Top 10 Reasons I Quit Smoking Today

2003-04-23 - 4:11 p.m.

10) Smoking buddy Stoo doesn't work with me anymore and smoking buddy Doug quit smoking.

9) It's bad for me. I'm not really health conscious, but I don't like getting winded playing video games.

8) Girls like kissing non-smoker boys. I might give up drinking from the toilet for similar reasons.

7) Society hates smokers. Doctors used to smoke in the OR, now you can't even smoke in bars. There's a lot of places you can go in California that prohibit smoking within 50 feet of the front door! Also, I'm sick and tired of the assholes that do that obnoxiously loud fake coughing thing when they walk in the vicinity of me smoking. I don't harpoon fat people when I see them eating; don't cough when you see me smoking.

6) $150. That's how much it costs a pack-a-day smoker per month to smoke. Better to quit now than wait until they raise the cost of a pack again.

5) I'm a control freak. That being said, addictions don't suit me.

4) The Patch. Two cups of coffee and a NicoDerm CQ patch and I'm flying. Do not adjust your set, I'm blurry because I'm shaking. Weeee!

3) Fire + Me = Bad. Here's the part of the movie where I show you a montage of me burning holes in favorite shirts, or in friends' cars, or singeing nose hairs, or dropping lit cigs in my crotch, or lighting the wrong end of a cig, or burning my fingers, or catching ashtrays on fire, et cetera, while "Disco Inferno" plays in the background. Burn, baby, burn!

2) For my Mommy and Daddy. I've never come out of the closet as a smoker with them, though they have suspected for a while. My dad had a long fight with cancer and has asthma now (he used to smoke over 2 packs a day in the 60's). Whether they know I smoke or not, they would prefer I didn't. I like keeping the list of things they worry about with me as short as possible.

1) Marijuana. Seems like it shouldn't be such a good reason, but at least you can't accuse me of being in denial about my coping mechanisms/vices. Non-smokers get higher, faster. I want efficient highs, and coughing fits aren't very relaxing. Also, if I have to choose between giving money to terrorists (like the television tells me I do) or to rich, fat, old, white men from the part of America that still thinks black people should be kept in sheds in the back yard (aka Big Tobacco), I'm going with the terrorists. I mean, if Reagan thought it was okay to give them guns and missiles, where's the harm in giving them money?