When someone was an AZ.OL to U and U want to vent about, this is the place. You can do it. Just breath deep and start swinging!
January 18, 2010…
I had a very large (ok, she was down right obese) woman tell me a few weeks back that I should quit smoking. “It’s very bad for your health you know, and so is second hand smoke”, she said with a Dr. Oz kind of authority. Why she followed me to my 30-yard distance away from the building entrance to point this out when she obviously wasn’t a smoker is unknown.
I smiled and had to bite my tongue rather firmly. I am a polite Canadian girl after all. What I dearly wanted to say to her was, “Yes, and I hear that being grotesquely overweight can lead to diabetes, gout, clogged arteries, several heart conditions and premature death, and maybe you should quit eating”, but then that would just be insulting and down right rude.
I have to question what makes it politically correct for her to tell me, a perfect stranger, how to live my life while it’s not politically correct for me to comment on her super sized McDonalds double arched ass? Some might say that it’s because of the second hand smoke issue. After all, there is no such thing as second hand fat, unless you are trapped in your Air Transat seat next to a big mama during a 4-hour flight while holding your bladder because there is no way you’re getting to the bathroom until the plane has landed.
In my opinion, there is such a thing as second hand fat. Let us explore big mama’s household where big mama, and little-big jr. eat the same fatty, non-nutritional meals day after day while they watch Jerry Springer on the television. If mama is feeding her child the same garbage that made her so enormously overweight as to put her name on the 6-feet-under shortlist, is her routine of wielding her bad nutritional habits upon him not a form of second hand smoke, in the philosophical sense?
I’m not arguing that smoking is good, but I am supporting the old cliché that people in glass houses should not throw stones. I’m also pointing out that some opinions belong to your inside voice, or here on a blog post with no names attached. 
I have been honing my habit of putting my money in my mouth and burning it 20 times a day for over 30 years. I’m a 70’s kid who grew up surrounded by smokers in the perfectly acceptable realm of doing it anywhere they damned well pleased. It’s going to take a lot more than her rude intrusion into my personal life choices to successfully stop me from smoking. She and I are both on the same 6-feet-under shortlist, but for different reasons. It’s kind of like asking me to skip breakfast for the rest of my life, while ironically that’s what big mama should be doing.
Regardless, we all have vices. We do things that bother others, continue to abuse our bodies in one way, shape form or fashion, while readily pointing fingers at others for their vices. It is who we are and often what makes us tick. Just for the record, mirrors are equally as useful for applying makeup and fixing your hair as they are for revealing your flaws. I know I have many, and smoking is one of them. Not all flaws are on the surface, and not all smokers want to be slaves to their unhealthy habit anymore than overweight people wanting to stay overweight. Ultimately, the point of this blog post is “think first, speak later”, even if you’re only sending out smoke signals.
January 20, 2010
