Queen B_ _ _ _

I've mentioned this before, but I want to say it again for emphasis: quitting smoking is hard work. It makes you a little bit crazy.

I obsessed for a week about cigarettes and smoking and my place in the world without either of them. Smoking is almost a battle cry - or it was when I was in college. We had to join others of our kind and rally around for warmth and protection. (I went to college in Minnesota. There is warmth in numbers.) There is power in numbers, and fewer people gave us dirty looks when there were more than three of us. So who's side am I on now? I don't really care about this point anymore - it took a long time to get it out of my system, but it's finally gone.

For the past few weeks, I've been wound tighter than... the only thing I can think of that's wound is a yo-yo, and I'm sure they're not wound very tight, so you'll have to take my word for it. I've been snapping at people, getting unspeakably mad for very minor reasons, generally being a total bitch. It sucked to live with me lately, and I know it. Hell, I knew it while it was happening, but there was all of that rage that kept bubbling up, and it was either let it out or explode.

I figured out where my rage was coming from. You see, smoking does do at least one good thing for people. It gives them the opportunity to sit back and think about things. For about five minutes at a time, and several times a day. It's a mental quiet time (or it was, for me), to collect my thoughts and take some deep breaths, and you know what I used that time for most of all? Realizing that the whole world didn't have to run the way I felt it should run. These past few weeks, I've been trying to run the entire world the way I think it should happen and it wasn't working out the way I'd planned. And that, in turn, made me angry.

I promise I won't be angry forever.