:: Naked Brunch: Of Cigarettes & Other Habits ::

So, if you’ve been keeping track of my habit breaking activities, here’s an update:

• Chantix creates rolling waves of acute nausea.  Hint:  Keep drinking water or Gatorade. 
  
• I have absolutely no appetite or desire for food whatsoever.  None. ZIP.  Nada.
• My libido, as if that was even possible, has somehow increased (unnecessarily).
• Chantrix acts as a detoxifier, flushing poisons and other nastiness from your organs.  (All I can say is:  Ick!)
• Everything, including cigarettes, tastes like shit.  Except my mouth, itself.  Strange, but good.
• My sense of smell is vastly more acute.  Mmmmmmm.
• You have to urinate……..a lot more than usual.  I’m even waking during the night for this reason.
• It makes me drowsy if I sit in place for more than 5-10 minutes.  This is not good at work.  I keep wanting to fall asleep at meetings and while writing reports, letters, etc.  Cripes.  For example, I am extremely sleepy right now.  I want to curl up in my overstuffed chair and take a lovely nap.  I had two of them yesterday.
• My dreams are surreal and odd.  They wake me.  Especially the ones about work (I rarely if ever dream about work) and the extremity of the sexually oriented ones which are physically intense…. (I often dream about this subject matter but rarely wake from its effects so often.  Now, it is every single night/morning.)

I’ll be right back…….I hope. (12:17pm cst)

Update on 02.25.2007 by Sine.Qua.Non

(Napped until 2:00pm cst with the vacuum cleaner running and  the phone ringing off the hook. )

(click it)

Could sosmeone please introduce Bush to the theories and practice of Conflict Resolution? 

Seymour Hersh on Iran, Syria, and the Middle East in the New Yorker gives us yet more reasons to get rid of Bush/Cheney.   It seems like they are trying to create an entire world at war.  Winner take all.  Enslave to rest to corporations.  Put all the people back into mystical religious servitude of the state controlled church. 

Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

On Bush/Cheney’s certain war with Iran:

Still, the Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran, a process that began last year, at the direction of the President. In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.

In the past month, I was told by an Air Force adviser on targeting and the Pentagon consultant on terrorism, the Iran planning group has been handed a new assignment: to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq. Previously, the focus had been on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities and possible regime change.

Two carrier strike groups—the Eisenhower and the Stennis—are now in the Arabian Sea. One plan is for them to be relieved early in the spring, but there is worry within the military that they may be ordered to stay in the area after the new carriers arrive, according to several sources. (Among other concerns, war games have shown that the carriers could be vulnerable to swarming tactics involving large numbers of small boats, a technique that the Iranians have practiced in the past; carriers have limited maneuverability in the narrow Strait of Hormuz, off Iran’s southern coast.) The former senior intelligence official said that the current contingency plans allow for an attack order this spring. He added, however, that senior officers on the Joint Chiefs were counting on the White House’s not being “foolish enough to do this in the face of Iraq, and the problems it would give the Republicans in 2008.

Ofcourse, they are foolish enough. 

On Saudi Arabia & the Palestinians:

Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, depicted the Saudis’ coöperation with the White House as a significant breakthrough. “The Saudis understand that if they want the Administration to make a more generous political offer to the Palestinians they have to persuade the Arab states to make a more generous offer to the Israelis,” Clawson told me. The new diplomatic approach, he added, “shows a real degree of effort and sophistication as well as a deftness of touch not always associated with this Administration. Who’s running the greater risk—we or the Saudis? At a time when America’s standing in the Middle East is extremely low, the Saudis are actually embracing us. We should count our blessings.”

The Pentagon consultant had a different view. He said that the Administration had turned to Bandar as a “fallback,” because it had realized that the failing war in Iraq could leave the Middle East “up for grabs.”

No shit.  

I have to go clean up for the family birthday parties, including my own.