t on daylight savings time so it always switches between being Central and Mountain and I never remember which is which) it will have been SEVEN DAYS since I quit smoking! My first whole week smoke free! It feels pretty good. I have one nicotine mint when I wake up and then my coffee and lunch and another nicotine mint and then a drink of pop and then another mint a couple hours later. It’s going well. I’ve been feeling pretty positive about it and my self esteem is even improving, which is nice. I feel like shit about myself when I am a smoker. Because I know I shouldn’t do it and most of the time didn’t even want to do it but I had to do it. Smoking, yuck! What a terrible addiction!

My sense of smell is coming back, and hot apple drink tastes SUPER yummy these days. But I think the biggest change I have noticed is I don’t have cold hands and feet anymore. My circulation has improved immensely. It’s nice to have something substantial like that to appreciate about smoking cessation.

So aside from that, I am still waiting to hear from STC. I helped put up the christmas lights today. I saw my sister tonight at her group home and she fell asleep while I was hugging her. Last night I read almost all of the articles on Quit Smoking at About.com. I had a crazy weekend but it was fun and positive.

Rejection sucks ass, but I am feeling better about myself these days. I harbour hope that one day I will have a totally healthy life long relationship with someone. I don’t know when it will happen. But I don’t mind being single. I’ve had some flirtatious action in the last few years at least, so it’s not like those other years of NOTHING! They just fizzle out like dud firecrackers though, my little flirtations. It’s been a weird pattern but maybe I should be relieved, like it is keeping me from being in relationships that wouldn’t make me happy.

Still I do worry that my relationship skills are totally out of practice. And my parents split when I was two so I never grew up around a relationship, like the day to day aspects of a relationship. I feel like I am kind of making it up as I go along. If I was still living across from a Chapters I would probably go sit in there and read the self help section on communication in relationships and stuff.

Maybe I am also thinking of this because of my cousin’s relationship, which I have been observing ever since he moved in with us. It’s not a good scene. It makes me think about my past relationships and how long I would try to withstand cruel behaviour just before it all unraveled. I think to myself “Oh if only I had had a backbone and would just have confronted them as soon as they starting saying mean things!” I think, from what I have noticed, people sometimes (well, often) gauge how badly they can treat their partner before their partner won’t take it anymore, and if they can get away with treating them like garbage then they WILL!

Oh man, that is really pessimistic.

My first real girlfriend lived in Toronto while I was in Vancouver, and only talked to me on the phone once every two weeks. Even if I would call her wanting to talk a week later because something came up, she would keep it to every two weeks. And that went on for a year and a month! Now I look back on it and think “Oh gawd, how controlling!”

So I get crushes and then later on they kind of fizzle out after I start noticing weird behaviour or other indications of possible relationship drama. And I’m not talking mental illness, I could date another person with a mental illness, enough of my own friends are really nutters anyway, one more nut wouldn’t wreck my world. I just mean people who like making people jealous and that kind of weird gamey behaviour. That’s what I can’t stand.

Red Flags is what I’m talking about!

I am wary.

Because I don’t need a girl to make me feel like a loser! I can feel like a loser all by myself. But BLAH! Who wants to feel like a loser, nobody, that’s who!

I am very highly suspicious of people who want their partners to change fundamental aspects of who they are. I think you should love someone for who they are, not for what you want them to become. People’s growth and change comes from a core within themselves, they have to want it for themselves. They can’t do it for other people. Even if EVERYBODY wants them to change! I don’t believe in interventions either.

Well, I think I am going to get away from this confessional blog and go make myself some Hot Apple Drink to take to bed with me, where I will finish reading about butch and femme and maybe jot some totally embarrassing feelings about a certain someone who will remain nameless in my journal. Which is almost ALL WRITTEN IN! I started it in April 2008 when I moved into the coop! Hundreds of pages and many deep dark secrets later I am almost DONE! I have eight pages left. I am going to have to go diary hunting this december. Either that or write in that cute Marlene Dietrich book I got, but I don’t feel as secure about the binding of it for a long term document like a journal. I am very fussy about my journals.