Want to Quit

I smoke too much. In fact, smoking at all is too much. My mouth tastes like ash, my room stinks, and I'm spending about $5 a day on something that will eventually kill me.

The money is the real killer. I figure over the past few years that I've smoked, I've probably burnt through a good $3,000 or $4,000. I could have used that money for so much more than cigarettes. Hell, I could have turned that money into more money by playing poker. Instead, that money went into my lungs in the form of ash.

I need to quit. Soon. The longer I smoke, the harder it will be to quit. The problem is the timing. With my workload in school increasing as finals approach, now would not be a great time to quit. When I've gone without cigarettes, I've found myself mentally sluggish and found it difficult to focus on anything for an extended period of time.

Quitting during winter break would also not be the best time. I intend to play somewhere around 80 to 100 hours of poker per week online and at Foxwoods. The irritability and sluggish mind of a recently quit smoker would not fare too well at a high level game of no-limit hold em. By deifnition, no limit is a game of swings, and without nicotine to help balance those swings, I'd be dead once something bad happened, which it inevitably would when playing thousands of hands of poker.

I've decided to quit after winter break. I won't be playing much poker then, and won't have much work to do right away. I can use that time before work starts piling up in order to get used to living without nicotine. I also will acquire prescription pills in order to help me quit. I've heard they really help reduce the cravings.

Until then, I'm going to try to keep my cigarette levels down so that quitting is less of a shock to my system.