TravisMohrman

A: “Hey man, want some black jelly beans? I have a whole bag!  I know you love jelly beans!”
B: “Gross!  I love jellybeans, but those taste bad”
A: “Yeah, I get that a lot”

 
A: “Hey lady, want some Brazil nuts?”
B: “No thanks, I’m more of an almond and cashew girl”
A: “They are a little more ‘meaty’ I guess.”

 
A: “You want an orange soda?”
B: “No thanks.  Do you have any white sodas?”
A: “Nope”
B: “I’m good with water, thanks”

A:”Hungry?  I’ve got some chicken thighs”
B: “I like the white meat”
A: “More for me!”

A: “You want a Bud Light?”
B: ” No, thanks.  I mostly just drink IPA.”
A: “You’re a beer snob!”

One of these fictional interactions is a little different than the other.  Does anyone care to explain?

I try to live in the moment and all that hippy nonsense, but my ways sneak out on their own all the time.

This is what I’ve been waiting for!

I need your help trying to figure out if I’m weird or relatively normal in my eating habits.  Let’s explore!
Let’s assume you sit down to eat dinner and you have three items on your plate–call them A, B, and C

A is your favorite thing to eat.
B is pretty tasty.
C is not so good but you’ll eat it anyway.

In what order to do you eat that plate?
(Please disregard things like B cooling down and becoming gross, this is hypothetical, don’t be dificult)
Some folks might just smoosh it all together and gobble it down.  I want to party with these people, although I’m not to sure why.  It just seems like a good time to smash all your food together into a smeary food painting before eating.  I couldn’t do it, but I want to chill with those that can.
Other people are instant gratification types and they will eat A first and end up with things on their plate that they don’t really want to eat. I assume they then get depressed and eat C while wondering what their life has boiled down to or they do something even worse–Throw away food–that’s a dick move, man.
Others nibble things separately but at consistent rates….I don’t understand these people at all.  Seriously, are you following an eating program to make yourself appear human?  Because you’re doing it wrong. Wait, do some real humans actually do it this way?
And then we come to me and my delayed gratification. I eat the things I’m not excited about first to clear out the boring stuff, pretty much instantly forget about it, and then relish in A. Delicious A! When the meal is done, I can still taste A, rather than the bummer that was C…which I don’t even remember anymore but I probably ate it because it kills cancer or makes me poop or something. This is just the most rational approach really.

This also shows up in both my wife and I when we check our freezers. Inevitably, every single year at around the end of July I notice that we have a bunch of venison backstrap that we have been squirreling away….and now it needs to be eaten to make room for the animals we are about to murder.

We have tried to get better about squirreling stuff away, and I think we’ve made some progress, but it’s still a struggle.  I can’t say it sucks to have backstrap on the menu for breakfast, lunch , and dinner, but it is kind of stupid.
Even worse is foods that aren’t replaced every year.  Something really special that gets squirreled away because “c’mon, that’s too special to eat!  We need to wait until it’s degraded and less special before we eat it.”  I really hate it when this happens and it forces me to kick my own ass.

I mostly seem to do this with food and I don’t know why that is.  I don’t delay gratification when it comes to purchasing other stuff.  Fallout 4 was in my dry and scratchy hands on release day, as was The Martian and a number of other things.  I didn’t wait for the “perfect time” to start either of those.  I had them and then opened and enjoyed! Instant!

But what is it about food?  Is it a learned trait?  When I was little I had to eat all my veggies and drink all my milk before I was allowed to get up from the table.  Did that carry over?  Because I love veggies and hate milk so that might be a wash.  Any brain squishers or junior brain squishers want to take a crack at explaining this?  Is it just good old fashioned hoarding?

What makes you think I’m a food hoarder?

What say you folks?  What order do you eat this hypothetical meal in?  And don’t be bound by my categories.  If you eat A, then C, and then throw B against a wall because you don’t do half measures, let me know.

I have now been six months free from nicotine, tobacco, and generally inhaling anything except sweet baby atmospheric mix and whatever hound scent is made of.  This is just a quick update post for those who may be following along (or folks who want to see pics of dogs).

