Smoking halls still existed in 1995!
In my day, we just called them "halls".
I don't know if it's time of life, or where I live, or who I hang with, but I'm surprised to see anyone smoking these days. I see it sometimes when I'm driving through the city and people are hanging out outside a bar, but I can go months without seeing anyone smoking. One friend smokes, but he doesn't live nearby.
Just about zero. Only one person in my office of 7. Only 3 I've ever seen in my entire org of 175. One friend who will cadge cigarettes when drinking out in bars.
OTOH, my brother and his wife, my older sister and her husband, my friends from high school whom I never ever see.
I think one or two people in my lab will have a cigarette now and then but I never see it. One of our neighbors lurks in his car and smokes cigarettes sometimes. I walk Zardoz in to school past a health clinic that will fairly regularly have people outside it smoking, I guess.
But yeah generally among people I know pot smoking is probably more common than cigarettes. Not common, but less rare.
It seems like it was more common in California.
I've been surprised by the number of people I see with vapes. It makes for some impressive clouds.
How long do parents think they can fool their kids by sneaking outside?
When I worked at a community mental health agency, around 70 or 80% of my clients smoked, but there are particularly high rates of smoking among individuals with schizophrenia. It seems to clear their heads briefly.
What surprised me was how many of my co-workers smoked. And there were people who had been social smokers and had quit who took it up again to socialize. I think that people were just so damn stressed and underpaid that it was one of very few outlets. Smoking is expensive, but gym memberships are expensive too.
Lee still smokes but plans to try a cessation class and medicine again starting at the end of the month. I feel like her smoking has brought us social ties to a lot more smokers because they do the sneaking thing, which I also hate, and bum cigarettes from each other. But among my friends, one has had a horribly stressful year but still I think managed to quit and then there are a few who will have a cigarette late at night when drinking or something but not otherwise. No one in the office smokes.
But yeah generally among people I know pot smoking is probably more common than cigarettes.
Good comparison. Me too.
Also, everyone I know who smokes cigarettes is trying, recently tried, or is about to try quitting. That's true for none of the pot smokers.
Smoking went into such steep decline in the 80s that I had assumed that it would eventually die out altogether*, but the last chart I looked at showed that it settled down to about 25% of the population by the mid 90s and hasn't really budged since.
*Not completely, of course, but rare enough to be a weird niche activity.
How long do parents think they can fool their kids by sneaking outside?
I dunno! The oldest kids are around ten. I wouldn't know if the kids do know and are not letting on, of course.
There's more people that smoke pot than smoke cigarettes in our group (but a lot of intersection), but less smoking-pot-while-parenting.
10 is very true here in Tobaccoland. Though I've also always believed the story that it's merely the state's biggest LEGAL cash crop.
I'll also say that, per stereotypes, gays seem to smoke at higher rates than straights and the lesbian bar is horribly smoky. But I'm also probably not making fair class comparisons there.
I hardly ever see students smoking on campus unless they're vets. In fact, one blowhard colleague periodically suggests a campus-wide smoking ban, and at this point that seems like merely a fuck you to vets and aging staff members.
It used to be 50% or higher just 5-10 years ago, but it's getting pretty close to 0% these days. I will still buy the odd pack when I am on vacation, but that's it. I don't bother to hide it from my kids.
I saw a guy walking down the sidewalk smoking a cigarette after I dropped the kids off today at the intersession camp, and felt a twinge of jealousy. I do miss it.
My suspicion is that this group of friends is an outlier precisely because there's a critical mass to keep it going. That they're all re-affirming each other's smoking and enjoying it, and if the ratios of smokers to non were slightly different, they'd all be working on quitting.
As far as how sneaking works here, Nia busted Lee once but believes she quit, which I guess she did just not successfully, and I got mad at Led for trying to lie about just holding it for a friehd. Mara can't smell but pays attention to everything, so I'm not sure whether or not she believes Lee just keeps my brother company when he smokes or whatever. They have no interest in smoking and don't understand why people do it, which has at least let us talk about addiction in a less-threatening context. (Or there's my brother's response to Nia, that sometimes smart people do stupid things.)
I quit a couple of weeks ago. Cravings are mostly gone, but occasionally something triggers a powerful one. I only know one other smoker, and he uses a vaporiser exclusively.
