From Jackmanni
So – does this mean that if you are in a room with a person who is smoking, your best option is to light one up for yourself? I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the quoted statement.
I should note that I actually like the smell of cigarettes. My dad was a smoker, and the smell of a newly lit cig meant that he’d just come home from work, so I have a lot of good associations with them.
I don’t go. However, I don’t host, either. The smokers WILL light up, no matter how nicely they’re asked not to, and then they’ll figure that opening a window will magically draw all the evil smoke particles out. It doesn’t. So, I don’t go, don’t host, and spend my time online instead.
I don’t know what sort of losers you hang out with Lynn, but I suggest you start looking for some new friends. Preferably considerate ones.
I’m now an ex-smoker (7weeks and counting!!) but lived through the years of smoking being the absolute norm both in private and public places. Offices, cinemas, public transport…nowhere was immune to smokers choofing up at will.
In more recent years, smoking has now been banned in all of the above, plus pubs/clubs, sheltered areas in public places and just about EVERYWHERE where you would really like to light one up. In parallel with those changes, most households, even those who sported smokers, started smoking outside as well realising the stinky damage they were doing to other occupants and the furnishings…and EVERYBODY now either goes outside for a fag, or asks hesitantly if it’s OK to smoke inside, but then ONLY when others are already doing it. You’d be a moron otherwise, and justifiably ostracised by smokers and non-smokers alike.
Are you serious Lynn that, even despite requests not to, your guests still smoke in your house?
That’s fucked up, fer’ sure.
They are my inlaws. They are NOT my friends, and they are not welcome in my house. Nor do I hang out with them. My husband tries to variously tempt me (“They have a big batch of fudge that needs eating up!”) or guilt me (“Mom asked me to get you over there, they haven’t seen you in a while.”), but I refuse to go. I am quite addicted to breathing, I’ve done it for 51 years now and I don’t plan on quitting just to please my inlaws. I have my own friends that I hang out with.
Congratulations on quitting. My husband had to quit several times before it took but he finally managed it. Now he says that he feels rich whenever he realizes that he DOESN’T have to have that money set aside for another pack.
This. Lighting up around non-smokers is always rude. Making the demand was just as rude. “Toady” handled it poorly.
I’m basically with Smokey. You don’t order a smoker not to smoke in his own house. Depending on the relationship, you might be able to ask politely and respectfully (and even then, I think it’s still mildly rude), but just demanding it is out of line. I think the only proper response to that is directions to the door.
I’m also skeptical of the melodramatics a lot of anti-smokers will put into their performances when any wisp of smoke is in the air, but even if their extreme sensititivity is real (which I believe is rare to never), and they’re in the smokers’ home, there’s the door.
I say all this as a non-smoker.
I’m a pretty dedicated smoker – and I side with Smokey, but not because of our shared tobacco use. Rather, though he was a bit rude, I subscribe to the “my house, my rules” principle. Same holds true for Lynn; I’m incredulous that someone (relatives or friends, doesn’t matter) would directly disrespect their host as you suggest. IMHO, while a host should be accommodating to their guests, they get the final say. And if a guest commands rather than requests, they automatically lose guest status.
But that’s not why I’m posting. As to the quote above, for the past, oh, 20 years or so, I’ve always smoked in the house. Almost never bothered me at all, even though my first college roommate and I bordered on being a smoker parody – we’d open the door and clouds of smoke would billow forth.
However, at one point, I used to share an apartment with a guy who smokes Basics. Gah…they’re so bad, they made me gag; I couldn’t stay in the same room while he was smoking. Definitely the brand, as I’ve had a similar reaction to others smoking them.
Oh, sorry, the impression I got was that ALL smokers you know just light up regardless of the company/environment, not just a particular bunch of inlaws.
:smack:
Rudeness all the way around.
Yeah, I still find it pretty damn rude that my sister, knowing that I am an asthmatic whose worst single trigger is cigarette smoke (legal trigger, anyway - pot smoke is worse), will invite me over and then proceed to light up anyway. With her three-year-old in the house.
On those occasions, I generally save her the trouble by divesting myself of my guest stats by leaving. She knows I am going to do it, and she certainly knows my reaction to tobacco smoke, and she knows how bad secondhand smoke is for kids, so why the fuck does she a) smoke with a small child in the house, and b) invite her asthmatic sister over and then light up? I consider it fucking rude, personally. (And no, I’ve never ordered her to stop smoking, as if it would accomplish anything anyway.)
This.
I am a smoker. If we have people over that are smokers, or I know are okay with smoking, I’ll smoke in my home without asking permission. However, if my mom or my allergic, asthmatic niece are over I will smoke in the breezeway or outside and I request others do the same. I want my mom and niece to enjoy their time at my house, but I know if I’m puffing away, they will be miserable.
