I’m weird. I know it; you know it; we all know it. I think about things in a way most people don’t. And I’ve learned over the years to keep it to myself. I’ve talked at length how I’ve realized that I just don’t think like other people do. Sometimes, it’s ok. Most of the time, it’s not. I am able to see nuance where other people may not.
For example, I used to smoke two to three cigarettes a day. I started when I was in college and never smoked more than that. It was a ritual for me. Go outside, light up, smoke a quarter or half, then put it away for later (after putting it out, of course). My favorite doctor told me it wasn’t that big a deal that I smoked a couple cigs a day, which I was glad to hear. It seemed like moderation would be similar to that of alcohol. Later, I had to switch docs for a different reason, and the substitute doc I saw in the interim was insistent that I had to quit. I wasn’t trying to argue that smoking was good or even neutral for me, but it wasn’t at the top of my list of things to worry about.
“Smoking two cigarettes a day is the same as smoking a pack a day!” She declared. With that, I lost any respect I had for her because it was so clearly false what she had just said. When my favorite doc said that smoking two cigs a day was no biggie, I asked why more docs didn’t say things like that. She said it was because people didn’t listen to nuance. If she told most people that, they would only hear that it was ok to smoke and smoke three packs. Which, fair. People did tend to hear what they wanted to hear.
I have a big issue with how ubiquitous alcohol is in polite society. Not drinking is considered weird. People have to have an excuse for not doing it, which is so weird to me. I’m at the point where I don’t care about it, but it’s still not something I want to be around. The lads of RKG were talking about how gross smoking was and how they would never date someone who smokes. Which, fair enough. I am firmly in the corner of date whomever you want (ethically sound, of course), but I had to laugh because they were really going off on smokers. Whereas they get drunk on the regular and have video of them acting up while drunk. Somehow, that’s acceptable, but we’ve vilified smoking to the point where you’ll get glares if you do it in public. Rory did mention that maybe some people would have problems with the way they drink the way they have problems with other smoking (which was surprising from him because he’s not the most aware of these things), but they were still so dismissive of it.
