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This whole time, I've kept thinking about Seth Rogen's line in "This is the End" when Jay Baruchel asks what he means by, "I'm on a cleanse." The weed part is irrelevant because I live in a state where it's illegal, so it's not part of my life. The drinking, though - that line always resonated with me because Rogen says that abstaining from mind-altering substances is "psychotic". As if trying to face reality without a chemical crutch is something only a truly insane person would attempt. There's a lot of pro-alcoholic subtext in the culture of the United States, among many others. Granted, Rogen's character is (spoilers) characterized later in the movie as a cowardly, unreliable person (no disrespect to the real Seth Rogen). Still, that joke wouldn't land if it weren't a true statement for a lot of people. The fact that I've been able to carry on without alcohol for an entire month, especially given the le...

Sobriety: Because we can't all be genius cartoon characters with bionic implants. I mentioned back in my "Week 1" post that I felt mentally clearer, that I had begun to experience less mental "fog" than usual, following my hiatus from drinking. It's gotten to the next level now. My mood is way more stable. It's easy to think clearly, and I get irritated and frustrated less frequently. I'm finding myself less distracted in general, which allows me to enjoy things like a cool sunset or nice weather. I spend less time in my head and more time in the present. To be honest, although I still miss beer, wine and liquor, I feel better than I have in years. If I were to more specifically describe how I feel, I'd say this...I feel like my "old self." I didn't really drink at all in high school. I'd had maybe a couple furtive beers here and there, but never more than one or two in a sitting, and only on two occasions before I l...

As Samuel L. Jackson once said: "Hold on to your butts." Last week was where things really started picking up. I mean that in both good and bad ways. The difficulty of abstaining from alcohol was pretty easy Week 1 because I'd had over a month to psych myself up. Avoiding getting drunk on the weekends after that hasn't been as much of a challenge as I anticipated. I forgot how easy it is to get sucked into playing hours of video games. I made entire weekends breeze by playing game after game of "Civilization", or a "Starcraft II" campaign, or breezing through my old favorite Nintendo 64 games (which I recently re-acquired). I also spent several evenings painting a bunch of Warhammer 40,000 stuff while watching clips from "Fury" and listening to D&D podcasts. I think last night, I did that from 6 PM straight through 12:30 AM. Netflix and Youtube have also been a huge boon. I can blow through literally dozens of Youtube videos...

So we're on Week 2 of my sobriety quest, and it's going well. In fact, it's easier than I anticipated. I thought the first weekend would be a struggle. I can't remember more than maybe one weekend in the past 8 or 9 years or so where I didn't have a single drink on either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I thought as soon as 5 o'clock hit Friday afternoon, an alarm bell would go off in my head saying, "hey, you haven't had any drinks since Sunday night...you've done a good job! Treat yourself to a beer. ONE beer. Eh, maybe two. We'll play it by ear." While I did notice  that it was 5 PM on Friday, I actually didn't get intense cravings for booze. I think mentally preparing myself for that weekend many weeks in advance definitely helped. I expected to have a totally sober weekend, and in fact would have probably ended up feeling disappointed if I hadn't stuck with my pledge to avoid drinking. I spent Friday night play...

It's not technically a New Year's Resolution if you're only doing it for a month. Nonetheless, I've decided that for the month of January, I'm going to completely swear off alcohol. I'm not giving up drinking; I think that changing your life for the better is all about moderation, not extremes. Giving up something you enjoy permanently isn't the way to go, unless you've got a serious condition that could seriously jeopardize your life (alcoholism, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, heart conditions, etc.). I'm grateful not to have to deal with any of these (yet, and hopefully never). What I'm hoping will happen is this: My tolerance will go down, allowing me to enjoy getting a buzz on a far more efficient amount of booze, saving me money in the short term, and saving my liver in the long term. My sense of smell and taste will improve, making food taste better. My memory will improve, making it easy to think clearly, allowing me to get ...