Saintless

Today I dropped $100+ on three two-week boxes of patches. Thankfully, that came from my Flexible Spending Account, and not my pocket. I bought 3 stages – 21mg, 14mg and 7 mg.

I’ve been using the patches occasionally for social situations as of late, and they’ve worked really well. I still need to go buy about 200 packages of sugar free gum, though.

One of my biggest fears is that I’ll eat myself into a size 16. My healthy kick, including no meat, and mostly organic foods is now very much a habit for me, though. I don’t drink soda, except the occasional Diet Coke as a mixer. I rarely have sugar, and almost never as a dessert or snack. Typically, I don’t sugar my coffee, and I sometimes put honey in my tea. That’s about it. I’ve found that I’m very comfortable with all of these things, and don’t feel like I’m missing out. My only real fear is junk food, such as Cheetos. But, hopefully I can resist.

Then there’s the irritability thing. Will I be grumpy without my smoke breaks at work, or stepping outside when the kids are driving me nuts? Time will tell. And if so, it will go away eventually. It’s far more likely that I’ll go through some kind of emotional trauma where I whither into a bumbling idiot. Since I’m not seriously seeing anyone, at least I don’t have to worry about relationship issues.

I rarely go to bars, but if I do, at least they’re smoke free now.

I’m trying to think of what other things might be challenging for me, and I think that’s about it. I’ve proven to myself that I can drink and not smoke, which used to be my big excuse for starting again when I’d stopped.

I think work will be less stressful in the next month than it has been as of late. There are some custody issues coming up that will be big, but at least I know my kids will be totally supportive of me quitting.

My next post on the topic will be the positives, and my motivations for quitting.

The big question now is: Do I wear a patch for tomorrow’s New years Eve party, or do I start it the next day? I’m still trying to decide. I guess it all depends on whether I’m excited about sharing a New Years Eve kiss with anyone.

It’s obvious that Rebecca Chavez-Houck is committed to the concept of social justice, and very concerned with issues affecting childen in Utah. I’d say she deserved a huge pat on the back right now, though.

Last year Rebecca submitted the bill titled “Forever Homes For Every Child”, but it died before it saw the light of day. This year, she’s sponsoring that same bill. If she is able to pass this bill, it means that many children who are currently in the foster care system, hoping to be adopted by loving families will get just that chance! Currently in Utah, unmarried couples cannot adopt children. This was put into law in 2000, to prevent gay and lesbian couples from adopting. As the Salt Lake Tribune put it:

The state’s 2000 adoption law essentially codified bigotry disguised as an attempt to provide children with the best of all possible worlds. What it has done, instead, is to keep children in foster care and out of permanent, loving homes with committed parents.

Another benefit of this law is that when one parent has a child, their partner can legally adopt that child. This means that if something were to happen to the biological parent, the child won’t be ripped away into the state foster care system, and that the partner is on solid ground when dealing with schools, doctors or anyone else.

Research consistantly shows that children of gay and lesbian parents are not more at risk for social or emotional problems, and there’s a whole list of acronymed medical associations who put their support behind the idea of gay adoption. Besides which, this also leaves the door open to committed, but unmarried hetrosexual couples.

A former coworker of mine opened his home as a foster family to children. I remember him telling me how sometimes the system was so flooded with children that he would get phone calls begging him to take one or two more children, often children under 5. Not all of the children in our foster care system are there for adoption, but the ones that are often wait years to find families of their own, and sometimes it just doesn’t happen at all. Can you imagine how detrimental that is to a child?

The only question here is, will the Utah legislature put kids first? As the Trib put it:

We urge the Legislature to put compassion above prejudice and debate this reasonable bill. These children desperately need homes and deserve to be heard.

The bill specifies that married couples still receive priority for adoption, so it really leaves nothing for anyone to object to.

You can help, in a couple of different ways:

First, don’t forget to tell Rebecca how much you appreciate her for putting this at the top of her list.

