This year I didn't watch the Oscars, but it's not like I missed them by accident. It was easy to give the annual award ceremony a pass this year because of a few reasons, not the least of which is that I hadn't seen any of the films that were up for best picture.

Added to that is my increasing annoyance with most things Hollywood. Now I know that's blasphemy, especially considering where I live, but to be honest if all the Access shows fell off the air I wouldn't even notice. I do watch some late night shows, especially Craig Ferguson's, but I also routinely fast forward through them once the monologue or skits are over and the famous people show up to plug their latest. Whatever movie stars or celebrities think about anything doesn't matter to me one bit.

This year lots of people applauded the return of political speech to the Oscars, and, again, whatever value movie starts have, for me it's not their political persuasion. I happen to agree with them on most of the issues, but it's one of the agreements that makes me cringe when I hear them mention them, sometimes even to the extent of making me wish I held the opposing view.

Anyway, everyone involved in the entertainment industry (the "business") already gets plenty of rewards. From what I've seen, they spend nearly as much time congratulating and fawning over each other as they do actually performing, so they can certainly live a day or two without me. Yeah, a lot of it might be envy, but I performed my job for years and years without having Jon Stewart give me a high five or having those around me break into applause when I completed a program or developed an addressing scheme.

So, I didn't see the Oscars, but was able to see the results the next day and they were as un-exciting as I expected. I did, however, watch Obama and Jindal's speeches, and felt buoyed and annoyed, respectively. It was sorta fun seeing the followers of various websites take credit for the Jindal-Kenneth association, but not as satisfying as it could have been.

I need to get to work and stop this drifting.

Now, I'm about as Catholic as Osama bin Laden, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating Lent. It's not as if I believe they're right or that they've grasped some handle that eludes me, or even some worthy display of solidarity, either, it's just that I believe it's a good thing from time to time to go without.

That's a good thing, too, because if there's anything I can claim to know, it's doing without.

Lacking even the most rudimentary of Catholic educations, I don't claim to exactly understand Lent, but I think it means that for the next month and a half I'm supposed to give up something to make it easier for me to get into heaven or something. Worse, what I'm supposed to do without isn't supposed to be something easy like sit-ups or pickled eel that I wouldn't even notice I wasn't avoiding, but has to be something I'd really like.

The simple answer, of course, would be cigarettes since that melds nicely into something I'm doing anyway, but I think that disqualifies it from being a Lent-worthy sacrifice.

I could give up lamb, which I enjoy quite a bit, but since I only get to indulge in that particular passion once or twice a year, I'm not sure passing up on lamb until April 11th would be very much of a stretch.

I suppose I could be selfish, not give up anything, and just go on living like normal, but I'm not very happy with how self-absorbed that would make me. Oh, sure, I could claim a religious exemption, but if I'm to be a member of society, I can't just go and willfully ignore what a decent percent of the population is going through. That would be as dumb as refusing to acknowledge the importance of kosher food.

I have a couple left, but I think I'll give up hard boiled eggs. I like those a lot and have them whenever I think of them or get a new dozen of the eggs from Trader Joe's that have some sort of egg information lasered right onto their shells, but I hope I don't forget how to boil them during my short time away from them.

I also hope I don't get thrown into any jail and be forced to make my mark there without my calling.

It's been over six weeks now since my last cigarette, and I only have myself to blame.

About nine hours into this process my breathing improved. And, while the passageways to my lungs got better, I still don't have any more lung capacity than one of those premature octuplets, so it's not like I can be any more active than when I smoked like a wildfire and looked way cool every waking moment.

I've been using these patches and am now down to the final step of the three step process. The patches, which began nearly the size of baseballs, are now about as big as a nickle, though they cost about the same. These last step patches, which deliver a whopping seven mg of nicotine a day, are the equivalent of smoking four or five cigarettes a day, a number I used to easily knock off before waking up in the morning.

Whenever I go to the next step in this process, I've learned to expect a couple things. One, of course, are nasty headaches, but continual annoyance with the world around me is nearly as certain. I can also expect to spend a few days thinking a great deal about smoking, and I guess it's good news that the last time I'll need to go through this is the end of next week. That last step, being patch and cigarette free, should theoretically last a lifetime.

Because of these nicotine patches, most of the info I find on the Internet is wrong. All of the health benefits of living without nicotine are, of course, lost on me because even though I'm not smoking, I'm still getting more nicotine than anyone in the world who isn't a smoker. Then again, no one who isn't a smoker ever gets any nicotine anyway, so that's not saying much.

