Laura Jane's Quitting Smoking Journals: ONE MONTH LATER

BY LAURA JANE RELAXING ON A SCOOTER WHILE LISTENING TO A MARY WELLS RECORD

On Saturday I was late for work for no reason; sometimes, you just happen to be less efficient at living your own life than usual. You do all the things you normally do only with a slow weird bent you don't really notice until it comes to be the time when you're normally scrubbing last night's guacamole stains off your service apron but instead you're only at "trail mix assemblage" (I assemble my own trail mix), and then you start rushing around and it's so tragic because it means you're not going to have time to buy a coffee; you're going to have to settle for stopping into the Village Market for a sugar-free Red Bull, which you hate- the Korean cashiers always talk to each other in Korean while I'm buying it (k I'm switching to the first person now) and it's so obvious they're saying "This poor girl drinks so much sugar-free Red Bull, what an idiot loser, her health is probably suffering for it, ew, she just knocked some gum over, she buys cereal a lot, she's out of control and I pity her," which is rude of them. Also, why is Red Bull so expensive? It's CRAZY! The worst deal in the world! Why do we put UP with that? Is taurine made of DIAMONDS? 

The other thing about this Saturday is that I'd pushed "not doing my laundry" really far to a point where for a few days I wanted to kill myself every time someone stepped onto the elliptical next to mine because my gym clothes smelled so insanely fucking bad. I was down to the DREGS of my underwear drawer, just like little scraps of fabric that neither fit me or are underwear. I was scrounging around looking for a pair that might fulfil a function and I found these pretty cute pink boy shorts with a neon leopard print waistband (obviously from Victoria's Secret PINK right I know) and I was like "Hmmm, I have a vague memory of these being an annoying pair of underwear to wear but maybe I'm wrong about that and they seem like my best bet at this moment," so I put them on and felt okay about things. 

The second I left my house, I realized why such decent-seeming sort of cute underwear had been relegated to... I have been sitting here for like ten minutes trying to think of a way to write how my underwear drawer on Saturday was "like early Christianity"- you know, freaks and lepers- but I just couldn't bend the words into the proper way, so I wrote it like this. Point being, my underwear were falling off my body. Like every maybe five or six steps that I took, the back of them would be completely off my butt- it would have been fine if I were wearing jeans or a tighter skirt that kind of locked them in there, but I wasn't- I was wearing a roomy pair of shorts, with sequin gold crosses all over them. To keep the Christianity theme happening. So I was like "FUCK. WHAT DO I DO"- I was already late for work, VERY late for work, the latest for work I'd ever been, and it was a Saturday. So I was like "Fuck it, Laura Jane. You can't go back now. You can't show up forty minutes late for a Saturday night service at a busy restaurant. You can do this. You'll be able to do this. You'll get really good at covertly hiking up your underwear by nine I bet." 

But then when I was waiting in line to buy my sugar-free Red Bull I realized that I was trying to kill people with my eyes because I hated them so much. I hated them because my underwear was falling off my body and it was annoying as fucking fuck and I was like "Okay, dude, you need to buy a new pair of underwear. You need to buy a new pair of underwear THIS EXACT SECOND, or you're going to get fired tonight. Something is going to happen, and it's going to lose you your wonderful job that you love," and I guess the most *MAGICAL* (overstatement) part of all of this is that in the ONE short block between the Red Bull store and the subway station, there just HAPPENS to be a "fancy lingerie boutique" that in my three and a half years of living in this neighbourhood I have never once set foot in, but that night I was like "Fuck it Laura, it's okay if wearing high quality lingerie isn't part of your personal brand, You have to," so I did. 

I stood in front of a table of artfully arranged Cosabella thongs, g-strings, boyshorts, and bikinis (ha! I am totally looking at the Cosabella website right now, which is why I know those words), drinking my sugarfree Red Bull out of a straw, listening to "She Says Good Morning" by the Pretty Things on one earphone, flipping the fuck out with anxious hyper "I'm crazy late for work and have to buy a pair of underwear right now and I don't know which to choose" energy. They were arranged into lacy rainbows and I was like "Black, LJ. Just pick up three black pairs, and then buy whichever one looks the most comfortable and like it will for sure fit you," so I did that, and like RAN up to the register and then my scarf and headphones cord got all tangled up and it was a HEADACHE AND A HALF to deal with let me tell you, and the salesgirl was all "Oooh, a Cosabella girl!"- like, she was saying that was ME!!! Like, give me a break. I'm not a "Cosabella girl" and I hope that should be extremely obvious about me. Ew! Do you have any idea how poor and cool I am?

"No, um, this is the first, my first... one," is what I actually said-ish. The salesgirl made the hugest deal ever out of how much I was gonna love it and I said "Yeah, I hope so!" Then she asked me, "Are you wearing briefs?" and I looked at her quizzically. "You can try it on!" she told me, over-enthusiastically, "Over your briefs!" 

In my head I was like "Ew stop saying briefs" and then in real life I said, "No, it's fine- I know my body." ("I know my body." Like God, ew, that is so Jennifer Aniston in the most SmartWater way ever! No, no, I love Jennifer Aniston too much for that- it was like Alicia Keys. Basically, imagine Alicia Keys saying "I know my body" in the middle of not trying on a Cosabella thong, and that was me. That was exactly how I said it.)

