Ah, so let me tell you what its like to quit smoking. Everything is a trigger. Things that you used to do with smokes you can't do anymore. That means, for instance, you can't drink coffee. Thats a tough one. It also means, that, ideally, you never eat because inevitably, food makes you want a smoke. That, unfortunately, you can't control. You can't drink. You can't hang out. You can't drive your usual route to work. You cant' do anything where you used to smoke or else, the cravings start. They'll be little pangs of anxiousness at first, then they'll get stronger. Your palms get clammy, your eyes get a little teary and you feel on edge. It's like how you might feel twenty seconds after someone scares the crap of out you - your tense, ready to pounce, a little jittery and a little angry and - if someone does it again - you are likely to snap their head clean off. Your body starts to feels tingly, and your arms feel out of place. Your anger and frustration begin to mount as you realize this feeling aint going away for a while. You become insanely easy to irritate. Anything - absolutely anything - will set you off. It's your body's way of trying to create a guilt-free pathway to having a smoke. "Oh crap! The font size is wrong! That's it! I'm smoking! I can't deal with this powerpoint crap!". Your coworkers are all idiots. You tell yourself, you are doing great. After all, nicotine is more addictive than cocaine. It's been proven nicotine provides a higher high and a bigger rush - and cocaine addicts couldn't tell the difference between shooting up cocaine or shooting up nicotine. Wow. Your remember that nicotine only takes 8 seconds to get to your brain, but it takes 72 hours to get out and for ten seconds, your palms return to normal, your heart rate drops and you feel, for a moment in control. And so you make it through day 1, but then day 2 comes. It comes again - but stronger this time. It's like someone who was tapping on the door is now kicking it. With a steel boot. You can't ignore it. That's the nicodemon. He's a little guy who sits in your head and !@!# with you for about a week until you become strong enough to rip his little !@(#!(@# testicles off and shove them down his throat. You make it through day 2, but theres no reprieve. Your pray for sleep, but he's there too. For about two weeks, maybe three or four (as in my first quit two years ago), you will dream of nothing but cigs. Every night. You will dream of Marlboro everything. You will wake up more irritated than that time you thought you slept with Jessica Alba but instead slept in a gutter hugging a dead squirrel. The next day the coughing starts. Since you sound like you might actually die at any moment, while your lungs scream "WTF" and expel years of smoking goo, you are reminded this is a good idea. You wonder how its possible that blowing your nose produces less goo than coughing. And thats fricking scary. But at least you know your lungs are healing. It'll take another 5 to 10 years before they complete the process, but they do it. And so, holding a big snot ball in the palm of your hand you think "yea I dont need another one of those." And that makes it through day 3. You come home that night and notice something odd. Your clothes all smell, well, kinda stale. Like they've been washed but never dried. You figure its just that shirt, so you throw it in the laundry and put on another one. That one smell just as bad. Ok weird. You throw them all in the laundry. You get one when its done and it smells normal. You get into bed. But the bed smells stale. You can't do anything about it now so you spray a little fabreeze around and go to bed. You forget of course that within twenty minutes your nose will be as screwed as Britney spears' career. You spend the rest of the night trying to breath through your mouth, only to wake up with the worlds driest throat - complete with fabreeze taste in your mouth - and an even deeper cough. And so begins day 4. You are excited because you've made it to the 72 hour mark. All the nicotine is out of your body. By now, the cravings should be gone right? Wrong. You've got about 10 more days to go before they really slow down, and about 24 more before they stop altogether. You mark your calendar, and you count down the hours for each day. One day at a time. Anyway, sorry, had to get that off my chest. 3 days, 23 hours, 7 minutes, 24 seconds But whos counting right?

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Smoking, oh its so much fun to quit.

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rhyme

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27 Aug 2007, 11:09

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I just realized that I just passed the six month mark....

I haven't smoked for 6 months, 16 hours and 6 minutes, saving 3,632.58 cigarettes and $1,380.38.

YAY!

kryzak

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27 Aug 2007, 11:30

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CONGRATS rhyme! good for you!

GMATT73

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27 Aug 2007, 15:55

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rhyme

I just realized that I just passed the six month mark....

I haven't smoked for 6 months, 16 hours and 6 minutes, saving 3,632.58 cigarettes and $1,380.38.

YAY!

Good on you Rhyme! You've already saved enough for a new Lenovo Thinkpad, not to mention a couple extra years of the good life.

rhyme

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27 Aug 2007, 16:26

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rhyme

I just realized that I just passed the six month mark....

I haven't smoked for 6 months, 16 hours and 6 minutes, saving 3,632.58 cigarettes and $1,380.38.

YAY!

Good on you Rhyme! You've already saved enough for a new Lenovo Thinkpad, not to mention a couple extra years of the good life.

HAHAH... Funny you should mention a Lenovo.. I almost convinced myself to buy one today precisely based on the above logic.

GMATT73

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27 Aug 2007, 16:30

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rhyme

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rhyme

I just realized that I just passed the six month mark....

I haven't smoked for 6 months, 16 hours and 6 minutes, saving 3,632.58 cigarettes and $1,380.38.

YAY!

Good on you Rhyme! You've already saved enough for a new Lenovo Thinkpad, not to mention a couple extra years of the good life.

HAHAH... Funny you should mention a Lenovo.. I almost convinced myself to buy one today precisely based on the above logic.

So why didn't you get it?