Then, figure out who your legislator is (if you don’t already know!) and let him or her know that you want them to put the needs of the children first, and make sure they get the opportunity to have a family of their own, instead of sitting around in the state foster system, costing taxpayer money. It’s an all around win for these children, and the people of our state. These children will have such better lives, and it’s wrong to deny them that opportunity! If they agree that with the bill, ask them if they can sign on as a co-sponser. Make sure this bill doesn’t see a repeat of last year!

Tags: adoption, Rebecca Chavez-Houck

I’m sure that Bush didn’t actually mean to, but he did something good Tuesday. W signed into law a requirement that employers allow couples (including teh gay!) to roll a retirement plan over to their non-spouse partners.

Really. He did. From HRC:

The Human Rights Campaign today hailed the passage of a law that protects partners who inherit retirement savings. The Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008 (WRERA), signed by President Bush today, contains technical corrections to the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (PPA). PPA made it possible for employers to allow any nonspouse beneficiary of an employee’s retirement plan—including an employee’s same-sex partner—to roll inherited retirement benefits directly to an individual retirement account (IRA) and avoid immediate taxation. WRERA requires that all employers provide this rollover opportunity to nonspouse beneficiaries.

(via ThinkProgress)

Over on the Wired Danger Room blog, Nathan Hodge has an article about how the U.S. and Georgia* will be signing a “Strategic Partnership Treaty” on January 4.

I can’t help but wonder what the impact of this will be. I’m all in favor of the idea, and I think we should have stood up for Georgia during the Russian invasion. How will Russia react, and does this mean we would consider stepping in, if another incident like the invasion happened?

*Clarification in case Sarah Palin is reading: Georgia, the country, not the state.

Eartha Kitt was an amazing woman and performer. I just found out that she passed away yesterday, Christmas Day, through One Utah. Miss Kitt was known for her role as Catwoman, as well as the above song, Santa Baby. Her story is amazing.

All of the reports are saying she passed away yesterday, so I’m assuming that her web site simply has a typo, where it lists Dec 26.

Her song “I Want To Be Evil” has been a personal favorite of mine, one of the only songs that touches me profoundly every time I hear it. I listen to it almost daily. At a recent party I held, I made everyone watch the old (above) and a new version of “Santa Baby”, after listening to “I Want To Be Evil” and even dancing and singing to that song. After that party, I thought about taking a vacation to see her in one of her 2009 performances, but I guess I have missed that opportunity.

I’ll always be a fan. Rest in peace, Miss Kitt.

Tags: Eartha Kitt

I’ve had people try to tell me that my outrage over Obama choosing Warren is divisive. That Obama is trying to bring us all together, and that I “shouldn’t be angry” over this.

Except that my anger isn’t the cause of the divisiveness, if that’s what it is. Obama’s choice is. And I damn well should be angry!

Now, I’m not saying I don’t still support Obama, because I do. I don’t expect to agree with him 100% of the time. But, this was the wrong choice on Obama’s part, and I refuse to just pretend that I think it’s ok.

If Obama wants to bring everyone to the table so we can sing Kum Ba Yah, and all get along, that’s one thing. Obama is bringing someone to his Inauguration to play a prominent role that represents hatred and equates homosexuality with child molestation. If he were to bring a prominent anti-semitic in such a way, do you really think that anyone would be telling the Jewish Community that they are wrong to be angry, or to just get over it?

Rachel Maddow drives some of my feelings home in the above video. (via ThinkProgress)

The implication of Sen. Obama’s defense is that he is returning the favor.

[…]

But Obama is not inviting Rick warren into his church or into his campaign or something. He’s inviting him to the nation’s capital to convene the swearing in of the next president of the United States. The President-elect did not invite Warren to his home. He invited him, proverbially, to our’s, the nation’s.

[...]

When human rights activists look back decades, centuries, from now, on the first presidential innauguration of an African American, a landmark achievement won’t they be thinking ‘what a great moment’, but ‘what was that guy who compared homosexuality to incest doing there?’

