Food and Pharmaceuticals

Now the drugs don't work
They just make you worse
But I know I'll see your face again

So I started taking Wellbutrin today to help me quit smoking. I've taken it before, but it's been a long time. I took in college when I tried to quit back then. But all my friends smoked then, I had three papers due a week, and I really just didn't want to quit. Now that my life is evened out a little, it should be easier to stay quit.

Anyway, I don't remember it making me feel so...odd. I do remember that it made me very...flat, I guess is the word. I tended to stay in one very mild attitude all day. That actually seems to be happening again. I don't really like it, but it's not like this is a long-term thing. But still, I do feel a little wonky.

Last time, it also seemed to really help me focus and to maintain an extremely high level of concentration. I'm kind of waiting on that to kick in. Not seeing it yet. Same thing with the suppression of my appetite.

I'm supposed to start smoking two fewer cigarettes a day. To do that, I took two out of a new pack and I'm limiting myself to that pack for my entire day today. I don't really feel any great longing for a cigarette, but I do want to get up and go to the back for a cigarette. I don't know how I'm going to cure myself of that. I might just start telling my office manager I'm going outside and just walk around for a little bit. I don't know.


On a completely unrelated and random note, I felt the need to share my odd creation.

I'm an experimental cook. I rarely follow a recipe to the letter and I like to come up with my own ideas for dishes. Last night I had some leftover vegetable broth, spinach, some chicken that had been in my freezer a while, and less than half a bag of egg noodles, so I made a sort of chicken noodle soup.

Here's what I did:

I marinaded the chicken in my usual soy sauce/red wine vinegar/poultry seasoning/dill marinade and grilled it on the Foreman grill.

I browned some onion and wilted the spinach in a very tiny bit of olive oil, then added what was left of the vegetable broth, the rest of the marinade, the cooked chicken and the cooked noodles. I made sure to boil the soup to make sure all the chicken juices from marinade were heated enough.

It was actually very good. I was afraid the soy from the marinade was a little too much, but Corey said it was a perfect amount. Anyway, I love coming up with something good from leftovers.


Wish me luck on the quitting smoking, y'all. I'll need it.

And now...The Verve

Projecty Princess

What's he building in there?

What the hell is he building

In there?

He has subscriptions to those

Magazines... He never

Waves when he goes by

He's hiding something from

The rest of us... He's all

To himself...

Probably the weirdest lyrics I've ever posted from one of the weirdest of Tom Waits' songs (and that's pretty damn weird). Gotta love him.

Now that I'm mostly over my extraordinarily obnoxious illness (whatever it was), I've got some newfound energy (except for when I've just taken some Robotussin to get rid of what's left of the congestion) and a fire has been lit under my ass to do some stuff.

How and when I'm going to do them is another question entirely. Classes have started back and I'm busy pretty much every night of the week except Friday. No rest for the weary, you know. I've got Medical Document Processing until 10:30 and on the nights I don't have that class, I have to go to the CVT library to work on assignments for my online class.

But I still feel the need to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies at some point this week. Now that I've broken in my new printer by putting together notebooks for my class, I'm itching to do some fun desktop publishing. With all this focus on learning medical roots, prefixes, and suffixes, my mind's turning literary too. I want to work on my novels, I want to cook and try out new recipes.

I know I complain about this a great deal and I'm sorry, so I'll stop now.

But another note of interest:

After my physical Friday, I got my prescription for my stop-smoking drugs. I've tried it before (Wellbutrin) and had a great deal of success with it (I was quit for 3 months), but I was still in college and I wasn't at all looking forward to quitting. Now I am.

So starting next week, I will be taking the pills and smoking two fewer cigarettes per day. And doing a lot of munching on carrot sticks and playing with mint or teatree-soaked toothpicks. I must apologize beforehand for the likely vitriol-splattered blogs I will probably post while in the process of quitting. It's not me talking, it's the withdrawal. Just remember that.

One more thing:

My new hair color. It's not a whole lot different, but it's darker and it's redder (if you can tell at all in this pic). I look dreadful because this was taken before bed last night. Let's hope my overall appearance will improve as well as my health when I quit smoking.

Love your Tom Waits