Today I ask about vaping, the ever-growing trend that has risen over the last few years to a ridiculously high rate. What say you on this issue? We glamorize or romanticize photography where people smoke. Guys covered in tats smoking on bikes, chicks scantily clad on their backs, puffing out beautiful white images against black backgrounds. The old pictures of movie stars, using cigarettes as props. Sexy. Alluring. The old movies themselves. The artistry smoke makes in a darkly-lit world of cinematography. But that’s art, right? More fantasy. Not real. Not happening in front of us, our lungs, and our environment. Maybe we can argue that. But in real life, smoking is just…well...not only deadly, but nasty. It smells. Kissing someone after smoking is…not sexy. Walking into a room where someone has been smoking makes those of us, who don’t smoke, ill. Renting a car where someone has been smoking cannot be erased with a spray of the bottle. It seeps into fabric. It stays in the air, stale and unappetizing. The verdict is out. Smoking traditional cigs kills us, first-hand, second-hand, and third-hand. But what of vaping? Well…it’s a constant battle in my world, where fighting the vapers on a tobacco-free campus becomes quite contentious, and they make valid points. It doesn’t smell. I’m not ingesting it myself the way I would be forced to do so with regular cigarettes. And it harms (maybe) only the vaper. And this debate isn’t going to get easier as more and more people choose to vape. While traditional smoking has decreased exponentially, the surgeon general states that”e -cigarettes are very popular with young people” and that their use is “higher…than adults.” And it’s even increasing in middle school and especially high school students. 'How? Isn’t that illegal?' I ask myself. But I suppose it’s no different than how we all got our underage drinking gems, right? We were that young once. And these taboo things are still cool. Smoking “real” cigs isn’t anymore. Not by a long shot. But this? Cool AND seemingly harmless. The problem is that the verdict is still out on the health risks. It’s too soon for anything conclusive. Still, early reports are coming out. And it couldn’t be more contradictory. No one can deny that nicotine is addictive though. And so, “no matter how it's delivered, nicotine is harmful for youth and young adults” in regards to addiction. But, further, the surgeon general goes on to say that “e-cigarettes typically contain [chemicals]…that are known to damage health.” In addition, “Some initial research shows it may hurt…arteries. Some brands contain chemicals including formaldehyde -- often used in building materials -- and another ingredient used in antifreeze that can cause cancer.” But even then, there is more conflicting information. And no one can deny that if you’re going to choose to do one over the other, e-cigs are clearly not as harmful. In a 2015 expert review from Public Health England regarding smoking, it states, “Most of the harm comes from the thousands of chemicals that are burned and inhaled in the smoke…E-cigs don't burn, so people aren't as exposed to those toxins.” The study’s conclusion? “E-cigs are 95% less harmful than the real thing.” So I don’t know about you. Have you tried it? Are you a former smoker who quit traditionally smoking as a result? And all these reports I’m reading only mention young people. Does that mean it’s not harmful to adults? And why shouldn’t someone who wants to smoke not be able to do so wherever they are? They are not polluting the air in which I breathe. It doesn’t affect me. In fact, when I teach in long blocks, a student who vapes comes back calm, refreshed, and often able to concentrate again. Common sense tells us that anything foreign we ingest into our bodies that way can’t be good. We know better. But is it any worse than anything else we do to our bodies, both deliberately and by no choice of our own? Bad food filled with chemicals? Pollution we breathe every day? Taking over-the-counter meds to cure ailments and headaches? Milk filled with injected hormones? If e-cigs are legal, who am I to say? I’m on the fence on this one. I, myself, may not choose to do it, but if it doesn’t harm me, personally, who am I to judge? Would I encourage my students to start? Of course not. Would I encourage them to NOT pick up a bad habit? Yes, just as I might other healthy habits they don’t have. But will I NOT allow the donuts they eat on campus daily that we sell? Nope. Are e-cigs any different?
Like all bad habits, it seems by the time they get to me, it’s too late to change, not without them really wanting to. If we’re going to combat addiction, we have to start younger. But there’s the rub, the companies know that and have always targeted the young, from traditional cigs to e-cigs to sugary cereals, it’s the youth that always suffers. And that--THAT is the problem we should be addressing...
