withdrawal
welp, i finally did it. i submitted my thesis.
to celebrate, I was going to quit smoking by buying a pack of cigarettes and share one w/ my ex, and maybe go stargazing. (i originally had a few cigarettes left but my bag chewed them up.)
to celebrate, I proceeded to fall face-first off my bike after I rounded a corner too fast and lost traction. I split my lip, started bleeding everywhere and then someone called an ambulance which took me to the ER. There, I got a CT scan, a tetanus shot, a gob of LET (lidocane, epinepherine, tetracane) to numb my split lip, and then the nice resident put a single dissolvable stitch in my lip. That was a fun experience, mostly cause I got to chat w/ all the doctors, nurses, and EMTs. I got to experience the patient-side of emergency medicine while not being so fucked up I couldn't recall, which I enjoyed since I am nationally certified as an EMT-B but don't actively do EMS work.
turns out, getting fucked up by falling face-first onto bricks and quitting stimulants as a whole is very sub-optimal for productivity. I spent most of my Saturday out cold on my couch, recovering in agony.
Quitting stimulants as a whole is generally unpleasant. going through nicotine and caffeine withdrawals in conjunction with the sheer exhaustion of a month-long stimulant-fueled grind left me in agonizing pain (more than the regular amount of pain i'm usually in, anyway.)
Caffeine withdrawals for me are just headaches, tiredness, and physical fatigue. Nicotine withdrawals are mostly the same, with the magnitude cranked to a far higher intensity and paired with additional malaise and general body pain. I see why people have a hard time quitting smoking, but as for me in particular, I never really had nicotine cravings, so the withdrawals were just physical. Smoking was also just unpleasant enough to not want to do regularly as well, which was certainly a factor.
The consequences are still catching up to me. I'm a bit behind on schoolwork, and the end-of-semester crunch is hitting pretty hard. Plus, my thesis needs some reformatting, as well as a cover page and getting the IP rights sorted out. I also need to figure out what name to publish under, either my preferred name or my legal alias.
things are looking up though! I got a chunk of work done the days before, and I was plenty productive monday and tuesday.