Ditto with riding in cars. I always have the window open (even in the dead of winter), but if I’m driving someone who I do not know their attitude towards smoking I will ask first. Yes, even in my own car.
Back in college, when we could smoke indoors, there was a girl who would come sit with all of us smokers in the commons and start fake coughing (OBVIOUSLY fake), waving her hands, making comments about how she was going to just DIE because of us. Then go sit elsewhere, numbnuts.
It’s the nature of addiction, it trumps common sense, it trumps basic courtesy, it even trumps parental protection instincts.
It’s a snapshot of our cultural values that habitual smoking of tobacco is the addiction that can harm children simply by proximity, but it’s the one addiction that parents are permitted to indulge in even in the closest of quarters with the kids, and no one cares enough to even suggest that it’s wrong in any serious way.
I have a friend who smokes; she’s tried to quit several times, but it never took. When she and her husband adopted ten years ago she stopped smoking in the house and steps out on the porch instead (in Chicago, in winter - now that’s addiction).
But before the adoption a nonsmoking friend would occasionally visit with his kids. The first time he brought them over he politely asked her not to smoke around them, and she had no problem with it. I can’t remember if she went outside when they were over, or just smoked in a different room.
In some ways it is that simple, but in others, it isn’t (or I would have stopped going seven years ago and not have to bitch about it on message boards). There’s the tradition, there’s the familial obligations, there’s the hurt feelings from everyone involved if we don’t go. Not going is certainly an option, but I have to be sure I’m prepared for the fallout if I choose that option.
As for the smoking around kids, smoking with kids in the car is illegal in some places now, with that possibly to become more common. I’m the last person to be screeching about “Oh noes! The CHILDREN!1!!!”, but a quick search will tell anyone all they need to know about how harmful second-hand smoke is to young lungs. At this point, anyone who is still smoking around non-smokers is pretty friggin’ clueless. Wreck your own health all you want, but leave mine out of it.
There already are consequences for parents who smoke around their kids when it comes to custody in divorce cases. It’s also been suggested that secondhand smoke exposure constitutes child abuse.
As to the latter - while I’m reluctant to endorse legal action affecting smoking in the home, it does in my view constitute child abuse for parents to smoke around a child with a significant health problem that is exacerbated by tobacco smoke. If your kid keeps winding up in the ER with asthma attacks because of your smoking, you should face legal consequences.
Your in laws are assholes, and it has nothing to do with being smokers.
As previously mentioned, I’d boot someone in a heartbeat for demanding that I not smoke in my own house. But if I were a non-smoker, and a guest lit up in my house against my expressed wishes, I’d let it be known in no uncertain terms that if they didn’t put that thing out, or if they ever did it again, they wouldn’t have to worry about dying of cancer.
featherlou, I realize that not going creates its own set of problems. What I’m saying is that if you do the cost/benefit analysis, and decide to go… well, there you are. I host, and I’d prefer not to have to listen to small children screaming and my brother in law ranting all day, let alone stay up half the night cleaning up, but NOT hosting would mean going to one of their places instead, and… well, there are reasons I’d rather not. We’re both allowed to bitch about the inconvenience, but we’d be silly to expect people to cease any and all habitual behavior that annoys us, and I’m pretty sure that the screaming and ranting and cleaning have no more long-term effects on my health than the smoke has on yours.
Just a matter of understanding dynamics here:
Toady and Smokey are both adult children living in their parents’ house, yes?
To those for who believe that “my house my rules my castle my realm get the fuck out” trumps courtesy to a guest or to a sibling, and more to those in the know about dynamics in the DR - do adult children living in their parents’ house get to call it their castle/their realm? Or do only their parents get that right?
I know my children do not get to decide on the rules in my house. This is my house. If any ever are adults still here more than for a visit (and I’ve made it clear that there is an expectation they will not) then they are still the children of the house and still do not make the rules. (Children, even adult children, don’t even get to be called guests. Hospitality needs not apply. I am not their host.)
But obviously the DR may have a different standard.
Bricker where do the parents of the house, the ones for whom the this is their castle their realm defense most applies, stand on the issue? Which son were they most pissed at?
Oops–sorry for misunderstanding, Bricker. However, the fact that they’re both residents of the house means that there’s some difficulty figuring out how to handle it. Certainly I’ve never felt empowered to kick out my housemate’s guests, no matter how obnoxious they’ve been. And if my housemate were having a get-together with friends, I wouldn’t automatically feel welcome at it.
That’s not to excuse Scoldy, but I still think Smokey should’ve handled it better.
Daniel
Their house, their call, end of story. A man is still free to do whatever (legal) he wants to do in his own home, right?
Smokey could be more considerate though.