Thank You For Not Smoking

There's a new anti-smoking ad campaign rolling out that's the topic of debate. It shows amputees, people with their trachea cut open and lung removal scars. The question floating around is "Is it too graphic?" Personally, I don't think so. Some people are moved more by visual images than just words on a paper. Still, I don't know how much good it'll do in the long run. The hardest thing to change is a person's mind, which is why I rarely try to tell people what they should or shouldn't do especially with their own body. So long as you don't smoke around me, I don't really care. There isn't a person on this earth who doesn't know those things cause cancer, but some people are just so stressed that they figure it's worth the risk. Ride the maverick. Go for it, just don't smoke around me or my kid because I don't want to star in my own poster one day.

Now that's not to say that I'm without sin. I've tried smoking, it just didn't take. When I was in junior high school someone gave me a cigarette, I took a few drags of it so that I wouldn't look like I "was gonna snitch" and I didn't find it that spectacular. Fast forward to college and I'm sitting at my desk at my nice summer job when I got the infamous, "I missed my period" phone call. Ten minutes later I was sitting alone in a park that only homeless people go to, wearing a suit and tie on a 98 degree day smoking a pack of Newports.

As I sat there thinking about life, watching my dreams die one by one, I found myself feeling dizzy. I don't know if it was the extreme heat, the sudden onset of stress, or the fact that I hadn't been paying attention to the fact that I smoked three cigarettes in about a minute and a half. All I know is that I started thinking, "Did I just pay six dollars to feel like this?" I threw those damn things in the trash and went back to work.

Later that day, I got a "false alarm" follow up call and I now had two things I would never ever EVER do again.