Priorities

Posted on September 18, 2013

A few years back I had a friend who, when I first met him, was very tall and pretty average weight.  I found out through mutual friends that he used to be fat- he had lost over 100 lbs in the previous 2 years- or something incredibly impressive like that. I don’t remember how the conversation went exactly, but I definitely remember the reasoning he gave for losing all that weight.  According to him, he one day decided to completely change his lifestyle and shed all those pounds because he wanted to go faster on his motorcycle.  And he did it.

I thought of this the other day in my car as I finally, for the first time ever, SERIOUSLY considered quitting smoking cigarettes.  I’ve thought about stopping before and half-assed it one or two times, but I’m not a heavy smoker at all whatsoever, so its hard to use the typical health reasons as motivation to quit. Yeah, I might be poisoning myself by breathing in toxic chemicals but I’m not breathing them in that often, so I’m ok with it.  What I am not ok with, however, is this: Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” came on while I was driving, and I found that when I went full force alone-in-the-car on it I couldn’t hit the notes near the end of the song that I knew I’ve always been able to do.  Or rather I could hit them, but I couldn’t hit them and hold them*. This is not ok.  I also remembered a few days earlier when I was “singing” the guitar solo in “Beat It” and I couldn’t do the very end where it gets super high, even though I expected to be able to.  Totally unsatisfying.  Goodbye, cigs.

*unBREAK my heart, sweet darLIN, withOUT-YOU-I-JUST-CAN’T- GO-O-O OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-oooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-oooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-ooOO-O-ON