According to the email I got this morning:

It’s been 97 days, 6 hours, 8 minutes and 38 seconds since my last cigarette.
I’ve NOT smoked 681 cigarettes, and therefore have saved $171.50.
Mostly importantly, I’ve saved 5 days and 4 hours of my life.

These facts and figures are courtesy of Quitnet.com, an internet site that has a little calculator that tracks these figures above. They also send you little pep mails, like the one I got today, with status updates like the one above, plus helpful tips and all sorts of warm fuzzies. The first two weeks you get a daily email, and then you graduate to milestone dates and monthly emails. I can’t believe how much help those silly emails were. I still can’t quite pinpoint why they made such a difference but they did.

It’s a good thing I quit smoking, long term health affects aside, because the air in Bangalore is so polluted that you could chew it. It’s a real concern. A lot of people get asthma problems or allergy issues when they’ve never had anything like that before. I’ve had a cough since I landed here and it just won’t leave. I asked Kyle to bring over some cough medicine because the stuff I was finding just wasn’t working. We found out why not when Kyle showed up with the jug of Robitussin. Robitussin is twice as strong, and you take twice as much, as the prescription strength version I found here.

Regardless, I’m still coughing. My lungs are probably worse then when I was smoking every day.

I don’t know what it says about me that I quit smoking right before I ended up in two of the most cigarette smoke clogged countries on earth: Greece and India. Israel is up there too, but I was still smoking back then. It hasn’t been that hard though…there are still times when I have a craving but they’re pretty few and far between right now…even with all the smokers around me. Very few women smoke in India; I think I’ve only seen one or two Indian women with a smoke in the five weeks I’ve been here. Not that this would have stopped me.

I’m pretty proud of me though; the last time I quit smoking I did it on a dare and those generally aren’t the best way to quit anything addictive. After a while, you start to convince yourself that you’ve proved your point and you come to believe…truly believe! that you’ve crossed some invisible line…now you can just be a “casual” smoker. After you convince yourself that this colossal lie is true, it’s not usually very long before you’re back to puffing away just like before.

But so far, so good. I’m starting to have these pleasant little realizations like: hey, it’s been a whole three days since I recall having my last craving. That sounds like a confession, doesn’t it?

"Bless me father, it’s been 97 days since my last cigarette. Since then I’ve had six thousand and five impure thoughts about sucking on a thin round stick of tobacco. "

Hail Mary.