First of all, the usual non-smoking rant. I have compiled a list of all the pros of nonsmoking I perceive so far:

• My mom thinks it's a neat idea
  
• You save money
  
• You die at a later time (probably)
  

Now for a list of the cons of nonsmoking at the moment:

• I spend every waking minute thinking about smoking
  
• Social ostracism
  
• Haven't slept a wink the whole week (today actually it was two hours)
  
• Little phases of boredom where one has nothing to do
  
• No release for stress
  
• My lung hurts (???)
  
• My skin looks like shit
  
• I am dead tired all the time
  
• Crabbiness
  
• The money I save on cigarettes I spend tenfold on clothes to lighten my crabby mood
  
• You die at a later time (probably)
  

I am seriously considering giving up nonsmoking again. It's a pain in the ass. What for anyway? I thought it would improve things with my nervousness and stomach. Didn't do anything for that. Just makes me feel miserable. But...actually that's not really the reason so I probably should stick with it. What IS the real reason? Follow me on my train of thought if you will...

Yesterday, while I was jogging, I thought about a seminar I had last year. It was called "goal-setting". For that seminar you had to pick two goals you had and present them to the others following certain rules the professor made up. But what really bugged me was that she afterwards did not criticise your "setup" like e.g. "you should have worded the goal more like this to make achieving it more probable etc." but she criticised the goals itself. For me, I chose: "I want to pass my exam" as my goal. And she was saying that was a crappy goal because you should really aim for a good mark. But what if a good mark isn't my goal? It wasn't then and now that I passed the exam it still isn't. Why should I pick something as my goal that is not it just to "aim high"? And why is it any of your business??

Now why was I thinking about this while jogging? Because my other goal was "I want to run a marathon" and she said I was never going to make it anyway. And I thought: "Why not?" Is there any reason I couldn't? That's why it kind of bugged me that I wasn't able to make it last year, but I am definitely aiming for it this year again. And what does this have to do with the topic at hand, i.e. non-smoking? It has something to do with it as the answer to both the questions: "Why are you not smoking?" and "Why do you want to run a Marathon?" is "Because I can." And at the moment I need something to prove to myself that I can do something as I'm feeling rather useless and worthless. I am in a strange mood at the moment anyway. I don't feel too good and need something to lift my spirits. Don't know if it works, though, as non-smoking weighs heavily on aforementioned spirits, too.

The other thing about feeling really down and vulnerable at the moment is that I really don't know if blogging helps with that. It's like everybody gets to look inside my head but I never get to look back. Sometimes I feel like an animal in a zoo. Of course, it's my own fault, after all, I don't have to write about my emotions. But if I use this blog as a diary I'll want to write about the depressing stuff that goes on in my mind. I'm not sure if I want to ignore the way I am feeling and just blog "the funny things that happened to me today". But I think I'll either have to do that or give it up entirely. Haven't made up my mind yet, but that was what I was thinking about.