I forgot my nicotine patch today. I left the house without wearing it. I wasn’t too far out the door when I remembered, but I had pretty much just enough time to get to an appointment, so I had to keep going. I mean, by the time I got to the train station, I had halved my mental list of things to do for the day, because I figured if I could just cut way down on the time I would have to be without it, I’d be okay. At one time, this wouldn’t have worked. Any kind of mental technique that involved me thinking about the patch as some kind of a fix would just explode in my face because I would feel like I was “settling,” and taking a fix far inferior to the one I really wanted. Boy, that would make me angry, and I’d soon enough be smoking again. I had to look at the patch as something I just did in the mornings, coincidentally to quitting smoking. Oh, look at that. It’s a patch on my boobie. I know better now, however. The patch is a fix, and a great one indeed. There’s nothing like the calm that washes over me about fifteen minutes after putting her on. Well, maybe a cigarette. But that’s kind of defeating the purpose.
I’m really not going to get too into the whole quitting smoking thing here on my knitting and gallbladder health blog. (That’s funny if you imagine someone saying the whole sentence very seriously.) Seriously, this blog is fairly new and I don’t know who reads it. I appear to have no regular readers, just throngs of people crazy about Fantine, and googlers looking for things like “gallbladder danger” and liver cleanses. Which I do NOT condone, by the way. Anyway, I think my mother reads occasionally, and the myspace friends, but otherwise, there’s nothing I can confirm, and therefore, I’ve decided not to get into the smoking thing on here because it is far too personal and too painful to do.
I do have to tell the funny story of what happened today when I left my patch at home, however. Because I actually had a fairly decent day and didn’t get too angry, except at one point on Fifth Avenue a guy and his girlfriend who were walking in front of me stopped short to take a closer look at a Halal cart and I literally tripped over them. Both of them. He apologized; she did not, of course, because women in New York are like Jeckyll and Hyde, every one that I have ever met is either super sugary nice and sweet or else they are evil mean banshee demons who seem to think that city life is a large contest full of smaller little contests such as Who Can Talk the Loudest or Look the Most Bored or Who Can Swing Their Fendi Bag That No One Wants Anymore Already More Violently, and they are all trying their hardest to win.
So I become really angry, and as I start to cross the street, I’m muttering cursewords under my breath, all directed at the girlfriend, of course, because she could not bother to say “I’m sorry.” And then a woman in front of me who is crossing the street too drops her purple underwear out of her enormous tote bag and I decide to pick it up and give it back to her. I don’t know why I decided to pick it up and give it back to her, but I did. I don’t think I even knew it was underwear until it was about a split second from my hand. And I gave it back to her completely straight-faced because I was so angry still at the girl. She quickly took them back from me but her eyes steadily grew wider and wider and I thought she was going to die and then she just started laughing really hard. She assured me over and over that they were clean and told me that I would probably have karma to burn for a long time for handling a stranger’s underwear like that. We laughed until 6th Avenue.
I toyed with the idea of taking this opportunity to wean myself off of the patch, but when I got home today I decided that was an idea whose time had not yet come. Instead I tried to coordinate exactly putting on the patch with taking the first bite of my tofurkey sandwich. It took a little bit of strategy, but it was well worth the mild sedative effect I gained from the combination of nicotine and delicious food.
Last night I started the one-skein wonder from Glampyre Knits. I purchased this pattern quite some time ago and kept putting off getting around to it, thinking I didn’t have the right yarn. Then I noticed several knitters had taken on this pattern in Lion Cotton, and it looked great, so I figured I’d do the same! I’m almost done; the knitting goes quickly, the picking up stitches is a bitch as there are over a hundred to pick up. I’m learning as I go; I’d love it if it fit, but as my research has shown me, it can take several tries sometimes, so I’m okay with the idea of frogging the equivalent of two nights of knitting in order to get it just right. I think if I can pull this off however, I will have learned a little something about the fine art of the sleeve, which means I can get back to Fantine. I’m thinking I’m going to start over again on her as well, because if ever a sweater deserved to look absolutely perfect, it’s Fantine. Anyone up for a Knit-Along? I’d be more than happy to host. I’ve got two good weeks before classes start up again, more than enough time to get a KAL going strong.
