GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are quitting or thinking of quitting, please -- join us! We kindly ask that politics be set aside.
You can also click the GUS tag to view all diary posts, or access the GUS Library at dKosopedia for a great list of stop-smoking links. Check it out!
Greetings GUS people and lurkers - Vacationland here, filling in for the studying-hard-for-finals Safina, who is our usual Sunday PM host. Good luck, Safina! We're pulling for you!
Some of the conversation this week has touched on the places we each call home. As a group, we're quite literally all over the map. Those of us in urban spots have to contend with noisy neighbors, traffic issues, and the high cost of living where we are. Those out in the countryside have to wrestle with the whims of Mother Nature, isolation, and lack of access to goods, services, and distractions. Suburban GUSsacks get to experience a bit of both, but don't get to fully embrace the benefits of either urban or rural living (and, I am led to believe, spend an inordinate amount of time in their cars). There are a few of us -- maybe more than a few of us? -- who are at odds in some way with the place we're calling home...we live where we live not because we absolutely love it there, but because we have obligations, roots, or ties (job opportunities, family responsibilities) to a place.
Although I was born in the biggest city in my state, that's not saying much: back then, there were more people living in just The Bronx than in the entire state of Maine. I was taken home from the hospital to a very small town, and I spent most of my early years in rural surroundings: tiny towns with one school, one store, no such thing as traffic, and everyone knowing your business. I was a Country Mouse. I had acres of woods for my backyard, walked miles to buy candy at a general store, and -- ever since I was a very small kid -- was absolutely dazzled by anything urban.
I adored those exotic trips to a city, where you would see things in real life that you normally only read about in books or saw on your snowy, black-and-white TV (when the weather was good and the signal was strong): street lights! Traffic jams! Chinese restaurants! Crowds of people in fancy-looking clothes filling actual sidewalks! Noise! Lights! Store after store after store! I couldn't get enough of it. We visited my great-great Aunt in Cambridge, MA once (around 1968 - I was five) and I thought I'd died and gone to Big City Heaven. I'm not kidding, I lived for this stuff.
The first record I ever bought? A 45 single of my favorite song from the radio: Downtown, by Petula Clark. I believed every word she sang -- go to the city and life would be great! What could be better?
So for as long as I can recall, my mission in life was to move to a city. Eventually I did, as soon as I could manage it: first London (for school), then Boston (for work), and there I stayed, for many years. For the most part, it was great...I loved the convenience and variety of experience open to me as a city-dweller. I loved just about everything, in fact, except for the insane cost of living and my inability to save any money whatsoever. Still, my transformation to City Mouse was almost total. I lived in big cities for so long, though, that when I moved back to my home state almost a decade ago, to the city of my birth (minuscule as far as cities go - it's more of a hip big town, with a growing rep as a foodie destination and a lively arts scene), it sort of felt like I was back in the country...and I felt totally out of my element.
A couple of years after moving here, when I decided to quit smoking, another aspect of country, suburban or small-town living became apparent: proximity to smokes. In the city, I had lived right next door to a 24-hour gas station/inspection station/cabbie hangout. At any given time, I was literally a 30-second walk away from replenishing my stash of smokes. There was no question of avoiding temptation, either, not with a helpful bodega or Store 24 or 7-11 on every street corner, ready to sell me my drug of choice at all hours of the day or night. Hell, I worked in a school of public health, in the middle of a large hospital zone, and I could pick up a pack of smokes at the same pharmacy that filled scrips from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, just down the block (the smokes kept getting more expensive, but the irony was free). Cigarettes were everywhere.
Not so with the rural, suburban or small-town dweller. When I moved here (still smoking), I had to make sure that my ciggie supply at home was well-stocked, regularly purchasing cigarettes by the carton for the first time so I wouldn't run out and be stuck without. Getting to a store (or anywhere that sold smokes) was an ordeal, especially since I still didn't have a car and lived on the outskirts of town. The mindlessness of an easily accessible, never-ending supply of smokes had morphed into a deliberate plan of attack: purchasing a new carton whenever I was in town or did my grocery shopping, "just in case." And the lack of distraction and slower pace of my no-longer-urban world? Well, you can guess how I tried to fill up the time. This resulted in smoking even more than I had back in my urban days...as if the limits on my supply forced me to stockpile and the lack of distraction and activity made me consume greater quantities.
It kind of sucked in the moment, but -- as I discovered post-quit -- there was also an upside to being out in the proverbial sticks: it removed temptation when I was craving a smoke. Yeah, technically I was living in a city, but it was miles to downtown and the only thing I could see from my balcony at night were trees, a highway, and a field with a farm stand...once the buses stopped running, I was a $25 cab ride from everything. It wasn't as easy as popping next door, or giving in to a late-night urge to get more smokes right now (the old coat-over-PJs trick). It forced me to consider what I was thinking about doing; it made each move deliberate and conscious, instead of convenient and mindless.
After I quit, I got the opportunity to lease a sweet, non-smoking apartment in a cool, historic building right downtown. It's the kind of place that I never could have afforded in Boston (I now pay about a third of what a similar place would have cost me there), and I am once again a few minutes walk away from everything...including a couple of 24-hr convenience stores, a corner store called Joe's Smoke Shop (you can guess what they specialize in) and a place that sells nothing but discount cigarettes and other tobacco products. It's a good thing that my quit has stuck; if I were more open to temptation all this proximity to nicotine might do a number on me, but so far, so good!
How about you, GUSsacks? Are you taunted or haunted by smoking opportunities on every corner, or are you miles away from temptation? Are you surrounded by businesses, restaurants and bars with smoking bans, or are you in the middle of nowhere, where you can get away with "just one" smoke away from prying eyes? Do smokes cost you $10 a pack, like in Chicago or NYC, or are they tax-free or cheap, like in NC or NH? Do you think where you live make you more or less likely to smoke?
I'll leave you with a classic City Mouse/Country Mouse comparison...are you in an Empire State of Mind...
...or more of a Granite State of Mind?
(I think I'm somewhere in the middle these days.)
Current members of the GUS team:
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