6: In my wife's case -- pretty much forever.
Sorry, can't type on this and don't care enough to correct.
When I go to the bar that allows smoking everybody is smoking or vaping or me or called Mark. The waitress was keeping the door open when it was freezing outside because she couldn't breathe.
At work, one guy smoked and tried to hide it from everybody. Then he moved.
I have 3 friends who smoke. I think these might be my only 3 friends who've reached the age of 30ish without a college degree.
I find the smoking in my current group annoying because they're all very big on hiding it from their kids, which means they're constantly sneaking off and returning, and as a non-smoker you're sort of not invited because that would draw attention to the fact that the adults are vanishing.
For a long time this was family gatherings for me. Then my cousins grew up and nobody felt the need to hide the pot smoking. (There was one get-together where all the olds were in one bedroom smoking up, and all the kids were in another doing the same, only nobody would fess up. The adults, shockingly, had much better stuff.)
One person in my grad school circle. Nobody else that I know of, including at work.
In my day, we just called them "halls".
By my day, it felt obviously anachronistic and weird.
The adults, shockingly, had much better stuff.
When you know better, you do better.
Wait, you don't have a campus-wide smoking ban? I thought that was standard for colleges nowadays.
(I did have to recently look up whether our ban covered e-cigarettes, because I had to ask a student not to vape during class. The answer was yes it was banned last year.)
I think the last time I was around people who smoked was an unfogged meetup.
I had an aunt who hid her smoking from her family, except her immediate family. This was easier back then because her husband smoked. Then they both died of lung cancer.
28.1: We don't have a campus-wide ban. The hospital system that surrounds us does, resulting in certain campus sidewalks becoming smoking lounges.
One of my friends has to hide her pot smoking from her kids, not because she thinks it would teach them a bad lesson, but because they get lots of anti-pot propaganda at school and so the kids get mad about if they know.
I haven't smoked for about 3 years, but I can easily imagine having one again, if I was having a drink, and was somewhere where smoking was relatively easy to do. If I was in Europe somewhere, maybe. Or outside drinking in nice weather. My wife is a very very occasional social smoker.
I don't think any of my friends I see regularly smoke, although I have relatives who still do.
Our friends are successfully hiding it from us. If any of them is smoking. Some do smoke weed, but I never see that either.
1 of my close friends, maybe four of my wider non-work social circle, and maybe three of my immediate colleagues (out of two dozen or so.
The ratio used to be much higher, both in and out of work. Including myself, of course.
If I was in Europe somewhere, maybe
Yeah, not only does AB's dad smoke like a chimney*, but just generally being in Germany it's sort of shocking how much time you have to spend being near smoking. It's hard to believe how recently you could smoke in restaurants around here, because it feels like it would be intolerable. But of course we did tolerate it (with annoyance) just 10 years ago.
Among people we actively choose to socialize with, it's close to zero, but it's close to 100% in the hipster apartment house on the one side and used to be 100% in the drug dealer house on the other side, but now I think that house is just down to the bipolar, and borderline frightening, blind guy. My office is 100% smoke-free, but job sites with contractors tend to be pretty smoky, alas.
*2 things on Opa: he started as a young teen, managed to quit in his 50s, then spent 3 years working in Kuala Lumpur, where it was so ubiquitous (including offices) that he couldn't hold out. When Iris was very little (as in baby), she was very standoffish with him, and we were pretty certain it was the smoke stench on him. She's extremely fond of him now (but still doesn't like cigarettes), but until 2 or 3 she really didn't like to be held by him, which wasn't much like her.
I recall going to a wedding of some grad school friends a couple of years ago. At the wedding ~150 ppl. Only saw three people smoke at the (outdoor, May, glorious) reception: a person on the catering crew, a european classmate, and a super-duper old lady.
It's kind of amusing to see the clusters of doctors and nurses smoking near the back entrance to the hospital near where I work.
When I was last at a big conference, the smokers were European and Chinese. The attendees were mostly doctors if that makes a difference.
I feel like it's near zero. Only exception is at music industry connected stuff I sometimes go to with my wife, where you might see a group of 5-10 people sitting around smoking. It actually feels a bit shocking. From my office tower in which maybe 5-600 people work you see the same 5-7 people outside smoking each day and nobody else.
