[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by Marcus on October 11, 2008, 4:38 pm, in reply to "Some clothing ("Smoker's Lungs Hoodie")"
Onza's post brought back a memory. Several years ago, I had gone to one of the places I smoke on campus and was approached by a young woman who asked if she could join me on the bench where I was sitting. (I was the only person in the are who was smoking.) I said yes, and before she sat down she removed her jacket to reveal a tee shirt that depicted a picture of a smoker's lungs with a slightly enlarged heart between them. I complemented her and asked if she had made it herself. She had originally made it as a project for a marketing class she had taken, but had begun wearing it when she noticed the reactions she got from smokers and non-smokers alike. I have to paraphrase her comments: "It's weird, anti-smokers use it as an invitation to give me a hard time about my smoking when it should be obvious that I don't mind and kind of like the idea that my lungs look like that; and I've had smokers ask me to put on my jacket, because they don't want to think about what their lungs look like."
We chatted through a couple of cigarettes and i learned that she was a 24 year old returning student. She started smoking when she was in her late teens and had quit for about a month when she was 22 years old, but had started again because "It didn't feel normal not to smoke." Again, I paraphrase: "It took more than a week to stop hacking up goo ever morning and then it didn't seem right. I'd had a morning cough since I was a teenager, it was just as much a part of waking up as my first cigarette. My sinuses opened up again and I realized how inflamed they had been and that didn't seem normal, either; but it was when I had to sprint for two blocks to catch the last bus home and wasn't totally gasping for air when I got on it that I realized just how much of an effect smoking had had on me. After I started again, I actually looked forward to things going back to the way they were."
I didn't see her again until about a year ago when M G F and I were out one evening and ran into her at a bar where she had just finished her shift. I asked if she was the lung tee shirt girl and she recognized me. She's still smoking and still taking pleasure in the idea that her lungs might look like the lungs on her tee shirt.
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