Awesome April Actuality Awareness!

Well, I was going to hold this off for the actual end of the month...but I figured, what the hell, I'm edgy, I'll post my monthly update a day early. Occupy that.

First up, my progress on my resolutions.

#1 - Quit Smoking - DONE- 40+ days under my belt and going strong. I feel great, I smell great (...alright, better), and I have the energy of someone who isn't hacking up a lung. Basically my energy level has from Neo in the Matrix when he's all shot up and dead, to the jumping in that Agent dude and watching him explode into a bunch of itty bitty pieces. Ha, find that on your stupid TV quit ads, which are WAY more annoying when you're trying to quit. Imagine you're Catholic, and all you see and hear about on Friday are ads about steak. Yeah, thanks public ad campaign.

#2 - Positive Networth  DONE - In the black and growing! I've also made my first....83 cents off ad revenue from this thing. I'm not in this money, and like I said, I would donate whatever I made during Lent and triple it or something. I'm just gonna go with $5 (I should probably clarify that this isn't my only charitable donation of the year). Luckily the market continues to do well, and my budget has finally gotten to a settling point, which means I have more room available for fun!

#3 - Run a marathon - IN TRAINING - I've done the research, and I've decided that I'm going to run the Atlanta marathon on October 28th. I should have ample time to train up for it, and I'll be kicking off that effort in the next few weeks.

#4  - Travel more! - Doing! - This past month or so I've visited the Atlanta and Charleston areas and have had a blast at both. In addition, I bought a season pass at the US Whitewater Center near Charlotte, and quitting smoking has now covered that! There are a few more cities and places within driving distance I plan on visiting, so hopefully I'll be able to get to those places soon!

#5 - Write/create more! - Needs improvement  - Now, I've been writing a fair amount on here, so on one hand, I feel like I'm getting somewhere. However, it has gotten my kind of antsy and wanting to do even more.

One of the big ones is that I really want to enter, and eventually get selected, for one of the Cracked.com photoplasty articles. Yeah, it's dumb, but I'm making it a goal to enter at least 3 of those a month.

In my next post, I'm going to cover my next whiteboard item...tackling P90X!

#QuitNow! Achievement Unlocked: First thirty - No smoking for 30 days

Done, done, on to the next

It has been a crazy month since my last update, but I'm happy to say that I've continued on my trend of quitting smoking, and am now a month into my quit. It's been rough, but I'm finally past all of the withdrawal symptoms, and most of the psychological symptoms have finally subsided as well. Unfortunately, this has also meant that I've had to come face-to-face with my other addiction, sweet sweet caffeine.

Let me put this into perspective. In college, my academic adviser drank coffee until about 4:30 in the afternoon, and this is a guy I spent a lot of time with my senior year. To say I picked up the habit is an understatement. My last semester as a history major had me writing somewhere around 90-100 pages between all my classes, and I was drinking coffee from 7am to 7pm and switching to Wild Turkey at 7:01pm, while smoking a pack a day.

Even nowadays, my morning usually started with three cups of coffee that I finish before 8am, and then I drink at least 3 more. And then on my way home from work, I'll grab a Monster from the gas station. On weekends, I'll easily drink 6 cups from the start. You can get a pretty good idea of how this can mess with my sleep cycle, and thus create a vicious cycle of dependency.

This is all well and good when you're smoking, because nicotine messes with how alcohol and caffeine effect the body, mostly in that they reduce the effects. Take away that nicotine, and you have a super-powered drunk/hyperman running around. So in honor of my one month of smoking cessation, I've decided to confront my caffeine addiction. I started out trying not to drink anything containing caffeine, but that turned out to be what scientists define as fucking retarded. After about an hour of feeling like my brain was being pried open, I caved and had a small coffee, and for the rest of the day I felt okay. And that night, I slept like a baby. No waking up in the middle of the night, it took me all of about 10 minutes to go to sleep, and I didn't wake up two hours before my alarm went off. The next day, I decided on drinking my 3 cups of coffee in the morning to get me going, and under no circumstances would I drink a Monster after work.

Now on day four, I've also had the bonus effect of not ingesting between 200-250 calories of God knows what, nor any of the gas station snacks I'd buy and eat as well. Baby steps to a healthier me, woo.

In any case, this post has focused mainly on my resolution of quitting smoking, which I feel confident enough to say I can cross off my list of resolutions. So now, between having a positive net worth and this, I've finished 2 of the 5 things I've set out to do this year. I'll do the full first third of the year update next week, but so far, I'm pretty pumped! And I'll keep posting my QuitNow achievements as I get them, because life deserves to be played like a video game.

#QuitNow! Achievement Unlocked: Half a thousand cigarettes - 500 cigarettes non-smoked

#QuitNow! Achievement Unlocked: Two days saved - You saved two days of your life