I have enjoyed a relaxing cigarette by the cancer research facility loading dock in 4 nations, 5 if you count the Institut Pasteur. I stopped smoking last April.
Like CharleyCarp, my friends don't smoke or hide it well.
At the store, a few people step outside to smoke, but many have changed over to vaping, due to its greater acceptance. My brother and his family struggled with smoking, but mostly quit about 5 years ago. Their eldest son (19) now vapes.
38: Do you notice that by specialty at all? At the state mental hospital a lot of the nurses smoke. The doctors really didn't. They had to go in their car, because the campus was smoke-free.
21: They allow smoking inside. Around here, people go outside to smoke.
40: When we were in CA last month, AB & I thought there were more smokers than we expected (Downtown, nearish City Hall). Probably mostly hipster types.
Between bus riders and office workers, downtown Pgh is pretty much an ashtray, which is maddening and gross.
bipolar, and borderline frightening, blind guy
At first I read this as "bipolar and borderline," and I thought that a house with someone who has bipolar disorder and a borderline as roommates would be pretty intolerable.
43: Didn't see.
On a related note, though, I was just explaining to students a few weeks ago about the changes in drug metabolism and consequent need for dose adjustments when people quite smoking. With a special emphasis on patients being treated for mental health issues since they smoke more than the general population.
Very few people I know at work smoke, but we're dull civil servants. A lot more that I know socially.
What I always find amazing is the difference in what being a smoker means from when I was a teenager. "A smoker" to me, is someone who doesn't go more than an hour or so between cigarettes -- I didn't used to know anyone who smoked on some days but not others. Now, everyone I know who smokes seems to be pretty occasional about it.
44: They grandfathered in bars where little or no food was served*, but I don't think you can open a new smoking bar. There are cigar bars which, at least sometimes, are technically retail stores where you're allowed to sample.
*amusingly, this involved, for some businesses, a flip in lying about the ratio of liquor/food sales. Before there were smoking rules, the primary import about % of food sales was whether you could allow anyone under 18 and also (I'm pretty sure) how you were taxed and/or how much your liquor license was worth, so places would fudge the numbers, but then they had an incentive to fudge the other way if they wanted to keep smoking. FWIW, many places that had the right to allow smoking gave it up once they realized that, duh, smokers are a minority, and nonsmokers will choose a nonsmoking bar every time, unless they're from Nebraska.
44: Bars with lower food sales can allow smoking but most do make you go outside.
47: Clozaril definitely metabolizes faster if you smoke, what others in particular?
Now, everyone I know who smokes seems to be pretty occasional about it.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure anyone of my social group who does smoke does so on this basis. Other than the hipsters (a couple of whom are good friends), I really can't think of a single friend who smokes in the half pack/pack a day way that was the norm.
What used to be PD's on Forward reopened as a sports bar that allows smoking.
in Ohio when the smoking ban went into effect, many bars set up heated outdoor smoking lounges.
Another bar in Columbus decided they were just going to ignore the law, and then when they got busted they took it to court and lost and appealed and lost again -- it went all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court. Still I'm betting that if you went to that bar tonight, people would be smoking inside there.
Sort of to 45: Smoking has become rare enough here that I notice it immediately elsewhere. Like on a few trips to the other Portland, whoa, so many smokers. On the main street in my neighborhood I pass through clouds of cigarette smoke outside the hipster coffee shop and the grimy hipster bar, but elsewhere up and down the street I'm much more likely to smell pot. Come legalization in June, I suspect I'll be smelling a lot more of that.
Only a couple of cigarette smokers are left among my social circle, but people still smoke pot. My social circle includes lots of fellow parents, and (AHMEMSAHIB or whatever the acronym is) pot comes in handy when the kids have you frazzled.
55 before seeing 52, which confirms my suspicion that hipsters are a major source of revenue for Big Tobacco.
49.last: I'm always a bit surprised at how full the place is. The new hipster bar appears to have increased business at the surrounding bars. Anyway, I go because it's got a crowd that will chat. And because it's cheaper than other places.
