Puffers in the City

I feel like every new Life phase I enter, there is incrementally more smoking. Given logic and positivity, you would think that this would not be the case. Considering the amount of advertising now done against smoking and what we now know about the health risks, you would think that this would not be the case. And yet, it is.

When I started at Smith in 2004, I was nearly blown away (no pun intended) by the amount of puffers around campus. They seemed to be everywhere as I pointedly hacked my lungs out in front of them whenever I could. I assumed that all this sudden smoking was because everyone was basically over 18 now and could thus legally obtain cigarettes. This compared with a high school full of underage smokers where smoking was the sneaky, semi-cool thing you did back behind the football field just over the school’s property line to thumb your nose at the school’s dictatorial principal. Perhaps in college, people were just expressing their newly-found right to buy cigarettes and that accounted for the difference.

Anyway, I got used to it. I chilled out, stopped my pointed coughing and just chose to hold my breath whenever I passed a smoker. I was damned if I was going to get lung cancer because that idiot couldn’t read a Surgeon General’s warning!

And then I came to New York. If I thought Smith was bad, New York was like living in a chimney. They were even more everywhere! And I couldn’t hold my breath that consistently as I walked around the city. (For any number of other reasons, that kind of oxygen deprivation probably wouldn’t do wonders for my health any more than breathing in their smoke would.) The subway was my only refuge from these people who just can’t seem to obey common laws of courtesy by keeping their addiction to themselves in some private corner. I honestly get a trifle offended by their insistence on polluting my air as well as their lungs. It doesn’t seem fair that my health should suffer from their habit.

I had a last straw moment today in the big city in terms of smoking. We had a protest at work this fine autumnal day (I work for a historic preservation organization so it’s okay and we’re not a bunch of crazies, I promise) and, of course, it was outdoors. It was there on the curb that my suspicions about my boss were realized. In addition to being a fruit juice-loving, passionately cause-oriented, gay, hat-wearing thirtysomething, my boss is also a smoker. And he just stood there on the curb talking to me about the building we were trying to save, smoking away, blowing smoke up above our heads. With each puff my respect for him diminished. How could he do this? Why would he do this? Does he really have a death-wish?

Just to cut to the chase, it didn’t resolve in me actually doing anything about it other than writing this. Because even if a smoker can’t respect my space, my lungs and my preferences, the least I can do is respect their right to make those decisions. I can be the better person in this situation by not exploding about why in God’s name they would chose to do this to themselves. So, just like I didn’t explode at my other smoking co-worker, I didn’t say anything today. I still feel imposed upon and little disrespected in terms of personal space, but there isn’t anything to say. They know the issues and they clearly can’t stop. Perhaps the number of people smoking has gone down and that I just keep entering these bigger and bigger sample areas so it just feels like there are more smokers. At least that’s what I like to think. And hope.