Hey, I'm pricing 325i right now for when my wife arrives later in the quarter. I think I can fenaggle an 04' with 40K and a clean (cerified one owner) carfax for $20K. Overpriced??

jjanders

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27 Aug 2007, 16:32

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Personally I avoid the European cars due to reliability issues and high maintenance costs, but that's me.

rhyme

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27 Aug 2007, 16:37

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GMATT73

rhyme

GMATT73

rhyme

I just realized that I just passed the six month mark....

I haven't smoked for 6 months, 16 hours and 6 minutes, saving 3,632.58 cigarettes and $1,380.38.

YAY!

Good on you Rhyme! You've already saved enough for a new Lenovo Thinkpad, not to mention a couple extra years of the good life.

HAHAH... Funny you should mention a Lenovo.. I almost convinced myself to buy one today precisely based on the above logic.

Cause im on a student budget... unlike you apparently! 325i eh??? I remember looking at 04 325xi's, and finding them around 23-27... so certainly a 325i at 20k sounds like a decent deal

https://carmax.com/dyn/factsheet/factsheet.aspx?id=9

https://carmax.com/dyn/factsheet/factsheet.aspx?id=83

im not an expert in car prices though....

very student budget friendly car.

hah

GMATT73

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27 Aug 2007, 17:24

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rhyme

GMATT73

rhyme

GMATT73

rhyme

I just realized that I just passed the six month mark....

I haven't smoked for 6 months, 16 hours and 6 minutes, saving 3,632.58 cigarettes and $1,380.38.

YAY!

Good on you Rhyme! You've already saved enough for a new Lenovo Thinkpad, not to mention a couple extra years of the good life.

HAHAH... Funny you should mention a Lenovo.. I almost convinced myself to buy one today precisely based on the above logic.

very student budget friendly car.

Agreed! And the previous owner was a non-smoker :-D

sangoman

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28 Aug 2007, 01:47

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Kick arse Rhyme......

Me close on your heels. Mar 23 is when I quit........since then have been off not only ciggies, but booze as well.........

The upside is that now I run over 12 kms in a week.........an am kicking arse in squash after eternity

WBF

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29 Aug 2007, 22:14

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yo whats up guys. sorry i've been away for so long! i quit smoking back at the end of March when we were talking about quitting in our GMAT Club chat room! congrats Rhyme for staying off of the cigs...

man, i moved to LA, got married, and will start at Anderson here in a couple weeks!

rhyme

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30 Aug 2007, 15:47

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WBF

CONGRATS QUIT BUDDY!!!

I also quit smoking, got married and will start at Chicago in a week!

rhyme

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04 Jan 2008, 21:58

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I haven't smoked for 10 months, 1 week and 2 minutes, saving 6,200.02 cigarettes and $2,480.01 .

kryzak

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04 Jan 2008, 22:00

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now you can buy a really nice Xmas gift for yourself...

how's the lenovo? reviews out there for their service is pretty dismal... so as long as they don't break.

gmatclb

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05 Jan 2008, 00:34

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Great job to all of you guys that's quitting smoking.

I've been smoke-free since the summer of 2003. This summer will be 5 years. After the first year or so, it gets a lot easier.

It's a weird mental thing now. When I first quit, I couldn't imagine having a drink without cigs or taking a break at work without a cig.... now I can't imagine smoking at all.

But every once in a while, I'll get the urge to smoke a cig, especially after a few drinks and seeing other people smoke. I tell myself that I already quit and 1 cig will do nothing... and it's so ironic and twisted that this type of thinking is what got me hooked in the first place....what's 1 cig gonna do, right?... HA!

The key point and sad truth I tell myself that may help some of you continue this fight is that we are forever going to be addicted. I don't mean that we are forever going to have withdrawal symptoms or that we will start up again. What I mean is that, all it takes is 1 puff to erase xxxx amount of time we've been off and relapse. Others that are not addicted can have 1 cig today, not think about it for a week and never have the urge to do it again. And we may wrongly assume that we are like those people because it's been xxx amount of years/decades since the last cig, but we are not like them because if we were then we wouldn't have been hooked in the first place.

All it takes is 1 puff to relapse. Stay strong.

rhyme

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05 Jan 2008, 09:57

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So true. Thats precisely how I relapsed a couple years ago, I had quit, though not for 10 months, more like for 4 or 5. One day, I was a little drunk, and I had a cig. Within a week, I was smoking "only at night" when I got home from work. I should have realized that when I started seeing that as the highlight of my day.... Within two weeks I was having one or two at lunch, by the end of the month, I was smoking my regular amount again. I learned my lesson. Never another puff. Honestly, now, I really really don't know how in the world I ever smoked. The smell is so rancid.

A bonus? All Chicago bars and restaurants just went smoke free.

kryzak

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05 Jan 2008, 12:51

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rhyme

A bonus? All Chicago bars and restaurants just went smoke free.

WOOHOO! Go Chicago!

rhyme

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04 Feb 2008, 05:16

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I haven't smoked for 11 months, 6 days and 7 hours, saving 6,806.17 cigarettes and $2,722.46 .

Wow, I'm coming up on a year!

sam77sam7

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04 Feb 2008, 06:04

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Congrats Rhyme! That is really impressive!

uphillclimb

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05 Feb 2008, 07:46

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Congrats Rhyme! You could take a nice vacation with all of the $$ you've saved on ciggies...

rhyme

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22 Feb 2008, 13:01

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I haven't smoked for 11 months, 3 weeks and 3 days, saving 7,172.65 cigarettes and $2,869.06.

We are really getting close now!!

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