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Cessation
I've been off the smokes for 3 months. I can't say whether or not it's going well, only that it's not on my mind as much. I didn't quit for any 1 overriding reason. I suppose that more than anything I'd been longing to be free of the tyranny of addiction, which I'd never thought too much about in the past but which was becoming an obsession of late. I was getting tired of all the "breaks" and "rewards" I was giving myself in the form of a nicotine fix. It was starting to repulse me.
But if there's one thing that repulses me even more, it's the incessant anti-smoking advertising and brainwashing that has been permeating the city more and more in recent years. Somehow I feel more credible speaking out about this now, being (at least currently, 1 day at a time you know) a former smoker.
On Monday, I noticed that there are now yellow stickers on the subway turnstiles at Union Square bidding all smokers to call 311 for help quitting as they swipe their metrocards. I wonder what sort of Pavlovian response these misguided activists are hoping to elicit from our city's nicotine happy straphangers.
There are a few things in this world that make me wonder if I'm a closet Libertarian, and this kind of thing is one of them. Sometimes I feel that being a non-smoker puts me on the wrong side of some unarticulatable cosmic argument, where now I'm hip to hip with a lame group of humorless automatons rather than my "own kind," whatever the hell that means. Then I have to remember: that's the habit talking.
Posted by karges on June 10, 2009 ---> Comments (0)