Five Weeks!

It's been five weeks since I've had a cigarette.

Chantix's "GetQuit" site tells me that I can now officially call myself a non-smoker or an ex-smoker. It also cautions that if I have one cigarette, I'll probably start smoking again.

To be brutally, painfully, unpleasantly honest: I have not found the GetQuit feature to be particularly helpful in this quest to quit smoking. Taking Chantix: Yes. Blogging about it: Yes. Reading other Chantix quitters' blogs: Yes. Quitting along with my sister: Yes.

All these attributes have been extremely helpful in my quest to quit smoking.

But the GetQuit stuff?

Eh.

Not so much. For one thing, their grammar drives me crazy. "Less colds," one headline recently touted, and my insides cringed, "FEWER colds, FEWER colds, FEWER colds!" This despite my graduate school professor who assured me that English is a living language and I needed to loosen up about spelling and grammar.

I have obviously failed my old professor.

GetQuit has been cute. And it has been time-consuming when I need it to be. Otherwise, it has not been very helpful to me. I really rely more on Maggie and Tasina and the other bloggers. Or I rely on myself and my ability to distract myself when I would like to smoke. "Have a cigarette? No, thank you, I think I'll wash some dishes." Or, "No, thanks, I think I'll sit here and make some cards."

Keeping busy is better than watching the asinine GetQuit cartoons.

(I used to be the head copywriter for an ad agency from hell. Sometimes the GetQuit cartoons make me want to scream and throw Addys through a window.)

But in the final analysis -- cutesy or not, poor grammar or perfectly composed -- I'm still not smoking. I climbed a mountain, I cleaned my front porch, I made 11 scrapbook pages in a single week -- and I didn't light a cigarette the whole time.

Maybe they're right. Maybe I really *am* a non-smoker.

Weird.