On Old Friends, Good and Bad

Marv update: I went to talk to Marv and alas, he isn't my past. He is a pretty cool guy and a dear old friend but he's not my past. I fear I have been nostalgic for my pre-motherhood days and when a friend from those days popped up I went overboard on the nostalgia. So seeing Marv isn't the big deal I made it into because it isn't really a big deal at all, mainly because we live in different towns and lead perpendicular, rather than parallel, lives. But I will continue to email him and talk to him on the phone, basically because I have nothing better to do late at night, at least not on nights when Tom has to go to sleep early, and also because he is a cool person and a dear old friend.

Smoking update: I know it's been months since I announced my intention to quit smoking, but it's been a weird process. I went on the Chantix pill and quit smoking after two weeks with no problems. After two more months I called my doctor for a refill and also to ask him some questions about side effects. Like, how long would I continue to feel nauseaus all day? Well, by all day I mean not counting the 18 hours I seem to be sleeping lately. So he cut my dosage back to half a pill twice a day rather than one pill twice a day. So for the last two months I have been on half-dose, which is the same as saying I have been in a continual nicotine fit. But I have been diligently waiting for the desire to smoke to disappear. The problem was, I slipped up every now and then. So I never, after the first two weeks last spring, went more than a week without a cigarette.
Then Tom got his vasectomy reversed, and Chantix is not approved for pregnant women, which I may soon become, so I quit taking the pills at all. I felt stuck. Either I start smoking again and hate myself with a near-suicidal passion, or I quit and feel deprived for the rest of my life, an endeavor I wasn't sure I could pull off anyway. So I researched ways to quit smoking and found Allen Carr and liked the success rate stats. So I read the book and swore to follow the instructions and so far, four days after my last half pill and two days after my last cigarette, I feel great. I feel better today than I did when I was on the pills regularly. I don't want a cigarette. I don't feel like I need a cigarette. I don't see any appeal in the concept of having a cigarette. I am a non-smoker. I love Allen Carr. I highly recommend him, especially for people who are having trouble on Chantix. I don't know if this book would have worked without the pills, but I do know that the pills weren't working for me without the book.
And I always wondered, if the pills imitate nicotine to the the nicotine receptors in my brain then what's to stop me becoming addicted to the pills? The problem was that I feared the withdrawal. Now I enjoy nicotine withdrawal, because I see it as A) the desperate death throws of addiction, and B) not even bad enough to wake me up or send me to the doctor. It is mild and laughable and pathetic. Like the tiny arrows the tribesmen shot at Larry in Night At The Museum.