Monthly Archives: January 2012

by admin

How to get to smoking tobacco-based cigarettes in 3 easy steps.

I’ve got to hand it to the anti-tobacco lobby. They have single-handedly created a whole industry all for pointing out the effects of smoking tobacco products. I want to say up front I do not endorse smoking in any way, shape, or form. In fact I don’t even have first hand experience of nicotine addiction. I’m just saying because of all the products on the market today to help you supposedly “stop” smoking instead it’s creating a great way to step up to full time tobacco cigarette smoking. Warning: Following these steps may lead to risk of some types of cancers not to mention bad breath, yellow teeth (well I get that from coffee anyways), smell on clothes, loss of a significant amount of money (if you smoke a lot), and increasing expulsion from bars and taverns as they seem to be driving out the smoker more and more every day. For the record this is called nicotine replacement therapy.

Step 1: Nicotine Patch. The first step would be to start with the patch. This is simply because you can forget about it for a while after you put it on. Plus it may go into your bloodstream quicker with a trans-dermal patch. My first thought was to place this second and nicotine gum first because chewing gum is usually enjoyable, however since you have to actually put the gum in your mouth and chew it for any length of time I felt that using the patch would be the easier option since all you have to do is put it on and sort of ‘set it and forget it’. (Of course it’s really not that much easier putting on a patch verses popping gum into the mouth but if you want to just have your nicotine without any conscious effort this would be the option to pick first.) If you’ve never smoked before or somehow ingested nicotine, you may feel sick.

Step 2: Nicotine Gum. Modern chewing gum has been around for over a hundred years, and various forms have been around for about 5000 years. Apparently American Indians would chew the resin of spruce tree sap which was then picked up by New England settlers until 1848 when John B. Curtis developed and sold the first commercial chewing gum. Since we’ve been chewing on things for thousands of years and smokers would often chew gum to keep their mouth busy while quitting cigarette smoking, it was only a matter of time before they started putting nicotine into gum to make quitting smoking a little more enjoyable. So now you want to graduate to gum chewing. While gum chewing is more enjoyable than wearing a patch on your skin, it’s not really any better at getting you addicted to nicotine. So really if you wanted you could swap these steps.

I’d like to speak a little bit about lozenges and sprays. These are more or less similar to the gum. Since an inhaler or a spray would have something in common with electronic cigarettes I’m simply going to talk about e-cigarettes down below. Also chewing tobacco is completely different method of getting nicotine than from smoking. It doesn’t necessarily fit anywhere. Like does it go in between the patch and the gum since there’s chewing involved. Or would it fit between the e-cig and the real cig? My guess is, if you go down this route, once you’re smoking real cigarettes you can transition to chewing tobacco which actually can give you mouth cancer and is a really nasty habit, (I despise chewers and spitting) but for the sake of this article it is worth noting.

Step 3: Electronic cigarettes. What’s better than smoking real cigarettes that stink and make people cough and stuff? Smoking fake cigarettes. Why? Because you don’t get a lot of the bad effects that you can with the other products. I’m not saying they’re good for you, I’m simply saying that since they don’t have all the chemicals to keep them burning and they only release water vapor, you’re not stinking up the place, they’re not necessarily making your teeth yellow, etc. What’s not to like? Okay granted by now you’re probably pretty well addicted to nicotine, you may want to skip this step, because you may want all kinds of cancers, and stinky breath, and yellow teeth, and what not. But if you don’t the next step would be of course the E-cig.

This brings us to the final step. Which is not really a step I guess since it’s the end result we’ve all been waiting for. That’s right smoking tobacco-filled cigarettes. Well here you are, are you proud of yourself? Risking others via second-hand smoke. Driving off those nice girls because you have nasty breath and yellow teeth? Risk getting some types of cancers and dying? If you are then I probably fill sorry for you. Yeah so this article was about getting into smoking by using nicotine-replacement-therapy options, in other words stepping up from the easiest to the hardest. So I wouldn’t wish lung cancer on my worst enemy. So what, you’ve read this far haven’t you? Well shame on you for reading about that. Of course this was all just for entertainment purposes and maybe you learned a little something along the way. And if you didn’t that’s just as well.

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

5 Tips for procrastination

Why do today, what you can put off until tomorrow? Here I present the 5 tips for procrastination.

Or as someone else expanded further “Why do tomorrow, what you can put off a month from now?” In this article I’m going to talk about procrastination. Before you get excited I need to state up front this is not how to overcome procrastination, but rather how to procrastinate.

Procrastination has a long and proud history dating all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. From the 11th dynasty of ancient Egypt pyramid construction techniques changed. Instead of the large grandiose pyramids from before, these were little more than mountains of mud brick encased in a veneer of polished limestone, and even later pyramids were built on top of hills. This basically tells us that the work was so hard, they started to procrastinate eventually resulting in smaller and less well constructed pyramids.

It’s sort of like my Algebra homework in high-school. First I started waiting until the end of the night to work on my homework, then the next morning before school, then just before class, and then during class, and finally I stopped doing homework altogether. For some reason I got moved into a more remedial geometry class called “Practical Geometry”, but that’s a story for another day.

There were several famous people who procrastinated getting their high-school diplomas, which among them are, Dave Thomas, Founder of Wendy’s; Comedian and Actor Bill Cosby; Famed female race-car driver Danica Patrick; Olympic gymnast, Mary Lou Retton; Actor Christian Slater; Musician Waylon Jennings, and many more. Technically, though, they got their GED’s rather than specifically putting off getting their high-school diplomas. Many of them did however put off getting their GED’s and they seemed to turn out fine.

So now that you know a little bit about this history of procrastination, here I present 5 tips to help you procrastinate if you find you’re getting “too much” done.

