~ Time to write again.

~ I just ran for about 30 minutes at 5-6mph, and finished off with a 4 block sprint.  This is the second time I’ve ran this week (I ran on Sunday shortly after waking up).  I’m not entirely sure what inspired me to start running again.  I just sort of got up and decided that I had to – it was the only way I could make myself feel better at that moment.  Hmm, that last sentence seems to imply that I was feeling badly that morning, which was not that case.  It is, however, true that I have been feeling somewhat sour about my health lately.  I still smoke, though overall less than when I wrote that previous post.  I was drinking a ton of coffee, particularly at work (like 5 cups a day? I’m almost embarrassed to admit that) , and I haven’t really gotten any decent exercise recently.  I occasionally felt winded going up several flights of stairs.

~ The icing on the cake was my teeth.  I haven’t been to the dentist in about two years – a mixture of transitioning from college to Portland, as well as a lack of proper insurance.  I mean, going to The Dentist is hard enough as it is without also having to pay for the experience.  When I woke up on Sunday morning I could just tell that my teeth felt unhealthy, and that really got to me.  There’s something about teeth that make them rather unique to our sense of self.  For instance, it seems pretty common to have dreams where something is wrong with one’s teeth (falling out, rotting, etc).  I’m sure their importance can be partially explained by the fact that, unlike every other part of our body, our teeth literally stay with us for our lives.  Though seemingly static, every other part of our bodies is actually materially new after, at most, 7 years (our liver cells being the longest holdouts).

~ So I decided to run to directly confront my sensation of unhealthiness.  And it really helped.  On Monday morning I made an appointment to see a dentist on tuesday (today).  Turns out I have a cavity and I need to get my wisdom teeth pulled.  But really, oh well.  They aren’t doing anything for me anyway….  and maybe I’ll get to keep them?

~ The running has started a little bug that itching me to be healthier.  Yesterday I had two cups of coffee. and today I had only one.  I smoked a little less too and made some healthier menu choices. I’m feeling generally better, and hopefully the trend will continue!

~ I ran across a video again recently that I really enjoyed. I’ll finish up this post with a my first shot at an embedded youtube link. I hope you like it:

~ Errrrr, one, two… two-a, three? No? Okay, one, two…shit… one, two…two… three? ….I give up.

~ So for work today I had to get one of our employee’s personal cellphone accounts migrated into to our business account.  I knew it wasn’t going to be simple, but I didn’t expect that it would become blogworthy.  A quick rundown of the steps:

~ I went to a T-Mobile store to ask what I would have to do to make the switch, he very knowledgeably explained that I would only be able to do it by contacting customer care by phone, as the retail stores do not have the ability to authorize account migrations.  Just call customer care and they’d be able to handle it.

~ My coworker called the next day to figure out what he would have to do to make this possible, and the next day showed up to work with a form for me to fill out.  I was a bit confused, naturally, since I thought it could only be done on the phone.  I went back to the T-Mobile store to figure out which one was the truth.  Turns out, both, sort of.  He’d have to call to authorize the change of responsibility from his end, then I would bring the filled out form to the store so that they could fax it in for processing.

~ As I am filling out the form, I am noticing that it is asking me for things that I find unclear or just plain confusing.  For instance, under the section about ‘New Billing Responsibility,’ it asks: “Keep Same PCS Number? Yes/No”  PCS number?  What the hell is that?  If all that means is ‘phone number,’ why not just say that?  Another thing it asked was for a password (which I can’t even explain in retrospect, after having asked), and my signature, though the signature isn’t required ‘from a corporate email address.’  ……What?  How does the preposition ‘from’ even make sense in this context?

~ So I call T-Mobile’s customer care.  “My name’s Erik, calling on behalf of my company, here’s the tax ID, here’s the number we’re looking to change, etc etc. ” So she tells me to hold on for a moment so that she can check up on his account information to verify that we can make the change.  Five minutes later, she comes back: “Ohhhhh, it looks like this is a business matter, so you’re gonna have to call Business Care to deal with it.  Well… not so much call them, for some reason you can’t call them, only fax or email.  So let me go ahead and give you that information, and then you can send your questions to them so that they can get back to you?”  I had no idea what to say, I think I chuckled and skeptically asked “Wait, really?  Like, actually?”  The subtext of my statement being: your entire business is to sell people the ability to talk on phones where and when ever they want and an entire department of your business doesn’t talk on phones… ?”  So that conversation ends abruptly, and I am a little flustered at this point.