51: Pretty much anything that's metabolized primarily by CYP1A2. For mental health related drugs a quick search turns up doxepin, duloxetine, fluvoxamine, mirtazapine, olanzapine, pimozide, thiothixene and trifluoperazine. I'm sure there are others.
53: Oh, huh. So I guess not grandfathered.
57: Well, it's kind of a legend, so I think there are a lot of people who still make a point of going.
What's the hipster bar? I can't picture hipster anything over there.
hipsters are a major source of revenue for Big Tobacco.
It's funny, I never knew that American Naturals were a hipster thing until I saw an internet joke about it ("Hipster Trap"), and then, sure enough, I noticed that's what the hipsters I know were smoking. For some reason Camels were big when I was in college, so that specific reek is strongly associated. At the end of fall semester, when everyone was holed up in studio for final project, the place would be super smoky, and of course you'd have a mild cold, and the smell would literally lodge in the snot in my nostrils. So, so very gross.
59.1: It may still be grandfathered. Somebody told me it was just Fanatics in a different place. Fanatics was where the hipster bar is now. IBC is what I call the hipster bar even though it may have fewer hipster customers than the Cage. Anyway, IBC is only hip compared to the rest of Squirrel Hill.
If more than half the men are under 40 and have non-Orthodox Jewish beards, I call the place "hipster".
For some reason Camels were big when I was in college,
My college friends loved Parliaments.
53: Great! Hasn't it been a Chinese place for the last few years? I was a bit sad when I saw that since it meant a net loss of liquor licenses to our neighborhood. (But then I haven't gone to the bar at Mineo's yet.)
60: I independently call IBC the hipster bar; I was there on Tuesday, and it still has more hipsters and fewer eccentrics than the Cage.
55: how much of the pot is smoked as opposed to vaped/vaporized?
When I was in college, roll your own was the big thing (I believe Drum was the most common tobacco used). The hand rolled cigarettes were the only ones where I've ever been able to actually inhale. They didn't have whatever chemical additives make normal cigarettes keep burning. Hence that fact that they had to be re-lit all the time, but they were less harsh on the throat.
"Everyone knows you're doing it out of sight and we all tacitly agree not to discuss it..."
So, like masturbation then. Can't wait to see the small groups clustered around the side doors of office buildings and in special airport lounges.
66: Vaping is catching on, but you're still more likely to catch a whiff from people sharing a joint on the street. Why buy a vape pen when you can spend the money on some killer weed and a couple packs of papers?
67: The Drum and Three Caftles (I know, nosflow, I did it on purpose) thing was big among pained intellectual boys in college. (The two who spring to mind instantly are both philosophy professors now.)
65.1: The Chinese place was next door. It's always been a bar where PD's was. The lesbian bar is now gone and not a bar.
I glancingly new a tall, slender, sensitive-but-haughty intellectual-type guy in college who could roll cigarettes one-handed, a fact which was pointed out to me with admiration when we were both at a party by this girl.
69: Having never smoked pot, I'm obviously not up on these things. The only time I was around people who didn't know that I was too square to want any, they were using a big vaporizer thing? Don't you just use regular weed for that?
What's the point of vaping if you don't get that wonderful rush?
God, I miss smoking.
The only people I know who still smoke are some members of the Unfoggedtariat, but VTSOOBC and all that you know.
70 Also popular with a similar type of crowd I knew: roll your own Gauloises. I was tempted myself but I was always a shitty roller.
78: I smoked Gauloises (and also long black cigarettes and rejected the triune God), but I cannot roll cigarettes or joints.
I used to roll cigarettes for other people when I was in the Peace Corps -- lots of the smokers rolled their own because it was cheaper, and while I didn't smoke, I had a knack for the rolling. I think I started when my cat had kittens, and I made a bunch of roll-your-owns to hand out as a joke.
None of my friends smoke cigarettes on a regular basis. A handful of them smoke when they're drunk.
On the other hand, every white grad student on my floor makes extensive herbal use of a vaporizer, a fact which I learned at the pace of a running sitcom joke, surprised with each new addition to the list. The foreign students (ie Asians/Indians) are all mostly straight-edge, maybe a couple drinks at the end of a quarter.
