"So I let the weeds grow up/ called them flowers of the common man." Dar Williams Stop Smoking

I had an idea for a story today, and let me tell you, those are hard to come by these days. I hope I get into that fiction class, but it's looking unlikely since we register tomorrow and I still haven't gotten a yes or no from the writing department. Maybe they don't send out rejections. Anyway, I had this idea about a character, a really really old man who used to, as a kid, rhave a job reading the titles in silent movies for the people who couldn't read who now, in his old age, narrarates whatever is going on around him.
I finished my film class today, with an exam that I didn't know about until last night. This is what happens when you don't go to class, but there's no use in yelling at myself now. I don't think, however that I did that badly. I might even scrape by with a B. An A is out of the question, and a C is likely, but I'm hoping for a B.
I am sleeping again which is good, and whenever I have those panicky little moments, I stop and concentrate and make them go away. I won't break. I feel a little bit better, a little stronger, not so tired all the time--a combination of getting more sleep and taking my vitamins. I'm drinking more water too. Hazel has a filter thing and it makes the tap water drinkable. I can't afford bottled water and bottled water always seemed really wasteful to me, all that plastic. I miss the water back home.
The snow is starting to melt and I haven't fallen and broken anything on the ice...as of yet. Snow is really kind of disgusting when it is muddy, and you notice the litter more. I get really bitter about the crap all over campus. Is it so much to ask for you to throw away your trash? And god forbid we put our cigarette butts in the ash trays.
What is it about cigarettes? I just have a really hard time seeing the humanity and intelligence in smokers my age. I mean, okay, so our parents may not have really truly known how horrible smoking was for you, but we have had slideshow presentations and lectures all through our entire lifetimes about how dangerous and unhealthy smoking is. We know this as well as we know the alphabet and yet these people do it anyway. No one gets addicted off the first cigarette. The thing is, these people say, "it took me a while to get used to the taste." which means this was a calculated decision that had to be "gotten used to." My film class smells like an ashtray. I can hardly breathe. My professor asked one day how many people smoked and almost everybody raised their hands, further proving their idiocy (which I knew about long before).
And what makes me even angrier is when "socially conscious people" who dread their hair and wear anti-capitalism/republican/government buttons are the ones smoking, when everybody who knows anything about the corrupt corporate world knows that Tobacco Companies are the worst of the worst. These people won't drink Pepsi or wear Abercrombie and Fitch but they'll throw practically every penny they make (or their parents give them) at these monsters.
And what annoys me more is the people who roll their own cigarettes, make a big production about their nastiness and further announce that they are cooler than all the other smokers. Okay, so they're not supporting RJ. Reynolds. Good for them. They're just coating their lungs with better quality, slightly less addictive, unfiltered SHIT. Shit is shit, people.
Since I was four years old, I haven't been able to rely on my lungs. Sometimes they give out. Sometimes when I am sitting at my desk I realize that my tubes are closing up and breathing becomes a concious, careful movement. Twice a day, in order to be able to walk from class and back without have to use my inhaler, I have to take a low dose of steroids that leave a bitter, powdery taste on my tongue to remind me that breathing is not a given for me. It has taken me a while to come to terms with my own illness, accept that this is how I will have to live for the rest of my life...carefully. So, I guess it is really hard for me to understand people with perfectly healthy lungs who take them for granted. Breathing is freedom. Breathing is a gift. And I guess smoking, to me, is like baptising a beautiful little baby, fingers curled delicately around his little pink lips, with hot chemical waste.