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Noxious Little Diatribes: A Word On My Smoking Habit

Sameer Suri |
April 18, 2013 | 9:49 a.m. PDT

Contributor

There are a lot of irritating things about being a smoker—the skyrocketing cost, the sparseness of public ashtrays, the need to go outside all the time…

My God… smoking kills? No one told me this. No one has ever said this to me. (borntosnore, Creative Commons)
My God… smoking kills? No one told me this. No one has ever said this to me. (borntosnore, Creative Commons)

But nothing compares to the noxious health diatribes you get from every single person in your social circle the minute you light up in front of them.

Hell, they don’t even have to be in your social circle. Random strangers will walk up to you at parties and start spewing out lung cancer statistics through mouthfuls of Doritos—speaking of which, can we spend a minute enjoying the irony of how enormous many of the people with the most sanctimony about smoking are? A man who could uproot sequoias by leaning on them trundles over and whines, “You know, you’re opening the door to heart disease.” Look, I know you don’t smoke—it would be impossible to fit a cigarette between the three burritos you’re shoveling into your mouth at once—but really, is this a health lecture? Really?

Taking nutrition advice from these people is like hiring Teddy Kennedy as a driving instructor.

Not that I’m denying the disastrous effects smoking will inevitably have on my health. What I’m saying is, I don’t need to hear them all the time. I know them. I know all of them. You’ve all told me, hundreds of times.

Quite frankly, the thing that annoys me most about these rants is the lack of variety. I see someone walking over to me in hysterics, wearing a t-shirt with the URL for a website where I can calculate my carbon footprint, and I know exactly what they’re going to say. Let’s give it a run-down:

“Aren’t you concerned about the amount of time smoking is going to cut from your lifespan?”

Concerned? Are you kidding me? This was the point.

No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. What am I going to do without those extra fifteen years of incontinence, dribbling into nursing home bed sheets and asking people if they can see my nipples through my shoes? Here I am, cavalierly throwing away the best years of my life, during which, if nothing else, I’ll be getting Social Security checks every month. It’s not as if government revenue and spending are further apart than Kim Kardashian’s knees and the Entitlements are spiraling into bankruptcy.

Oh, wait.

“None of this changes the fact that smoking kills.”

My God… smoking kills? No one told me this. No one has ever said this to me. This is an outrage. If only the Surgeon General had issued some kind of warning to prospective buyers somewhere—like, I don’t know, right on the side of the goddamn pack, in block letters—we might have had a chance. This is unacceptable.

But you’ve opened my eyes. Thank you. You’re my hero. You’re great, you know that? You’re just swell.

“Well, fine, then, if you have no concern for your own safety, you could at least think about the rest of us. How dare you expel your secondhand smoke into the air we breathe?”

…she said to me on the phone from her car, a vehicle that expels hundreds of pounds of exhaust per tank of gas into the air we breathe, on her way to the airport to catch a plane, a vehicle that expels thousands of pounds of exhaust per tank of gas into the air we breathe.

Next.

“You’re just smoking to be cool, aren’t you?”

You’re right. You’ve hit the nail right on the head. Peer pressure—that was the reason. It was definitely everyone I know in Southern California telling me what a fantastic idea this was.

Are you out of your mind? I spend my Saturday nights sitting at home by myself, watching reruns of "The Golden Girls." My idea of a wild, extravagant eighteenth birthday celebration was going to a Barbra Streisand concert with my parents. Cool is a goal I’ve long since forsaken. It would take me Ray Bans, a Lamborghini and a meth addiction to even approach cool.

Don’t get me wrong: in spite of what all this caterwauling probably indicates, I am, in fact, quitting. But it’s not because of you. If anything, it’s out of concern for my father’s blood pressure and my mother’s mental health (they don’t know yet, but still).

So, unless there’s a serious chance that the person in front of you smoking will actually plunge you into a nervous breakdown, that’s enough. You have convinced no one to quit. Not a single person. We know you mean well, but frankly, this is exactly the sort of stress-inducing conversation that makes us reach for the pack and the lighter and puff away for hours on end, while listening to the "Gypsy" cast album and crying.

Okay, that last part might just be me.

But I will quit.

Soon.

Ish.

 

Reach Contributor Sameer Suri here.



 

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