4 Comments
Today I ponder Thanksgiving. How many of you celebrate? Or something similar? And do you love it? Or do you loathe it, the holiday of American gluttony? I know many of my American friends love it: Football, feasting, family, and all that jazz. But for me, it’s hard to pinpoint when I started to hate it so much, this obligatory holiday, where we celebrate things we really shouldn’t be (I won’t go all politically correct on you, but you have seen Peter Pan, right?), and where most have come to celebrate it as just a simple time to be with family and friends and pause and breathe and reflect on the gratefulness of our cornucopias aplenty. I think I can pinpoint it a few things. One was the realization of what a turkey is. Interesting, the birds are still called what they are whereas beef and pork are not. I get it, you can’t lie down and snuggle with a pecking chicken, but you sure can with a baby calf, and even the most enthusiastic meat-eater agrees. There’s something unethical about that eating that with which you can love so tenderly. Still, friends of mine who own farms now will tell you that you can, in fact, hang and enjoy the company of our feathered-friends, even the ones you choose to eat. Either way, it’s a very difficult time in most children’s lives when they learn the truth. Most can get over it, having been raised to enjoy its flavor and not having to do the deed him or herself. I just couldn’t seem to. Of course, no one says you have to eat any meat. There are plenty of options, make no mistake, from gourds to cranberry sauce to pies, no one is forcing us to wear sweatpants and unbutton our pants. And I do have very fond memories of being with my Nana, the woman I derived my name from, my tea-drinking buddy, the woman who introduced me to Twinings and Darjeeling and quiet moments where we’d go sit alone out on her enclosed porch and just talk and sip and where she told me I was beautiful, and I almost believed her. So I think I’ve pinpointed it to being an adult. There is something "unmagical" about Thanksgiving for me. It screams time-honored tradition of stereotypical roles, where the women cook and the men watch football, and where the main chef doesn’t rest, rising at 4:00 am to stuff and cook a bird so everyone can gorge and complain later about how full they are, and where she must clean up the mess everyone has made afterwards, barely having a moment to eat herself, all her hard work, cold and dry, by the turn of the setting sun as everyone leaves ‘grateful’ to be full.
And really, it reminds me of my mother. My poor mother, the cook, the forever-traditionalist who refused paper plates or plastic, slaving for the happiness of everyone else around her. And then I begin to miss her and lament at all the times I stayed at my high school football game with friends, procrastinating, not grateful at all for what she was doing, but complaining with my friends, and doing things I shouldn’t have been doing. Then comes the guilt, at not only that, but at the fact of how much I had to be grateful for in her when she was alive. And then I just get sad…because I miss her. And though I respected her greatly, I didn’t appreciate a lot of things she did. Sigh… I cooked Thanksgiving dinner once. After that, I refused. I won’t do it again. If someone else doesn’t host it, my brother and some family and close friends go out to a restaurant, come back somewhere to play games, and to have desserts only. But we don’t need a made-up holiday to do it. Or to say what we’re thankful for. Or to drive or fly on the busiest, most inane holiday there is. And so, we don’t. Often. And I? I--am thankful for that. And I wonder if someday, I realize how much I wish I had the people I love surrounding me on the Thanksgiving I once loathed. Every so often, I think about when I started writing. And why I write. And I’m not talking about fiction; I’m talking about this type of writing. The autobiographical. The non-fiction. The sort of “essay” writing. Or the stream-of-consciousness therapy that gets applied to paper (or screen nowadays). I’ve always had what I called: A diary. Why boys had to call it something else is beyond me. But whatever you call it, the diary, or journal, is sold starting very young, almost like a rite of passage into puberty, that little book with a lock and key that anyone, who really wanted to, could break into at any moment, and yet, somehow, we viewed it as safe. And today I ponder why I kept one and why I continue to, though it’s morphed onto laptop. Do you keep one? Have you ever? Did you grow up writing in one? Have you ever asked yourself why? I wonder if it comes from my childhood and my close relationship with my brother. When I was younger, my brother and I used to write letters to each other and hide them in our adjoining closet. It was such a fun thing to do. Sometimes, we’d write them with “little trinkets” or gifts to one another: a silly owl eraser, some stickers, or some kind of weird thing we found in a closet—a photograph, a fishing lure, some weird decoration or knick-knack. I remember sharing a Hummel with him, and he exclaimed: “Put that back. Mom will kill you!” Who knew those ugly little things were worth money? Nothing was about money back then, not to us. It makes me think when I teach first-year writing to my students. When I tell them to just WRITE, they say: “But I’m not a writer.” And I answer that of course they are writers. Anyone with a thought or an experience is a writer. Anyone living is a writer. Anyone who breathes air is a writer. They shake their heads.