as is custom every few months, i’m having a bit of guilt about not writing more, and so begins another spot of trying to write every day (or at least every weekday, when i’m sure to spend a certain amount of time in front of a computer. it’s an exercise in balancing the desire to have a fairly complete ongoing record of my days with not listing off boring minutia of no value. i’m fairly sure my life isn’t as mundane as it would appear by the fact that i go ten or more days without writing, just that i often don’t take the time to reflect on what really happened or went through my mind each day.

a couple things for today. one, we played poker saturday night, and it felt less boisterous than usual. fewer players, as our poker crew is starting to dwindle as people move away, and less drinking, as several of my friends have entered into a weight loss bet running through til january and every calorie counts. can’t be mad about either, but something’s missing. the real problem is trying to fill out the table, as i’m not making many new friends these days, and as it turns out a lot of people aren’t very into poker. especially women. i’d never really thought of it as a particularly manly game (when playing for a five dollar buy-in, anyway), but several attempts to involve more girls have fallen pretty flat. maybe the answer is to combine it with some other activity like a pot luck or wine tasting, and sneak a little poker workshop in to build their fundamentals and confidence when it comes to gambling?

the other is, i’m two weeks into a very remedial effort to stop smoking by the end of the year. near the beginning of the month, with eight weeks left in the year, i decided to start at 8 a day and cut one out every week until the end, with the goal of zero a day starting in january. so far it’s easy mostly but sometimes very difficult, ie when i’m bored and/or drinking. i think i’m addicted more to the break and excuse to go outside than i am to the smoke, but that could be the nicotine playing tricks on me. someone made a joke saturday about how repulsive smoking is, and i wonder if it really is completely disgusting and everyone has just been overly polite for the past few years. i also wonder if my current method is only going to make things worse as i look more and more forward to each of the decreasing smoke breaks per day, and then finally taking away that last precious one that’s been built up will be that much harder. i guess we’ll see as the days go by; though i cheated saturday by borrowing a couple from sunday, and ended up basically fine when i ran out early last night. the biggest problem is availability; like a candy dish, as long as it’s around you constantly indulge, but take it away and you don’t suffer terribly for want of candy.