Apparently, even Rick Warren’s supports are upset by this. Who is being united by this?

Via Ezra Klein, I came across Matt Yglesias’ thoughts on the subject:

A brief point to make is that it’s very easy for a person who isn’t part of the minority group that’s being symbolically dissed to dismiss someone else’s concerns as merely symbolic and not that big a deal. But it’s worth considering how much public policy acts consistently to reaffirm the symbolic commitments of majority groups.

I finally got to watch Milk last night. I cried through almost the entire movie, and I don’t do that. I kept seeing so many parallels to today. No, gays aren’t rounded up in bars and hauled off to jail anymore. We’ve made progress there. But, the Prop 6 fight (to fire all gay teachers and their supporters), which Harvey Milk fought, was so similiar to the Prop 8 fight we just went through. Except Prop 6 didn’t pass, but Prop 8 did. After watching the movie, the thought “why are we still fighting this exact same fight 30 years later?” kept going through my head.

I went to see Milk with a friend, who reminded me that I should instead be concentrating on Harvey Milk’s real message. And that is – we’re all in this together. The GLBTQ community is a minority. We won’t accomplish anything on our own. We have to have the support of our straight allies. We have to form partnerships. We have to make sure that others realize that we’re here, and then that they know we are not freaks of nature.

For anyone who thinks that gay marriage or gay rights in general, are not a big deal, that there are “other, more important issues” to focus on, I have to say that this is a big deal. You don’t understand until you are the one being discriminated against. And how could you, really? Even more, though – these rights represent something far more than they might appear to, at first. Until we are accepted as equals, and society doesn’t see us as abnormal freaks of nature, we are still going to see gays lose their jobs, lose their housing, and even killed. You don’t hear about these things through the mainstream media. That means most people don’t even know it’s happening. 8 days ago, a gay man in Washington D.C. was shot and killed. All signs point to it being because he was gay. Utah is one of 20 states that do not include sexual orientation in hate crimes statistics. So, when you read that there were 1,195 victims of a sexual orientation based hate crime in 2006, that means the number is nowhere close to reality.

I could lose my job because I’m bisexual. The only way I can even hope to get a straight person to understand that, is to tell you that you, too, could be fired, if your boss just thinks you are gay. And I bet that doesn’t even halfway drive the point home.

The GLBTQ community cannot just pretend this isn’t a big deal. I’m not saying that I think we should go impeach Obama. I’m saying this community should be standing up and telling Barack Obama that we disapprove of his choice. Our voices are just a tiny part of the population, and our country is supposed to be one where the minority is protected from having the majority trample them. But, that just won’t happen if we stay quiet.

So, if you think I’m being loud and obnoxious about this, I’m doing something right.

Rick Warren is a horrible choice to give the invocation at the Innauguation. He’s a homophobe, he is against women’s rights, and even stem cell research. This decision feels like a slap in the face to LGBTQ people across America. And Barack just made this much worse:

The worst part here was the “disagree without being disagreeable” sentence. Everything about Rick Warren is disagreeable. He is hostile toward GLBTQ Americans. He doesn’t just disagree with us. He compares homosexuality to pedophelia! 

I’ve known all along that I wasn’t always going to agree with Obama on everything, and I’ve already disagreed with a few things. But, this one really hurts in a personal way. And it was so unnecessary.

Update: I forgot to include this link. I went to Change.gov yesterday to give my opinion on Rick Warren, and I’m about to go do it again! You should too!

Update 2: Here are some more things you can do:

Sign the petition: Obama: Stand Up for Gay Americans, Say No to Rick Warren

And from the Facebook group Protest Rick Warren giving Barack Obama’s Inaugural Invocation:

1. CALL 202-540-3000 , press “2,” speak with a live person

2. SEND a letter letting the transition team know what you think here http://change.gov/page/content/contact, and

3. EMAIL Parag Mehta, Obama’s LGBT liaison on the transition team at parag.mehta@ptt.gov.

4. Contact members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies as well.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein
http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe
Sen. Harry Reid
http://reid.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
Sen. Bob Bennett
http://bennett.senate.gov/contact/email_form.cfm
Rep. Nancy Pelosi
http://speaker.house.gov/contact/
Rep. Steny Hoyer
http://hoyer.house.gov/contact/email.asp
Rep. John Boehner
http://johnboehner.house.gov/Contact/

So, a certain well known woman walked into the Utah Democratic Headquarters last week, and asked Todd Taylor if he’d “heard what that blog bitch did”. Of course well all know she must have meant me! I’m Utah’s only female political “blog bitch”, right?