The salesgirl, of course, fucking LOVED it. She was so proud of me, for knowing my body. I felt like Tyra Banks should've been there. Everything was weird. I drank some Red Bull. I was in a store. "So this is what this store is like," I thought. The salesgirl rang my underwear through, and they cost FORTY-TWO FUCKING FIFTY and I was like WTFFFFFF that is so much money to spend on one pair of underwear but obviously I'm fucking spending it guys!!!!! and since it was the day after Tip Day I had a couple of fiftys hanging round my wallet even and I threw down a fifty and it felt great, like I'd done such a great job of seeming like a regular old run of the mill rich person, and then I booked it to the subway and took the subway to work and I was late and when I got there my manager was like "PUNCH IN NOW" and I was like "IN A SECOND" and ran downstairs to the staff washroom, where I "changed my underwear," which is a really terrible thing to have to do in a staff washroom. 

I put on my new almost fifty dollar underwear, and it felt really amazing. Everyone reading this who has ever put on a Cosabella thong for the first time is like "Mm-hmm been there girl" and it's so lame and awesome at the same time, for all of us. Regular underwear vs Cosabella underwear is like crack cocaine vis a vis a $13 glass of white wine. 

In the corner of my staff washroom, there's a pail. It's a plastic pail. I stood on the pail in front of the mirror and looked at myself in my hot new underwear and was like "Laura Jane Faulds. You are the sexiest, breeziest version of yourself ever to have existed. You need to throw all your other underwear out into the garbage and only wear Cosabella underwear forever. You are Sophia Loren," and then I BREEZED through the evening feeling like the hottest shit there ever was and nobody ever remembered that I was twenty minutes late for work that day. All they remembered was my breeziness. 

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The next morning, I woke up feeling very "WHAT THE FUCK LAURA JANE WHAT DID YOU FUCKING DO LAST NIGHT YOU FUCKING INSANE PERSON FORTY DOLLARS ON A PAIR OF FUCKING UNDERWEAR THAT IS ABSOLUTE INSANITY"- I just can't get enough of freaking out about money. It's my basal state of existence- like "freaking out about being alone forever," only a tad less horrific. 

Now that I work in a restaurant, I have almost no concept of "my bank account"- I live off tips, and then use debit to pay for groceries and drugstore things and clothes or whatever. I almost never check my account balance, because I hate money, and would rather not know. But I'll do fucking anything on a Sunday (it's a boring day), so I played this weird mindgame with myself where I was like "Check your account balance- No, don't check your account balance- Are you gonna do it?- Are you courageous enough to do it? Check Twitter first- No don't- Just do it." - I was all "Brace yourself, homegirl"- but then I did, and as it turned out, I had SO MUCH MONEY in my bank account! I tend to be pretty open about most things in writing, but I feel weird saying how much money I had in my bank account, because I don't want people who are richer than I am to feel sorry for me, and I don't want people who are poorer than I am to feel sorry for themselves. But all that matters is, in the context of myself, I have SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY. And yeah, it's a little bit because of my job, but it's mostly because I quit smoking. 

The money I used to spend on smoking cigarettes is equivalent to what I'd spend if I decided to buy myself a new pair of Cosabella underwear every FOUR days for the next ten years of my life-- something I'd never do, because I'm a miser, and that's a really fucking stupid fucking way to spend my money. 

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I haven't smoked a cigarette in a month and a week and it was really easy at first and it's still pretty easy but since it's been so easy for kind of awhile now my brain is loosening up in a way that makes me say to myself, "Just do it, girl. Just smoke a cigarette! Just see what it's like! Remember that feeling you felt a hundred times a day every day for a hundred years; how can you ask yourself to live the entire rest of your life without ever feeling that feeling again?" but then I walk a few steps and it's over. 

I found this anti-smoking ad on a dude who just followed me on Twitter's Tumblr a couple days ago and I am beyond way too lazy to properly cite it actually whatevs it's not that hard it's HERE (thanks!), it's from London in 1966 just like everything good that ever happened, and I think that a lot more people would be motivated to quit smoking if they realized how insanely fucking rich they'd be once they did it, but I don't know- when you're addicted to cigarettes, cigarettes seem like a really intelligent investment. So I guess my anti-smoking ad would just say "HOW INSANELY FUCKING LAME WOULD YOU THINK SOME RICH CHICK WAS IF YOU FOUND OUT SHE SPENT $40 ON A PAIR OF COSABELLA UNDERWEAR EVERY FOUR DAYS? PROBABLY PRETTY LAME, HUH? WELL, SHE'S YOU, DUDE, ONLY YOU ARE EVEN STUPIDER BECAUSE UNDERWEAR DOESN'T KILL YOU AND MAKE YOU SMELL GROSS," only really I don't care if anyone else ever quits smoking or not. I'm just really happy that I did, because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to drop $40 on impulse-buying a pair of underwear and would have had to spend that entire Saturday night service hiking up my underwear, dropping plates and crying, and a cigarette wouldn't have made it any better.