1.) Find something really large and overwhelming, the bigger the project the better. The idea is to make it so large and unwieldy in your mind that you want to put off the pain of working on it as much as possible.

2.) Never break down said large project into manageable steps. Steps have a nasty habit of getting done. You want to put this off as long as possible, so don’t break it down. In fact maybe you could make this large and unwieldy project a smaller step of a much larger, even more unwieldy, project. Did you notice how much I love the word unwieldy?

3.) Find other things you’d love to do first. Maybe watch a movie. Play some video games. Do some drawing. Maybe even do some sleeping. Sleeping is really good because you’ll be procrastinating without really realizing it. What? It’s 2 PM already?

4.) Don’t set goals. Goals eventually turn into steps and remember what I said about never breaking a large project into steps. Well actually there’s an exception to this tip, and that’s spending all your available time writing goals. Writing and rewriting, it’s a good way to put off actually working on your project.

5.) Two words: busy work. Why not do some work that will take a lot of time but not really making any kind of progress. This goes along with tip number 4 because setting goals and constantly refining them can be a good source of busy work. Write down what you’re going to do but never actually do it. This can also be considered an exception to tip number 2. Breaking stuff down can be a good source of busy-work, however, you may be in danger of actually breaking it down far enough into manageable steps.

If you just stick to these 5 tips you’ll be on your way to doing nothing in no time!

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

Ten reasons why top-ten lists are great!

I was going to write the top ten pros and cons of top ten lists as it applies to “I’ll do it on Monday”. I was googling information about top ten lists, and coming up with, you guessed it, top ten lists, procrastinating contently by reading said lists, when I came across an article on ContactMusic named “10 reasons Why Top 10 Lists Suck” and I thought, “This is why Top Tens are great.” So even though it’s only my second post I’m going to take this list apart one by one. Another great tenet of “I’ll do it on Monday” is to take the path of least resistance, which in this case means basing my article off another article. (You’ll learn about this in a future article called ‘Copy your way to the top, or why it pays to plagiarize’). Please note, I’m not so much contradicting the original article on ContactMusic as I am agreeing with the author but toward an eye on being lazy and apathetic, the creed of “I’ll Do It On Monday!”

“1. They NEVER, EVER, EVER, correlate with the truth.”

The author’s assertion is that it’s actually opinion of the person who made the top ten list. This is for the most part true, and it’s why we like it here. We don’t have to have facts to back up our opinions here at “Monday”. We’ll just call it “the truth”.

“2. If you buy that last magazine of the year, filled with retrospectives and top 10 lists, all you are doing is telling the guys at the top that it is OK to be lazy.”

The author says you send a message that you stopped caring about new music and movies and fashion and that the people at the top are laughing at you while they essentially cut and paste stuff they did during the year for knowing you’ll be paying for it. To that I say that’s the way we like it, get as much as you can for as little work as possible.

“3. Top 10 lists are simply an opportunity to spread apathy.”

The author says top ten lists makes people follow other people blindly by telling us exactly who to like and who not to like. Well apathy is our middle name here at ‘I’ll do it on Monday!’ We want to be apathetic; we don’t want to do for ourselves. Following the crowd is easier and thus the way we like to do it here.

“4. Generally speaking, there are never 10 things decent enough to legitimately populate a Top 10 list.”

This is another thing we agree on. But that’s the great thing about top ten lists you don’t have to legitimately populate it. You can populate it with whatever you want and instantly it’s spread over the internet like wildfire.

“5. Top Ten lists are patronizing. They tell us that we cannot think for ourselves.”

Here at ‘Monday’ we don’t WANT to think for ourselves. We want these top ten lists to tell us what to think and who to listen to and how to be. It’s what it’s all about.

“6. People that write Top Ten lists are simply trying to usher us to an early grave. Because essentially, the majority of Top 10 lists are ‘things to do / buy before you die’.”

While I agree that’s probably the case, I don’t tend to like to think that they might be trying to get us to get things done, even if it is before we die. We don’t really want to do anything here, so really this is one of the things that are not so good about top ten lists.

“7. You already know the answers before you even read them. We know what the Number one album of the year is, because it already won all the awards and spent all the weeks of the year at number one.”

This supposes you have paid attention to the awards shows or radio charts. Which if you follow our philosophy here at ‘Monday’ you probably haven’t. But this too is a great thing about top ten lists; it TELLS you what’s in the top ten, so you don’t HAVE to pay attention to who won what awards. Need to study the greatest music over the last few years? (Note that we aren’t advocating study, which is, actual work) See what movies were nominated for the Oscars for that film school course? Top Ten lists to the rescue!

“8. The innate subjectivity of the creation of most Top 10 lists is enough to send your average fan of music / film / whatever into a schizophrenic rage”

Actually that wouldn’t be a description of your ‘average’ fan, now would it? But we’re not even average fans; we’re half-hearted fans here at ‘Monday’.

“9. Hands up if you can remember who released the Top 10 albums of 2010? Or the Top 10 movies? Who topped the polls for Sexiest man of the Year?”

That’s also what makes top ten lists great. It helps us to forget, because really we don’t care about the top ten movies of 2010 (or in this case 2011?) or the sexiest man of the year (who the heck comes up with these things?)

“10. See point 4.”

This also makes our point. See that wasn’t so hard. The author didn’t have to make a number 10 as they were probably too lazy to do so. If you take offense at this remember we applaud such things; however I will take it back if it offends you. So to the author of this article on ContactMusic.com we applaud you!

If you would like to read the original article go here –
http://www.contactmusic.com/news/10-reasons-why-top-10-lists-suck_1279177

Until ‘Monday’