I wonder a lot about what it's like to be the foreign students. As best as I can tell, they're all virgins or close to it. Their social lives tend toward the nonexistent, and they're not like wildly more successful as grad students than the whiteys. Yet they seem a whole lot happier and more emotionally stable.
makes extensive herbal use of a vaporizer
Are you euphemistically talking about pot, or do people inhale lavender fumes and the like?
a big vaporizer thing? Don't you just use regular weed for that?
Yes, and now there are vaporizers that are basically like e-cigarettes but bigger.
82: I assume torque is talking about pot, but people hella do inhale lavender fumes and the like.
The nicotine vaping scene people are super into custom flavor blends and so on. e.g.
Also, Jesus's dichotomy between a fat doob and a vaporizer is ILL-INFORMED, I am sorry to say. You can turn up on the heat on a vaporizer (maybe not one of the little pen ones? Maybe only some of those?) and get all the flavor (and smoke) you'd please.
Can't we all just dig holes in apples?
Or go to the store with the shitty produce and get apples that already have holes.
I never! But I've never seen anyone cranking up the smoke on a the pen, which is what you might see on the street. I haven't seen anyone toking off a tabletop unit just walking around.
87: with Victory Liquid Apple All Day Vape Juice you don't have to!
89: that would be awesome, though. Volcano, batteries and inverter on your belt?
|| Good News: "[B]eing a really heavy drinker -- a 10-drink-a-day drinker -- cost about 45 percent of the average person's disposable income in 1950. In 2011, you could buy those same 10 daily drinks using only 3 percent of the average disposable income, according to a 2013 analysis published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. " |>
Can't we all just dig holes in apples?
I miss giving shit to the teenagers buying an apple at the 7-11.
With regard to the OP, I have a fair number of co workers who are smokers. And there's probably more guys that chew than I've seen anywhere else outside of baseball games.
I started to say "basically none" but then thought of a few. Hey after all the good advice on how to start exercising yesterday I think we have hit upon how I could actually lose weight in this thread.
Meanwhile, I need to decide whether to buy any more pot before my prescription for, oh what was it, insomnia? glaucoma? expires. The problem is I still like the idea of it more than the experience of it. Like caffeine, it doesn't seem to do for me what it does for everyone else. If it mellowed me out, I would smoke it night and day.
As I've said repeatedly, I know nothing about pot, but isn't that supposed to be partially a varietal issue? You go to a boutique and someone explains which the mellowing strains are?
Maybe it works better with an apple.
96 is correct. Even indica, though (the "head high" kind), just wasn't that great for me.
Er, sorry. Got that backwards. Indica is body high.
I shall now perform "Body High" from South Pacific.
The UK, or at least London, seems to be smokier than the US, or at least New York. Which I was not expecting.
I work with several smokers and share a very small office with two. It's doubly irritating: first there's the twinge of envy and feeling left out when they get up to go have a fag and chit chat for a few minutes, and then the wave of nausea when they carry the smell back into the room.
Note to smokers sharing space with non-smokers: the mint gum makes the smell worse, not better.
In New York a few years ago, a sizeable minority of my friends were at least social smokers, and of course whenever you'd go to parties or bars there would be plenty of people stepping outside to smoke. Quite a contrast to Fancy Law School, where I knew like one real smoker and a handful of social smokers. That's what got me to give up even social smoking -- I'd have to leave all my friends in the bar, go outside, and there would be no one out there smoking at all, so it was just sad. Best part of smoking is the little chats with the other smokers outside.
Anyway, one time we had some kind of lefty law student conference where all these students came from less fancy schools, and they were like, "Where do we go to smoke?," and we had no idea.
I'm sure I would still smoke a cigarette at a bar if I was drunk enough and somebody offered me one. In California I would always bum the banana flavor american spirits off people hanging out on the deck at the pub at my school. Just doesn't come up, though.
I actually did drunkenly smoke a cigarette a few weeks ago. It felt like the right thing to do after a particularly grotesque run through "The Ladies Who Lunch" at the piano bar. I get nothing out of the experience other than the gesture of it, but I probably have a cigarette about once every three years.
I get nothing out of the experience other than the gesture of it
Oh yeah, likewise. It makes me feel vaguely crappy but otherwise does nothing for me.