~ I call back.  Same number, same everything, except someone else answers (hello, this is nancy! how can I help you?).  I start out with different, more ambiguous, phrasing: “My name’s Erik, I wanna move an account into another account, can you help me?” And then I only answer questions as necessary.  It looks like she can help me.  We’re moving pretty briskly through the process, and then she wants to put me on hold to check up on the employee’s account, to make sure that it can be moved.  This is where it failed before, so I’m kind of holding my breath as she puts me on hold.  I start waiting.

~ Ten minutes later – long enough for me to take and complete a call made to my personal phone – they come back.  “Hello!, this is Mary, how can I help you?”  “hey!…. uh… wait WHAT? Who? What the hell?”  I literally asked, “where did Nancy go?”  She had no clue.  So we start over.  She tells me that I have to do it by the form, and that it can only be done by the form.  I tentatively accept this proposition, and she kindly agrees to help me with my questions regarding the form (that was the original reason I called at all, by the way)  Turns out, she doesn’t even know what the hell the PCS means, but it is actually just the phone number.  She doesn’t know about the password thing, so she told me to leave it blank (must have something to do with something else), and then she tells me that signature bit is only needed if I fax the form.  However, I can send it from an email address, and if it happens to be a corporate email address, then I don’t have to sign (ohhh now I get it)

~ So I have this filled out form in front of me and I am getting ready to scan and send it, and I have no idea if this is going to work or not.  I’m afraid to imagine what else could go wrong, but my guess at this point is: definitely something.

~ I’ll conclude with a question:  Seriously, T-Mobile, is it really that hard not to be stupid?

~ This will not be easy to write.  I need to do it though, for my health, both mental and physical.  For lack of knowing a more eloquent way to say this, I’ll just jump right in.  I smoke cigarettes and I don’t want to.  In the scheme of things, I haven’t been doing it for that long, especially given that my relationship with them has been oscillatory at best.  Oscillatory’s not good enough for me though – I want to stop entirely.  In a way that feels permanent.  I want to talk about why I want to stop, but the only way to do that is to talk about why I started.

~ The first cigarette that I ever had was with Jessie Paul, at a party.  I smoked it because I knew it didn’t matter that much, and I was feeling so high on life that it just seemed like a fun thing to do every so often.

~ The second cigarette I had was at her wake, with her friends and family. I smoked it because anything that might make me feel better was worth trying.
~ After that I hardly smoked at all, here and there at parties and always with friends. It wasn’t something that I thought much of, and it did not greatly enhance or detract from my life.  When the shock of her death finally ended though, almost two years later, I became seriously depressed.  The more I cared about life, the more it mattered to me that she had died, and the more I felt depressed.  The quickest solution to rescue me from the depths was to care less about life, and smoking a cigarette relieved so much pressure from my psychology that I began to do it often.  I did it to resolve my dissonance and it worked.  And I don’t regret that I started.

~ As I felt better and better, I started to repair my habits and live as a person who cared.  Smoking however, in spite of some long periods where I didn’t smoke much at all, has not really left me.  I’ve grown used to the ritual, it’s a boon to social connection and intimate conversations.  If I do it alone, it induces a relaxed thoughtfulness of which I have become quite fond.  But the act of smoking now serves to create dissonance in the opposite direction as it originally solved.  I care about life now, I care about the people in it, and I care about being with and for them.  Smoking doesn’t make sense when juxtaposed to those sentiments and, with every passing day, it makes me more and more uncomfortable.  A part of me is bothered every time I’ve finished smoking a cigarette.  I need and want to stop.

~ When I was at college, I quit smoking very easily with a simple act.  I was having a conversation with Jessica Ferguson about it, and about how she didn’t really approve and I told her that I didn’t have to smoke if I didn’t want to.  She took me up on it and I agreed to stop for a period of time.  We shook on it, and at that moment it became a matter of honor.  I didn’t smoke for quite a while and, even when I eventually started again, it was very occasional.  Having a social support structure like that made it so easy for my very social mind.  Graduating from college has all but removed that intense social contact.  Now I find myself wanting to quit again, but I don’t have very many hands to shake.  Hence this post.

~ I implore you to help me stop by telling me you’d shake my hand.  Send me a facebook message, comment on this post, send me an email, give me a call, send me a text or, if circumstances allow it, actually just shake my hand.

~ I need to stop.  I want to shake on it.