Someone once told me I smoked like a worried mother of twelve kids. At the moment I was smoking with my arms crossed tightly, sopping wet, fretting about trying to help corral a group of people safely across Rome from a storm-shaken train terminal to the bus that would take us back to our campus--a bus that was miles away from us and leaving in ten minutes--so it was probably a fair assessment. Sometimes I think part of the reason I smoked for so long was to master the elements of the process (fancy match-lighting tricks, inhaling properly, not tapping ash nervously off the end every two seconds) to the point where I seemed blase and worldy, not harried about running late for carpool.

I must have either achieved that goal or grown beyond thinking it important, because a little over a year ago I quit for good. I had been meaning to for awhile, and had even made several (read 3-4 month long) attempts at stopping, but it took a respiratory infection and a mounting desire to at least think about having kids to get me to take quitting seriously.

Once I did, after slowly cutting back and then stopping cold turkey, I swore that I wasn't going to turn into one of those prosetylizing ex-smokers who look down on all those who haven't yet kicked the demon weed and go around lecturing people about how they did it. And to be fair, I really haven't. Except in my head.

I feel now like one of those AA people who has to go around apologizing to everyone they were a bastard to when they were drinking or on drugs. I want to go door to door and beg forgiveness from all my non-smoking friends who I made sit next to me while I was smoking or dragged into the smoking section at restaurants. Honestly, your sense of smell is shot when you smoke, and at the time I had no idea how much even the slightest exposure to smoke makes your clothes and hair reek.

Now I do, and I get impatient when I see smokers being inconsiderate of other people. Especially when other people = me. I'm okay with people continuing to smoke even after they've said time and again they were quitting (and even lived for months as 'non-smokers' who bummed cigarettes off us every time we went out with them...yeah, if you don't buy them yourselves it doesn't count as smoking), and I'm even okay with sitting in smoking sections (especially if the majority of the group is smokers). It was really hard for the first month or two after I quit not to feel some resentment that the only help these people were giving me in my struggle was blowing smoke in my face, but I'm over that now.

But how hard is it to make sure that your cigarette is actually stubbed out after you discard it in the ashtray, really? How can you not notice that smoke is curling up from your finished butt--for five minutes, mind you--like some fancy incense centerpiece of death. I never used to do that (probably because I was the anal mother of twelve who got all twitchy and rainman if every last little ember was not put out, but still).

I got mine for being judgmental, though, because I was so occupied in gaping in disbelief at the smoking ashtray that I ended up accidentally pouring part of a glass of water down the front of my shirt. Go me!