All of that blood pressure or heart or circulation stuff to the extremities is still at least a month away, so I'll need to be patient. One disappointment I have is not hacking up large chunks of lung. In fact, I haven't really coughed at all, and I've spent years looking forward to bringing up black chunks like my friends talked about when they quit. It may be that my time is coming, or they may have been lying about it, but if it comes I'll be both ready and happy.

Still, it may be to my benefit not to be doing that yet. While those around me are catching the flu or coming down with colds, bronchitis, or allergic reactions to land, sea, and air, the thick, protective covering of tar I've built on my lungs is performing as advertised and keeping all the bad things from infecting me.

Still, I gotta admit I'm still uncertain about never having another cigarette, and I can see it going either way. I know the only way to quit is to consider oneself a non-smoker, but I'm still fascinated by the prospect of not smoking. I know I can avoid smoking, but I'm still not sure that I never want to.

While I've come up with answers to most of life's big questions, that's not to say that I've run out of other interesting ones. Some of these still don't have any satisfactory answers, while others are fun to wonder about for days on end.

The answers, pretty much, are never as interesting as the act of questioning, which is another of those entertainments that's falling out of favor. As much as ever, I guess, people think that just because they can ask something that there's an answer, and, worse, that every question has a simple answer.

I, along with just about everybody else, have long since found answers for all the simple things. The trouble is we've all gotten spoiled by those and have come to believe every question has a simple answer. While some things may result from a single, identifiable cause, I think we expect too much when we think everything should be so easily solved. It makes sense that a brick breaks because we hit it with a very heavy hammer, but why we fall in or out of love isn't quite so simple.

And, yet, we often look for a single, simple answer for all of our questions or problems. Worse, again, is that if we're faced with a problem, we'll stop asking once we find an answer that isn't impossible. If we ask why some jerk drives like a maniac, we'll stop asking once we come up with an answer we find satisfactory, the same way we stop looking for the match to an orphan sock once we find its mate. When we look for something physical, like that sock or missing car keys, we stop when we find it (usually in the last place we look), and we carry that practice into intellectual questions even though the two activities aren't really analogous.

When we find an answer to why someone acts like a jerk, we haven't exhausted the possibilities or even come close to doing so. Things like that may have one cause, but there's no reason to believe that any more than that there's a single reason why the Jews and Arabs can't stop fighting long enough to raise a single season's crops.

Some things, some activities, and nearly every human one, can't be reduced to single cause, and yet we constantly seek the answer and hope to be the first to mention it on one of the Sunday morning talk shows. I have no idea what incites some people or what causes them to act the way they do, but one thing I'm certain is that they rarely even consider why the act the way they do, either.

It's better to speak, act, and write in a way that makes you look awesome than it ever is to wonder why you want to impress everyone anyway.

By this time tomorrow, with any luck at all, I'll be done with my latest batch of chili and onto finishing up the Chinese Food.

According to the little pamphlet that comes with the nicotine patches I should be enjoying food more now, which I very well may be. This is around the time, they say, when food begins tasting better, and if it weren't for the sheer quantity of it that I've been shoveling in, there's a good chance that I'd notice something like that. As it is, what I'm noticing is that this batch of chili isn't one I'm likely to mention ever again.

I screwed up with the tomatoes, which are pretty important. I used a can of whole tomatoes instead of crushed ones, or diced ones, and spent a good part of the simmering time trying to cut, slice, and halve the floating red eyes with the side of a wooden spoon, which was about as effective as you can imagine. I even tried mashing them, hoping to turn them into a thick paste, but the mushy red eggs stood up pretty good to that assault, too.

In the end, you could easily count the number of tomatoes that were in the can since each was a spoonful unto itself. The rest of the stuff in the chili wasn't bad and the pot didn't end up too hot or spicy, but I'll go to my grave before I learn anything about how salty or not it was. All the time I was cooking it -- hell, for the past month -- I've been supplementing my breathing with sunflower seeds, which may also explain why I may not be able to taste anything. Even the "lower sodium" variety, which I mix with the ranch, BBQ, or jalapeno flavored bags, is pretty salty judging by my sudden fondness for all things liquid, so I don't know if the chili is too salty, not salty enough, or just right.

I may not make chili during the rainstorm scheduled to begin tomorrow because I also splurged on some Chinese food. It's been about the only prepared food I've had in the past year or so, a bi-monthly delicacy woven with a handful of lunches, and I'm well enough known by the women at the Hunan Kitchen or whatever it's called, that they smile big and wave vigorously when I approach to order. I mangled out my best imitation of a white guy saying Happy New Year in Chinese this time around, but I don't trust my accent and they may have thought I was asking about their scarves or the color of the wall tiles.

Anyway, I don't know. Maybe I'll just give up making chili.