Snuffing out smoking

So, you want to hear something disgusting?

I was dutifully sorting laundry in the Wolman basement several nights ago when I was assaulted with the latest evidence for my already well-established opinion that tobacco is indeed whacko. Stoned on Wilco and a mystifying lack of homework, I was about to tip my monochromatic laundry into the nearest available machine when I noticed that it was littered with cigarette debris. I'm not talking one demure cigarette peeking out coyly from behind the agitator, secreted and forgotten in the linty depths of a jeans pocket along with tissues, pennies and the stray Pokemon card. This was a massacre: an entire pack of eviscerated cigs, their grainy tobacco guts strewn appealingly across the shiny bottom of a now off-limits washer. Some absentminded smoker is out $4.50 and his daily dose of carcinogens, and I had to find a washer even further from the dryers.

In case you're getting the wrong impression, I'm not your average walking estrogen overdose constantly searching over the rims of her overpriced aviator shades for a reason to whine. It wasn't the awkward schlep from washer to dryer, wet frayed jeans and grandpa thermals on full display that pissed me off so much as the carelessness with which we treat our bodies.

Maybe I should be thankful that smoking isn't among my vices or temptations; instead, I react to smokers' committed self-destruction with fiery impatience. The "sophisticated appetite for self ruin" (Jeffrey Eugenides) is a fancy manifestation of grandstanding narcissism; reasons for smoking vary, but as a concertedly poetic act of "glamorous" self-destruction, showcasing your addictions ranks just below posting your suicidal poetry on Myspace.

Despite the widespread athleticism and fitness-consciousness of our campus, enough students smoke for it to be really annoying.

The small congregations around quads or building entrances conducting ash-and-butane flirtations, exhaling coquettishly sideways and flicking stray ash onto the sidewalk, are less a model of dissipated Eurotrash cool than advertisements for early-onset emphysema (and clich8e! Smoking as foreplay has been best exemplified in popular musical Rent; "Got a light?" is pretty much up there with "Nice shoes, my place or yours?"). It's become necessary to purposefully circumvent the clot of smoking students outside my dorm exhaling vile nimbi of mephitic smoke like they're conspiring against my determinedly translucent lungs. I'm not going to spout statistics like some above-the-influenceaa poster child for zombified pubescence and "intelligent choices;" by now we (should) get it that smoking hurts both the smoker and unfortunate bystanders.

Simply put, smokers are a pain in the [expletive deleted] ass. Take it from the ex of a demented chain-smoker, an unwilling breather of polluted air, a resident of Wolman, home to at least one dedicated (forgetful) addict. Take it from Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You For Smoking, an acidly satiric novel that exenterated the smoking lobby, political correctness and mainstream political discourse with the same clean precision as an agitator working its deft, brutal machinations on a pack of forgotten cigarettes. Take it from your own lungs.

Until then, stay your required 10 feet from the entrance of my building, please.