AISIMH at the time, basically the only time in my life where I've actively sought to smoke a cigarette while alone and not drunk was when working on the 10,000 word take-home exam I needed to do for grad school. Totally helped!
If I am not a regular smoker and get the keen idea to light up while drunk it's basically instapuke. NOT. GOOD.
Instapuke hasn't been on the sidebar for years.
The last time I lit up a cigarette while drunk, it was such a lovely combination that it made me realize I would probably drink a lot more often if I still smoked regularly.
You might be able to fiddle with preparation a bit too. When I've used pot in bitters for, um, efficient cocktails I've found that the effect is a lot more sedating than when smoking the same pot. It's similarish for the first few weeks but over time the chemicals clearly shift/break down into other things/etc. and whatever is left is relaxing and makes things taste good but doesn't have much effect on thinking/anxiety/etc.
I am in possession of highly advanced drinking technology.
Why the boggling? Marijuana bitters sounds like a fantastic idea.
And cocktails with pot are, like old news, man.
I no longer keep up with such things with the diligence of my youth.
It is important to note that this bit (from Sifu's article) is most definitely not true:
"When you put THC in alcohol, you feel it immediately," said Daniel K. Nelson, the designer of the cocktails and an owner of Writer's Room
It does start in quicker than when you eat it in brownies or something, but do not figure out a good dosage for yourself starting from the assumption that it will hit you all at once.
Also those cocktails sound appalling. What's wrong with an Old Fashioned?
Are Freewheelin' Franklin's words forgotten? "Smokin' pot and drinkin' beer together is like pissin' into the wind."
So, fine as long as the wind is lower than the exit velocity of your urethra.
I'm not standing downwind of Moby until he thinks that through a little more.
Agggh to me pot + booze = feel horrible and unable to move.
As long as you aren't spraying up and into the wind.
Volcano, batteries and inverter on your belt?
Bicycle-powered would really be the Portland thing. A stationary version parked in a food-cart pod? Synergy.
The one new fact I learned today: there is a mineral called cummingtonite.
My God -- Superbuttman VIII: Superbuttman in Rio was accurate!
Superbuttman 7 is still full of shit.
Or was 6 the one about geocentrism?
Still better than Superbuttman 4: The Erotic Phrenologist.
I have approximately 1 cigarette a month for stress reasons. I get more buzzed from that than a drink, but hiding it from my kids is a pain. My neighbor smokes but that is it for coworkers. I notice the smell on students but that is getting rarer. I live in sw Ohio though, so many of my students dip. I have to tell them the no tobacco policy in class extends to chew. Some in the back always try to sneak it, especially if it's a big lecture class
If you can't dip in class without your professor knowing, what did you learn in high school?
I think I had a dip in for 90 percent of my college classes.
Miranda, is your campus tobacco-free? I was at the local university today and there were signs everywhere about it. Lee's school doesn't even allow tobacco use in cars, though she also doesn't smoke in her car. Our public school district has just banned vaping as well as smoking, which is going to be really hard on several administrators.
Also if you ever want a SW Ohio meetup, there's now critical mass with one other commenter on your side of the river and me on the other.
oh hi, I could sign my name and also read the part of the comment that talks about being tobacco-free, I suppose!
You just put the dip in before class, spit a couple of times, and then remember not to eat chips in class.
135: I'm sure I've mentioned my professor who dipped and chewed nicorette and drank coffee all through lecture. At the same time, amazingly.
In SF seems to break down as hipster, admin staff (e.g. several paralegals at work), definitely seeing more and more of the non-cigarette cigarettes ("vaping"? I have no idea) seem to be used by sort of mid-level folks? Among lawyers and similar professionals I know a couple of consumers of herculean amounts of nicotine gum (you can follow their course through internal use conference rooms by the discarded husks of foil backed bubble packs) but no actual smokers. Otherwise its just Europeans.
I think I've mentioned that the PSA on public transit contra not-cigarette-cigarettes are so illogical and over the top they completely push my "no no no no no" immature button. Also think I mentioned that Tess Jaray's amazing chapter on her mother's Egyptian cigarette habit in The Blue Cupboard (fabulous book) was AMAZING and made me want to take up smoking on the spot despite having uncontrollably puked the one time I inhaled years ago.
