The Benefits of Smoking Cigarettes

First of all, shut up, I know.  I call them "cancer sticks," too.  It has been beaten into me from elementary school that cigarettes will make my tongue hairy and my skin yellow and my teeth brown and my lungs will fill with tar and the filters have fiber glass and rat poison and that I will probably die of asphyxiation.  Ok?  I know.  But despite this, I smoke and I will continue to do so as long as I damn well please.  And this is why.

1.  I started smoking cigarettes when I was in Barcelona, Spain.  The best bar that my friends and I could find was an Irish pub (run by real Irish people!).  We went there to watch the futbol games because it was the Super Bowl for soccer, and people yelling makes sports fun.  Anyway, smoking:  In Spain it's legal to smoke inside!  So everyone was smoking and since I had smoked a few times before and I knew I liked how it made me feel (it used to give me a crazy rush when I was drunk... oh, how young I was), I smoked along with everyone else.  I mean, I was breathing it in anyway and drinking Irish beer and cider and watching futbol, so what is a better compliment than a cigarette?

 I love beer, I love cider, om nom nom nom...

2.  Back in the states, I started smoking more as I started hanging out with people who also smoked.  This was a useful tool to form some of my relationships because if we were at a party someone can say, "Let's go outside and smoke," and you get to take a break from the action and have a smaller conversation with smaller people.  Well, people with smaller lung capacity, anyway.  It's a shared activity.  It forms bonds.  Even with people you don't know.  Wanna meet someone?  Bum a cigarette, Dumby!

3. The brain has nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which basically means God wants us all to smoke cigarettes.  In fact, every receptor that a drug compliments in our brain is one we are meant to do.  Yep.

4. On that note, it makes you feel good.  I totally smoke when I'm stressed and it totally calms me down.  Those chemicals definitely know what they're doing because even if I don't have a noticeable chemical change in my body, I will feel a little bit better.  Even if things aren't actually better.  A cigarette can't fix any of your problems, get real...  Unless that problem is that you aren't smoking a cigarette.

Yummy....

5. The ritual of lighting the cigarette, bringing it to your mouth, breathing smoke, exhaling smoke is satisfying and calming.  In the same way, I imagine, doing any repeated motion is calming.  But smoking is more fun.

6. I have an addictive personality even though I deny it all the time.  I didn't realize this at all until I started smoking because it caused me to stop binge eating on chocolate.  Chocolate, cookies, and sweets in general, actually, are not nearly as appealing they used to be, and I credit the cigarettes for that one.  It's like quitting any bad habit: just pick up a different bad habit and it'll be no problem.  And besides, if you're going to play to your addictive personality and oral fixation, you might as well be doing something that looks cool instead of shoving an entire bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups down your gullet.

Want to eat... :(

7. Speaking of which, the coolness factor actually is pretty important.  I'm not going to lie.  I feel sexy sometimes when I smoke a cigarette.  Even if you hate cigarettes, you can't really deny how cool someone looks while smoking.  I mean, it's been enculturated into you from day one when Doc Cottle smacked your ass and handed you to your mother just to light up a ciggy.  But of course, this may have to do with the fact that I am a woman and a cigarette is my torch of freedom.  Oh, how far we've come.

 

Common, Ladies, you'll be superheros if you smoke!

Update: Apparently, there are more benefits to smoking than I thought.