You know you have $5 sitting in your PayPal account. You could buy some new iTunes with it. You could even possibly buy porn with it. Why not just do something flat out selfless today and end this Friday on a feel good note.

My former co-worker Todd Sawicki and his wife are trying to raise $500 for some people in Kenya who could simply end up dead due to malaria. How do you help prevent this from happening? Well you start out with simple steps such as malaria nets.

My wife, Katie, and I are trying to raise $500 in a week to help our parish priest, and native Kenyan, provide 100 families in rural Kenya with anti-malarial mosquito nets for their children. We know times are tough economically, but even a small donation of just $5 – roughly your daily triple, non-fat, caramel machiatto – can buy a mosquito net that will keep families safe from malaria carrying mosquitoes.

We are hoping many of you choose to donate $5 for a net (and hopefully more), but please donate what you can, any amount puts us closer to giving a family a life saving tool. It’s important to note that 100% of the money we raise will go directly to buying the nets. No overhead, no wasted donations. Just money to save the lives of poor children in rural, western Kenya from the malaria.

You can go read his post here, or if you feel you have read enough – just donate by clicking here.

Technically Speaking, the choice is yours, but if you want to help – it’s only $5.

Why not? I may as well call them something fancy such as the Quit Smoking Chronicles. This is day 6 or 7, technically day 7, but some might call it day 6. It all depends on how you count the first day. In any case, it’s that really tough day. I looked out my window earlier and saw a cloud and for some reason my mind said it looks like a cigarette! Funny, but I wonder if other addicts see clouds after being clean for a week and say “Wow, that looks like the last crack rock I smoked!” or “That sure looks like a bottle of Jack Daniels to me!” etc.

Now as I stated in the beginning, I do not want to be hooked on this commit lozenges since they are a nicotine delivery system. In other words trading in one addiction to nicotine for another delivery system and still be addicted to nicotine. I’ve actually consciously kept that in mind and since they are terrible tasting I have held out for long periods of thinking about that one thought that has dominated so far today, “It’s time for me to go outside and have a smoke!”

Many of, well at least my loyal 6 readers, are probably smiling or even laughing out loud at this by now. I mean, for those of you that are lucky enough to be addiction free are probably thinking, “What a loser, he talks like this is really hard or something!” While I feel more like a winner at this time, I can totally understand your viewpoint. I am in fact sympathetic to it. It’s quite easy to quit. You just stop.

Simple, right? Well when your body becomes accustomed to something over a long period of time, quitting and just stopping are not as quite simple as it may seem. It take an extreme commitment of ones mind to do this. I really don’t want to say how long I have actively participated in lighting up a smoke, but put it this way, it was as naturally as going to the bathroom to relieve yourself. While that act is something you have to do, smoking had become that natural of a reflex to me at least.

When one of the first acts of being awake was lighting up that first cigarette of the day, usually within the first 30 minutes of being awake for the day, and the last thing you did before going to bed was having that last smoke – it’s not something that is easily changed in one’s daily routine. That’s one of the harder things that I try to overcome. The change of habits.

For example, after every meal, within 10-15 minutes at least, it was time for a smoke. Like clockwork. It was almost something that was again natural, like going to the restroom to wash your hands before eating. It came with no thought process at all. Put it this way, I’ve been smoking longer than the Web 2.0 or the last dot boom. I’ve been smoking longer than some of you reading this have been alive. I was smoking when Guns N’ Roses first became, and I was smoking when 17 years later Axl finally released Chinese Democracy.

The nice thing I find is, that I’m not alone in this fight. Others out there have won the battle are now crusading against the whole smoking false-hood that the big tobacco companies lie about.

Technically Speaking, gaining in life itself isn’t easy, and since I’m doing this for all the right reasons and no one has put a gun to my head to do this, I think I’ll in the end win this battle this time.