Like the last post, I’m not writing this for slaps on the back or encouragement, it is for other people who might be quitting or thinking about quitting and want to know first-hand accounts of what others experience.

I detailed what happened in the first six weeks already in an earlier post.  Revisit if you want a refresher on my personal hell.  The previous 4.5 months has been decidedly better…mostly.  Plus, I’ve saved around 600$ which is almost a case a delicious scotch!

Bottom line, I feel great.  I can breath so much better that it has spurred me to exercise.   I gained a few pounds while quitting, which is to be expected, but I found it very easy to lose that weight since suddenly I could walk up hills without breathing hard.  Also, now that I don’t smoke, I seem to give a fuck about my body again.  That’s kind of nice.

While I still like the smell of cigarette smoke, especially my old brand, I don’t feel the tug to smoke when I smell it.  When the aroma hits my nose I think “cigarettes, I remember those.”
I don’t get physical cravings to smoke and I no longer feel a hungry beast needing to be fed inside me. One thing that is interesting is that the little devil and his little voice still live in my head and come out at predictable, and sometimes unpredictable, times.
When we went on vacation in August it entailed a ten hour drive.  The drive was fine without smokes–which kind of surprised me, but once we got to the vacation house the little devil was like “Hooray.  We have arrived.  Time for a smoke!”  and I found myself patting my pocket absently, then I caught myself and started smiling.  This voice has no teeth anymore.  No power at all.

Also, I find myself really enjoying some of the little aspects of not being a smoker.  This little dude hangs out in my office a few times a week.  He wasn’t even born when I quit smoking.  He’s fond of grabbing onto my fingers.  I still sometimes reflexively worry that my hands smell like smoke, then I realize they don’t.   That simple thing brings a pretty stupid amount of pride.  Smokers will understand what I’m talking about.

I’ve talked to many others who have quit after smoking more than a decade and the pattern seems to hold true. That voice never really goes away, but instead slinks into a corner.  One of the unpredictable times it came out was when I had a terrific sales day in the woodshop.  The sales were piling up and Mindy and I were celebrating.  The little voice peeped out and was like “Hooray. Let’s smoke.”  My response is always to laugh and ignore…sometime I tell it to eat a bag of dicks, depending on my mood.  I never feel an actual craving to smoke.  It’s just like an odd subconscious tug.  Sort of like when you try to put your seatbelt on after it’s already on and you think “why would I do that?”.

Seriously, your analogies suck lately.

The ‘mostly’ part I mentioned earlier came in the form of a terrible cold that tore me down and laid my soul open for people to poke at with sticks.  Seriously, that’s what it felt like.  Bender took full advantage and had his soul pokin’ stick handy.  It was no good.  I wondered a little about the severity.  It was around five months, maybe a little less, after quitting.  Then, a few weeks ago I had to see a doctor for something else and I mentioned it to him.  He just chuckled and said that it is VERY common to get hit with something really shitty a few months after quitting.  He didn’t have any hard and fast answers and admitted that it was just observational data, but the first cold and flu season for someone who has quit that year typically leaves a few bruises.  You have been warned. The sort of awesome thing is that, as a non-smoker, your recuperation time from the sickness is way better than it would be otherwise.  Your lungs are actually regaining the ability to expel things rather than just wallow in their own tarry filth.

Like all things, that illness came and went and I got better.  Like a true saiyan I believe I got stronger because of it and I expect my hair to burst into yellow flames any day now.  Any damn day now. But I digress.

The other point I want to clarify is that after six months I am not angry with people who choose to smoke.  I don’t understand why some people get that way.  An ex-smoker understands perfectly why those people are smoking.   I have friends that smoke, they are not jackasses about it but I have told them they don’t need to alter their behavior on my account.  If others want to smoke, knock yourselves out.  I understand the attraction, trust me.  If you’re one of those folks who quits and now rails against anyone who smokes and also fights to make the entire world ‘smoke free’…lighten up….maybe have a smoke…you’re clearly not over them.