When you’re fifteen years old, coming home from school stoned, AND your father is an active duty Army colonel, you learn to be paranoid.
I think people draw more attention to themselves with multiple artificial smells, like cologne or mint. IME, other people notice, expecially if you don’t use it all the time, and speculate what they’re covering up. But no one is suprised when the dirty stinky smoker ™ smells like smoke.
Well you see … everyone has a tiny Noid living inside them. What most people don’t know is that there’s another Noid that lives inside the weed. So when you smoke it, all of a sudden, instead of one, you have two, or a pair-o-Noid. 
I know that I should quit and I also know its the socially expected thing these days for smokers to proclaim their desire to quit. But I don’t really want to.
<<whooshing sound regarding consumption of cologne and visine>>
No desire to quit.
I admit that I am addicted, and that is the likely reason I love smoking.
I lead a pretty active lifestyle; my lungs (judging by performance comparison against those with whom I play hockey) are in decent enough shape; I rarely, if ever, get sick, and when I do my immune system appears to be top-notch.
I have in the past, when coaching tweens and teens, admitted my addiction to them, and strongly advised against ever even trying it. Sadly (strangely enough, I am earnest in this), teenagers won’t listen to shit, even when their awesome cool smoker-athlete hockey coach tells them.
I last smoked 268 days ago, according to the quit smoking app on my phone. I still miss smoking each and every single hour, and get the itch to light one up regularly throughout the day. I expect I will still be missing it years from now, providing I’m not smoking. I smoked on and off for twenty years from being a late teenager.
First thing I’ll do once I know I’m definitely dying of a deadly disease or the world’s about to end is go buy a pack of 20. This may be hyperbole but doesn’t feel like it.
I didn’t want to give up when I was a smoker, not in the slightest, but knew I had to because I’m a parent of a young child, and the guilt was getting to me. I waited till I had flu badly enough that I could barely breathe, let alone sit up and get out of bed to smoke, and gave up then.
Generally, I’ll have a cigar maybe once a week…usually on a weekend with my dad. Sometimes it’s every couple weeks, depending on the weather and our schedules. I enjoy an occasional cigar, and don’t really feel any great need (certainly no desire) to quit. It’s not really a habit, as I can go weeks or even months without having one…or, I could have 2 or 3 in a weekend if the situation was right (that’s about my max though…at $10 a pop for the cheap ones in my humidor, having more than that would put a crimp in the bank account and get the wife riled).
:smack: Ah, sorry…I didn’t read that this was for cigarette smokers. Never mind…you can take one off of the not planning to quit part of the polls.
I quit tobacco cigarettes in April 2012, finally ending a 36-year-long, 50 cigs per day (handrolled) habit. I didn’t do the poll because there wasn’t a real option for me. I enjoyed smoking, but for years felt increasingly bad about the smell and nasty aspects of the habit. Never had any health issues either - although for sure I couldn’t run 10Ks any more as I did when younger. But there’s that social stigma, which I didn’t like.
So for the last 25 or so years, I’ve really wanted to be a non-smoker and really wanted to quit. Tried elebenty-bwillion times and all the various methods but it never stuck.
I finally quit tobacco using high-end “electronic cigarettes” (not the cheesy cigarette- look-alikes found in gas stations and many smoke shops) and flavored e-juice. Which does contain nicotine, so I am still addicted.
I feel like a non-smoker now though; I feel great.
I never want to quit enough when it’s just for myself. I cannot be intrinsically motivated to quit smoking. But having sufficient extrinsic motivation works, even if it’s just a little. I’ll be quitting again the first week of January, because I met a guy who wants me to quit. If I hadn’t met him, I wouldn’t be quitting.
So I didn’t choose a poll option because, “it’s complicated.”
I think you qualify as “ambivalent”.
A cigarette will not cover the pot smoke smell off your breath, especially with the high grade stinkalicious grades of dope that are out these days. Hence the extra “noid”.
Ambivalence connotes simultaneous conflicting feelings, and that doesn’t apply to me at all. There is no middle ground or wishy-washiness here–it’s more like an on/off switch. The desire to quit and/or lack thereof are sequential for me, not simultaneous. I have an overridingly powerful desire to quit when I have sufficient motivation. I have literally zero desire to quit otherwise.
Sorry if I’m reading too much into this.
I am pretty much the same way but I marked “ambivalent.”
Color me ambivalent. I suppose I ought to quit, at least everyone tells me I should, but 'way down deep inside I really don’t want to. Vices aside, I’ve always made an effort to stay healthy…exercise, proper nutrition, sleep habits, etc…and I can say with some confidence that I am in better shape than a lot of 52-year old men (considering the appalling fitness level of most middle-aged Americans that may not be saying much). I’ve always cherished a private conviction that a body can throw off quite a bit of abuse, provided one is willing to pay the price to keep it otherwise in a state of general wellness. The real problems seem to come when people abuse their bodies but ignore the need to compensate for it. I realize this attitude may someday bite me in the ass.
QTM, an honest question, if you please…as a physician, do you feel this line of thinking has any merit?
SS
Maybe that should’ve been a poll option
Sorry, it really doesn’t. It does some harm reduction, but if by your own genetic/somatic makeup your lungs are programmed for emphysema prematurely if exposed to sufficient inhaled smoke (and many people’s lungs are so programmed) then smoking will do significant lung damage, no matter what else you do. Same for the risk of lung cancer. And artery disease.
Remember, it sucks to be an otherwise healthy 50 to 60 year old who has taken care of himself mostly, but who is now a respiratory cripple. Even if you’re more healthy than another respiratory cripple who didn’t take care of himself so well.
Maybe you’ll dodge that particular bullet, and the other ones. It happens all the time. But it’s generally not the way to bet.
But everyone gets to make their own choice, and this thread is not meant to enumerate the reasons smoking is bad or scold anyone. We’ve got plenty of other threads for that.
For most purposes, the term “ambivalent” generally suffices.
I used to smoke quite heavily, then quit for a few years, and then started it up again when I took a brief tour of hiking tour through Central Asia. Theoretically, I think I’d like to quit again, but I can’t really think up much reason to do so. It’s a pleasurable method of releasing stress, and I’m no longer really concerned about its long-term health ramifications.
That being said, if the Squidette told me that I had to quit again, I don’t think it’d bring a tear to my eye.
I want to quit smoking, but I can’t do it at the same time I’m dieting… there’s so much I can take.
But since I started scuba diving, I figured that by next summer I should stop, use less breathing gases thus longer dives