Lent

It's been 21 days. The withdrawal symptoms are finally beginning to subside, and the intense cravings that I initially experienced have almost completely gone away...

This year I gave up cookies for Lent. I'm not religious (so forgive me if you are -- I do not mean to insult this tradition through my frivolous take on it), but I do like the idea of giving up a vice for some limited amount of time. As explained in my last post, I'm not very good at very strict long-term goals, but 40 days seems to be about the length of time I can handle.

Ordinarily, giving up cookies for a few weeks wouldn't be such a big deal. However, coffee hour cookies have made resisting the cookie temptation extra hard. The neuro program has begun to do a Tuesday coffee hour. Coffee hour might as well be called cookie hour, as far as I'm concerned, because there is always an abundance of delicious cookies to snack on to accompany the coffee. That alone would not be so bad (Tuesdays are not terribly frequent), but the cookies for coffee hour often end up being stored in my shared office space, so that I am not only tempted to eat them during the coffee hour, but every hour that I'm in lab. What makes it worse is that my labmates think it's hilarious to make a show out of eating cookies in front of me. Luckily, I've made it this far and managed, so I feel pretty confident that I can make it until Easter. Until then, I'll comfort myself with the thought that after April 3rd I'll have the option once again to turn back into a cookie monster.