Todd was telling me the story, and I wondered what I’d done to her, when he pointed out she was mispronouncing “Blagojevich”.

I say we don’t let people with weird names on ballots anymore, to avoid this sort of confusion.

I could run out into the street and jump for joy over this!

Remember how the (Un)Patriot Act placed a gag order on recipients of the National Security Letters (NSL)? This meant, as an example, that if an ISP received an NSL regarding one of their customers, they had to turn over tons of private data, but could not tell the customer, nor could they challenge it in court. It was illegal for them to ever acknowledge receiving an NSL.

Well, a federal court sided with the ACLU and has ruled this unconstitutional!

Because of the ruling, the government will now be forced to justify individual gag orders before a court, instead of casually wielding the power of a blanket gag as the Bush administration has done since the blindingly fast passage of the Patriot Act in Oct. 2001.

Now if only I could get my allergy pills without being labeled a terrorist…

While the typical political and occasional funny or geeky posts will continue to be the focus of this blog, I plan to chronicle my transition from smoker to non-smoker here. Sorry to anyone bored by this, and for the rest of you…please feel free to add your thoughts to the comments section as this goes along.

I’ve been smoking for about 14 years. I’ve tried everything in the book to quit. Obviously, it hasn’t worked.

Side note: every time I hear one of those “Truth About Tobacco” commercials on the radio, I light up, unless the kids are around. I abhor those commercials, and they make me not want to quit when I hear them.

Anyway, I’m at a point where I really, truly want to quit. I enjoy the physical act of smoking, inhaling the smoke into my body, especially when I feel stressed or unhappy. But, I don’t enjoy worrying that I smell like a smoker, or that my mouth will taste like an ashtray when I kiss someone. I don’t enjoy that my boys know I smoke, or that they have curiosity about it. I don’t enjoy when my dear friend is sad and I ask her why, and she tells me that her friend died of lung cancer, and I have nothing else to say. I don’t enjoy cigarettes having enough control over me that I brave freezing wind for a few puffs. I don’t enjoy smoking, as a whole.

I’m ready to quit. I’ve given myself a policy that I won’t date a smoker, which is a pretty big deal for me, since I’ve only ever really dated smokers. I’m ready to take back control of that part of my life.

I’ve tried before, even been successful for up to a few months at a time. I can go without a cigarette for even a few weeks, when I really want to (such as when Mom’s in town), and not feel all the horrible withdrawals that I feel when I “quit”. And each time, one of two things has brought the filthy things back to my lips; stress (try arguing with your fiancé and his family about whether his child molester uncle can come to your wedding – and no, I don’t have an 11 year old grudge, what are you talking about?) or social situations, like bars.

Most of my closest friends have all quit smoking, and very few of my new friends are smokers. I rarely go to bars, and they’re all about to be non-smoking in Utah, anyway. I really think that socially, I’ll be ok this time, on that front.

Stress is an every day thing for me right now. But, the doctor has given me a chill pill, which seems to work ok, and could probably outweigh any major stressful situations, if I just go ahead and use them when I need them.

There are 4 main options to quit smoking; nicotine patches, nicotine gum, cold-turkey and Wellbutrin.

Patches and gum have never done much for me. I find myself using them now when I’m in social situations where I don’t want to smoke, and they do hold me over. But, they don’t provide the twice daily calming fix when I leave my desk at work. They don’t fill that morning routine with the cup of coffee on my back patio. And they just don’t work long-term for me.