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everyone isn’t a writer, just as not everyone is an artist or an athlete. Maybe I’m just a weirdo, an anomaly. Maybe there is a simple biology to it. Maybe what we find beautiful or what music we love or what art resonates with us, is a nature thing that just is and has nothing to do with anything we can learn. I’m still trying to figure that out. Why do I love the subtle sound of an acoustic guitar over any other instrument, and why does my brother love the dissonant sounds of heavy metal that actually make me want to punch someone in the face it irritates me so much? And so, maybe, it follows, that not everyone is a writer… Every week, I have a million things on my mind I want to discuss, and I never know which one I want to write about to share. So I start (writing) and see what happens. Sometimes an idea comes to me while I’m driving, and I start talking into my phone; other times, I just wake and look outside my window and see what happens when I start to write. But I feel like, regardless of whether I scribe it or not, I’m always ‘writing’--The coffee check-out, the school where I teach, the gym, the grocery store, a walk outside, the night sky, prepping dinner. Wherever I am, I’m mentally ‘writing.’ At times, it’s poetry. Other times, it’s a ramble that later gets turned into a blog for you all to suffer through. And sometimes, it just stays right here, my own journal, my own diary, my space to be free to share whatever I want without the pressure of eyes or critics or know-it-alls or haters or sycophants. It’s funny that way. For as much as I write, I’ll never, ever, be comfortable with it. And perhaps, that is more of who I am than anything. You’d know what I mean if I’d only share my diary. ;) I love Halloween. Do you? What has made you love or hate it? I seem to hear a lot of mixed feelings about this “holiday.” And it makes me reflect on what is it that makes me adore it so much. I’m not sure when my love for it began. Perhaps it was when, early on, it was an excuse to bob for apples and have parties with my school-age friends, eating and drinking whatever we wanted for once. Perhaps it was being raised Catholic, and the spectacle of Halloween was somehow a bit of accepted sin and mystery, wrapped in fiction and stories and movies and tall tales spun by bonfire and candlelight, one where being safely scared was highly guarded. Perhaps it was because it hearkens back to the night I lost my virginity on a porch in our neighborhood, both thrilling and taboo, where he quoted: “If the stars refuse to shine. I would still be loving you. When mountains crumble to the sea. There would still...be you and me.” Perhaps it was because my brother always had the best ideas for costumes and executed them with such aplomb for the both of us my whole life, even in college, that it sealed the everlasting awe I still have of him to this day. But perhaps, it is truly because it happens to fall in the month of change, where we watch each leaf take its leap into the unknown of this thing called death, and we see ourselves in each one of them. One by one, they each fall, some gracefully, accepting the inevitable respectfully, maybe even hopefully; and others, fighting to hang on long after their time is up, not going “gentle into that good night,” forcing us to ask ourselves if they’re fighting on purpose or if they simply don’t know what’s in store for them until they sit on the earth to be taken away with the wind to who knows where, they, our mirror image. And it makes us ponder why some people fight and grow and rise above strife in the same exact circumstances while others crumble and lash out and give up, our fates all the same in the end. Halloween is that one time a year, it’s about us. No obligatory presents or killing of perfectly vibrant trees or endless wrapping of paper to waste and clog and destroy our environment after. No obligatory family gatherings or meals or meaningless football games. No obligatory drives far out of the city to sit and gorge on things we hate and conversations we loathe, only to drive home miserable. But instead, perhaps it’s that we get to focus on just ourselves, mostly, selfishly for once, surrounded by like-minded individuals with the sole purpose of levity and kinship, and where we get to put on a mask and be someone we wished we could always be but were too afraid to…and reflect, that maybe, just maybe, this year, spring will be different. |
Details
I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
Categories
All
Archives
November 2022
|