The fact that tomorrow is Ash Wednesday - "Give up your favourite things and live miserably until you cave in during Lent Day" - reminds me of a party I was at. A boy came up to me and blew smoke rings in my face. He had fat lips like Jay-Z and with an expensive cigar in hand - he didn't expect to be slapped lightly across the face. He didn't understand how un-cool his attempt at being cool was, writes Orla Tinsley.
Smoking makes you 'smokin', some people might argue, but it just makes me fume.
The mantra "smoking is bad for you" was drilled into me as a child, and I didn't need much convincing. I even turned up my nose at my godmother who we used to greet in my Nana's kitchen on Sunday mornings amid a stench of stale cigarette fumes. My chronic lung disease - I have cystic fibrosis - meant smoking was always a big faux pas, which made me dutifully hate it as a child, and curiously crave a try as a teenager.
A simple whiff of it would tickle my nostrils, teasingly. I began to love the smell because it was bad, the way a strong whiff of petrol can smell on a hot day.
I tried a cigarette once on a television set, in an attempt to look cool, like the rest of the extras. After taking two drags I ended up hurling up in the bathroom, out of sheer physical and mental disgust. The rest of the day was spent crawling around after the others like the black sheep of the flock. Peer pressure had hurtled me into a dimension of lunacy, but luckily I had realised it.
I have to confess I am not entirely innocent. I am a Jelaholic. Any sugar coated jelly renders me hopping and clapping like a seal. Sugar dipped soothers, cola bottles and multi-coloured boomerangs (they do exist) send me tripping happily off. Mentally I need them, but I could give them up anytime. At least that's what I would like to think.
While I can engage in BJB (Bad Jelly Behaviour) practically anywhere, diabetic clinics excluded, the in-between places where smoking occurs frustrates me. It is banned in all places of work, but I generally work at my desk in college and still manage to encounter it every day. Instead of a Snow White burst of birds tweeting and a breezy wind when I open my bedroom window in the morning, I am greeted by my punishment for being on the first floor.
Beside the main door there are cleaners or fellow students, desperately needing a drag. They stand at the main door, caught between one place and the next, just for a cigarette.
Outside the hospital I attend, a recorded voice booms: "Smoking is not permitted in the entrance or doorway." On my last count, there were four people happily puffing away outside the place I go to clear up my lungs.
Another place is hospital toilets, where smokers frequent for that sneaky cigarette escape, oblivious of how their guilty pleasure sneaks out into the atmosphere.
The affair with cigarettes is a convoluted one that my smoker friend tells me spirals into a routine - the secrecy in younger years, hiding from your parents, the cult-like groups of smokers who congregate unable to smell the scent that non-smokers recoil from.
Young smokers are oblivious to the message they're sending out - "We need cigarettes; it gives us a sense of identity and community. We are cool. We are sophisticated."
Ninety per cent of deaths from lung cancer are caused by smoking and when you see the reckless way people take it up, despite warnings, it's not surprising. Lung damage does not seem to factor in with young smokers and neither does common sense. Smoking of any kind sneaks into addiction, in the same way one casual pint becomes two and then five.
Smoking as 007, Daniel Craig makes my heart race. If they turned him inside out he wouldn't get a second look. If we all turned inside out and our insides were our outsides, you could spot a smoker a mile off. The outside may look good, until the yellow fingernails and spotted teeth kick in, but the inside is the real mess.
While on the surface smokers are gaining status, social clout or a sense of rebellion, with a 10-15 year shorter life expectancy than non-smokers and the permanent damage that's devouring your lungs, now would be the time to take a serious look at that guilty pleasure.
Tomorrow provides a window to maybe clear the air, for everyone. Replacing it with jelly-induced diabetes is hardly the way to go, but maybe a break for Lent as a shot at alleviating a life threatening habit could work.
Baz Luhrmann immortalised the words of Chicago columnist Mary Schmich in song when he said "The race is long, and, in the end, it's only with yourself". Why make it harder to reach the finishing line by panting all the way there? Life is too precious to be puffed away.