One of my favorite law school classmates had some kind of thingamajiggy to roll her cigarettes, she said they were cheaper that way and she could get better tasting tobacco. She is so brilliantly wonderful, we'd hang out between classes with her puffing away and me visibly pregnant, I definitely got some grief for that. Was totally worth it for her company. Sorry (not sorry!) kiddo!
I still smoke. I was thinking of trying to quit after settling in to my current gig, but it turns out I work with mostly Russians and Ukrainians who all smoke, and half of our work decisions are made in the parking lot. Not that that's a great excuse, but it puts me back close to the situation when I tried to quit while living with someone who continued.
I'll probably continue to think of smoking as my retirement plan.
Here is an excellent music video about habitual internetting Stromae, about twitter, based on Carmen, animated by Sylvain Chomet, the genius behind Triplets of Belleville.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU
Had a cousin who used a device to roll her own. It had a series of rubber belts cranked at one end. One of my earliest memories is of being pulled by that cousin and her boyfriend in a sleigh. What I remember is that they were grownups but seemed to be playing like kids, a contrast to expectations. Now I realize they'd be pulling me to get out of our house and have a smoke.
Most members of my family and many of my friends have smoked at one time; most have quit or are in the ground. My mother and daughter are the only ones whom I've never known to smoke. My son vapes when he's home, alone with me but not my wife. If we're outdoors he may actually smoke. My brother and wife and brother-in-law and wife still smoke heavily, which these days limits your choices of accommodation.
I would smoke cigars with my wife's grandfather, and for a while would buy some for myself. Bought a cheap bundle once and for a few weeks smoked one daily on the way home from work. My old VW bug had had vent windows which drew nicely; I remember sharing some joints with a guy I was giving a lift to Chicago from Sheboygan with once, and they worked well for that. By the time of my cigar binge I was driving a Subaru, the natural successor vehicle for such as I, which didn't have vent windows and it was the dead of winter. Cranking the window created too much draft. I improvised as follows: I folded over a corrugated cardboard strip the length of the horizontal portion of the driver's side window and stapled it along its length, about 2 inches wide. I put it over the rolled-down window and rolled the window up tight, so that the strip nested in the slot. Now I had a one-inch slot only in the diagonal portion ahead of me, where the old vent window would have been. It drew nicely.
When I got through the bundle I stopped, and probably haven't smoked in 20 years.
136--we have no tobacco in buildings, but outside use is still ok. Come the end of the semester, I would totally be interested in a local meetup!
When I was in college Portland kids smoked clove cigarettes, which I don't think I've caught a whiff of in decades. Did they turn out to really be toxic or what?
147: When they were banned nationwide in a few years ago, the rationale was that flavored cigarettes encouraged youth smoking. But I don't recall catching a whiff in ages, so maybe Oregon was one of the states with an earlier ban.
Actually, I quite like smokers.
Several things I've mentioned here before with regard to smoking and sports. Ashtrays in the locker rooms at Three Rivers Stadium until the late '80s (after Jack Lambert retired). A famous pic of Len Dawson smoking in the locker room at halftime of the Super Bowl in the late '60s. (I also like his youthful skinniness, could be a QB in Friday Night Lights.) I also enjoyed Angel Cabera smoking as he outdueled Tiger Woods for the US Open at Oakmont in 2007 (They would try to cut away on the TV coverage but he was too quick.)
"Some players have psychologists, some have sportologists; I smoke," Cabrera told reporters after claiming his maiden golf major.Somewhat relatedly, my college swimming coach had been a Modern Pentathlete and used snuff/chewing tobacco--he said they all did for the reputed calming effect of the nicotine for the shooting part of the competition.
I'm trying to remember the last time I saw ashtrays on an airplane.
I know I was still seeing them in the 90s, which initially made me think "Wow, those planes were old". But then wikipedia informed me that the in flight smoking ban only became general in 1990. That's much later than I thought.
147, 148: you can still get 'em, just called "clove cigars" and maybe with slightly different paper around them. In fact, the cigarettes I smoked during my test (mentioned upthread), the rest of the pack of which I've been toting around ever since without actually smoking any of them, were cloves.