I sit in my office leaning back a little bit staring at my three monitor setup listening to OSI on big studio headphones. I've prepped to sit a while. It is hard for me to sit. Daniel is coming to walk the dog in a few minutes and part of me feels like going down and saying hi and telling him again just how great Resident Evil 4 is but I know that what needs to be done.

And what needs to be done is this password update for work because there are mandatory password updates for certain systems yearly. I need to support someone else doing the work because that's a big part of my job lately – cross training and making sure some other people can do the things that I do.

I created instructions for it and validated the procedure this morning already. Somehow it feels like I haven't done a damned thing at work but when I reflect on it I've taken care of a lot of stuff – the license expiration thing and the email to my manager explaining my chair requirements that he can forward to HR, because I need a chair with neck support – I attended a meeting and pushed my agenda – and I responded to a co-worker about how to solve some problem.

Now I am waiting. The person who is actually doing the work whom we will call Xavier I consider to be my enemy. Well, not enemy exactly – but I certainly don't trust him. The procedure that I wrote needs to work for him and if it doesn't I need to immediately jump in and figure out what went wrong and remove his block or he will surely circulate that the process doesn't work and it's Tobias Urban's fault and this will not be good for me. So I'm waiting for his code changes to land, which will be sometime in the next half hour, and until then I'm kind of stuck, because the big thing I wanted to work on this afternoon, the cluster-merge consolidation project that I own and actually care about, I cannot do until Xavier's work is done.

I stared at my screen wondering what to do since I'm stuck. I could go through my task list but I know that there's nothing really critical on my plate except the stuff I've already mentioned. I could also go into my personal task list and take care of some breathtakingly awful things like checking my FSA account to make sure the most recent receipt and expense was approved – I seem to remember getting a phone notification last week indicating the most recent post failed due to a receipt validation issue – but even considering that feels overwhelming – paperwork is the death of life. I can do it, absolutely, I file my own taxes and I monitor the finances and pay bills and update inventory files at work – but there is nothing interesting about it all other than the vague idea that if I get it wrong there will be CONSEQUENCES which doesn't make the work itself more inherently interesting but it does increase my interest in getting it right – I sort of have to keep reminding myself of the CONSEQUENCES to keep myself motivated because there is no intrinsic reward of pleasure in the activity itself.

But today I don't have the headspace to load the CONSEQUENCES program into my brain to get the necessary sense of anxiety and focus required for any personal tasks.

I didn't know what else to do while I'm waiting for Xavier to do his work so I decided to try something different and write. Not that any of what I'm writing is any good or useful but it is a way to keep myself sitting here instead of running off to smoke a cigarette or do some other stupid thing.

I'm out of smokes right now. I'm not planning to get any more but I've said that a million times. A brief survey of youtube advice videos tells me that SMOKING IS AN EMOTIONAL DECISION and that it might be helpful to, instead of smoking when the urge hits, to write about what state you were in when you wanted a cigarette. To gain self-knowledge that you could then maybe use to make a better decision in the future.

I kind of know why I smoke already though. It is, in no particular order and given no relative weighting, the following: simple habit ie. i am used to it. If I haven't smoked in a few days it becomes especially alluring because I'll get the cheap 5 minutes of pure well being feeling that sweeps over me when my body has done the initial detox of nicotine and is therefore able to feel it again. So that's a reason sometimes: the idea of a cheap high. But there are more: Childhood memories of smoking to rebel. Or maybe something simpler: an activity that I perform as an adult that helps keep me linked to my previous self, almost an act of proclaiming that I am still me, a cry of identity to myself from within. Another: I like the nihilistic feel of it sometimes, the fuck it attitude of let's do this, let's destroy ourselves, live isn't worth living anyway – the sentiment best summed up in a scene from Robocop where a bad guy says "What? You want to live forever?" when someone else tells him that smoking is bad for him. No, I do not want to live forever.

But the adult me knows that I do want to live as long as I reasonably can and smoking is the number one thing that I'm doing to harm myself right now and I do need to stop. The people who don't stop get cancer. I might get cancer already anyway given the amount I've already done. It's hard for me to take a frank look at it because it fills me with shame. But I was on-and-off for five years when I lived in San Francisco – then mostly off in Boston for a long time – then mostly off living with my ex – but really picked up after covid and Penny. I stopped for a while with Penny – she even caught me once and I had to swear up and down I would never again because she made an emotional scene out of it – but I always pick it up again.

So there's another reason, I often feel like: I just lived through a bunch of shit that sucked. I got my shoulder repaired and I'm in pain every day. I did a lot of work around the house and I'm tired and need a reward for that. I did a bunch of programming or paperwork for my employer and I need a break from that too. I just spent two hours straight with Penny and my dog where most of what we did was dote on the dog and I lost any sense of internal self for that period, just gone, up into nothing, which feels – like a loss to me somehow. Like pain endured despite our connection and the laughter and the love. It is the pain of being with others. I deserve a break from this. I deserve to return to myself.

Smoke. Smoke. Smoke.