Cold turkey also doesn’t get it for me long term.

Wellbutrin did great, though. I’ve taken it for mental health reasons for years, though I did stop 2 years ago. Given my history, and my current stress, going on Wellbutrin would likely cause major harm to my mental health, which is overall in great shape right now. Additionally, the dosage that gets me to stop smoking also gives me the shakes and is actually higher than doctors are “supposed to” give, or that insurance generally pays for. So, that’s also out.

Recently, the drug Chantrix has come into my awareness. I brought it up to my doctor, who knows that I don’t want to take anything that might affect my brain chemistry, because of my history in that area. But, at my recent visit, I asked anyway. She said she’s prescribed it a lot, and only had one person not succeed in quitting smoking with it. She brought up the fact that it has a risk of suicidal ideation, but said none of her patients had experienced that. She also said that it won’t affect my brain chemistry, in the way that anti-depressants and other such drugs will. So, I decided to give it a try.

I discovered that my insurance won’t cover it, though I think I might be able to convince them to, if I let them know that I’ve tried the other options, and they didn’t work.

However, in bringing the subject up on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I got a lot of feedback from people who have used it. It seems that people fall into two categories; it works absolutely great and they have successfully quit smoking or it turned them into some kind of crazed lunatic with suicidal tendencies.

Most people who know me are aware (as my doctor is) that I have been diagnosed as bipolar, and went through a bout with suicide. Though, I have to say I won that battle, on all fronts. I was told I’d never be medication free, and shouldn’t even try. I also literally brought myself back from the dead, and decided I wanted to live. I’ve not had a suicidal thought since, and have been able to learn my mood cycles enough that I can change my environment as needed so that I don’t have the highs and lows that I once thought I had no power over. That’s the short story, anyway.

So, after a Twitter friend sent me a link to a NY Magazine article of One Man’s Experience With The Stop-Smoking Drug Chantix, I’m a bit worried. I wonder which category of Chantix users I would fall into. While my history with suicide was environmental, I don’t believe all of my mental health history has been environmental. I firmly believe that I am bipolar, but that because I finally found a therapist who I was able to work with, I was able to begin recognizing my moods and my triggers, and gain control, even eventually become medication free, and stable for years now. I feel the need here to say that I do not believe everyone can do this, and for some people, to try to get there is harmful to them. It’s a very sensitive topic, and I’m surprised I’m willing to put it out here on such a public forum. But, here it is. If it makes you think less of me, I don’t care what you think.

Back to the real topic, though. If Chantix were to cause suicidal ideation in me, I think I could recognize it, and know to stop. But, what if I didn’t? Or, even if I did, how long does this last after you stop taking the pill? Would I become one of the rather psychotic people on it? I’m in the beginnings of a relationship that is absolutely wonderful, and feels like it will probably be one of those deep and abiding friendships, even if it goes no further than that. I think about some of the stories I’ve read and heard about, and wonder if I would scare that person right out of my life. I think about how me going off the deep end would affect my children, or my sister, or the rest of my friends. I know that none of these risks are worth it, if I couldn’t tell Chantix was causing bad things and put it down, without long-term effects.

But, what if I could tell, and could stop taking it and the bad effects went away immediately? Then the risk would be worth it, because there would basically be none. I would have tried it, realized it didn’t work, and that would be the end.

Or, even better, what if I’m one of the people (who seem to be in the majority, by the way) who take it for the 12 weeks and never pick up another cigarette again? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have such a magic pill?

So, I’m faced with a choice: patches or pills. The pills seem like such the easy way out, as well as the almost guaranteed way. If I go the patches route, I know that I will need almost constant social interaction to keep from falling back into the old habit. And while I’m very social, both in person and online, I also very much need my “loner” time.

Right now, I’m leaning toward not taking Chantix. But, I really, really want to. And I’m not certain. I’m only certain that I want to quit, and I have a huge long list of reasons why, 99% of them very selfish reasons.

Tags: Chantix