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Living with a cat is a little like living with a philosopher who speaks in riddles and occasionally bites your hand. Whiskey Kitty is no exception. Most of the time she’s playful, affectionate, and curious. But there’s one behavior that had me puzzled for a while. If Whiskey is sleeping or resting, she lets me pick her up and carry her wherever I want. I can take her downstairs to play or bring her back up to her room and she tolerates the whole thing without complaint. But when she’s awake and fully aware, the rules change completely. The moment...

Living with a cat is a little like living with a tiny tiger that sometimes thinks your fingers are wildlife. Lately I’ve been trying to understand the language of Whiskey Kitty. She loves to pounce and play, but whenever she catches her target she bites. She also bites occasionally when we pet her. In most other ways she’s perfectly friendly, playful, and affectionate, but the teeth keep showing up. It naturally raises the question: Does this mean she doesn’t like me? After observing her behavior and learning a bit more about how cats communicate, the answer appears to be reassuring....

I bought another pack today, and yes, I’m smoking from it. Some of my followers think the problem is that I simply have too much time on my hands. Too much quiet space in the day where the mind wanders and eventually circles back to cigarettes. Maybe they’re right. Maybe idle time is like a stage where old habits walk on wearing tuxedos and top hats, taking their bow like they never left. The truth is that a lot of my strategies just aren’t working right now. That’s frustrating to admit. Nobody wants to write a daily journal where the...

Today I bought another pack of cigarettes and I’m smoking from it. Writing that down doesn’t feel great. It feels like I’m admitting defeat, or at least admitting that things aren’t going the way I hoped they would. To anyone following along, it may even look like I’ve stopped trying. But the truth is a little more complicated. For now, I’m taking a break from trying to quit. The doctor recently diagnosed me with depression, and I believe it’s connected to the frustration and disappointment around my attempts to stop smoking. Depression isn’t just sadness. People often think it’s about...

Yesterday I bought a pack of cigarettes, and I’m still smoking them today. With such little progress lately, I’ve been thinking about stopping writing about my efforts to quit and just writing about something else entirely. It may be that writing about smoking focuses too much on the cravings and somehow makes them worse. When you put something under a spotlight every day, sometimes it starts performing for the audience. Cigarettes seem to love a spotlight. I’ve thought of plenty of other subjects for the blog. There are always more adventures and anecdotes about Whiskey Kitty, who seems to live...