Quitter

It always seemed to me spectacularly moronic to smoke cigarettes while living in Bangalore - smoking is clearly not the most intelligent choice to be made to begin with...but just being in traffic here one is essentially smoking all kinds of noxious garbage. Lighting a cigarette while in traffic behind kilometers of openly putrid autorickshaws, third world personal vehicles, and a fleet of city busses with ages-old smoke-billowing engines was kind of like crossing my heart and wishing for an early death.

I honestly have no idea why I started smoking in the first place - statistics tell me I probably thought that it looked cool? Really? I mean, am I, have I ever been such a complete sheep? Whatever the reason was I laid it off enough to have quit some time ago, just like that, for about five years. I literally dropped those cigarettes one day, along with all meat and dairy, and spent the next five years tuning up.
Somehow my lifestyle in India didn't really sum that up nicely though and I ended up on the enabling end of the filter yet again.

Since then I've reminisced many times about the day I decided all in the course of ten seconds never to touch another cigarette again (and didn't, though admittedly 'forever' lasted only five years) - recounting for Hamid how ridiculously easy it had been to quit them and with the same breath inhaling one freshly-lit, further embellishing it all with a comment on what a yuck smoking is.

I finally decided that every time I actually said or thought how disgusting it is while smoking that would be the moment to put the damn thing out. I mean, who can hold a cigarette in one hand, despising it, and still smoke it?

And voila, I've quit.
And I'm quite certain that forever will last a whole lot longer than five years this time.
I spent plenty of time running around discotheques and parties with a drink and a smoke in each hand, creating whatever the image is that goes along with being a young urban social butterfly - but I'm much more interested now in cultivating my image as a young-ish urban wife and maybe even more importantly, a mother.
I always said that I would quit all the bad habits at least one year before I wanted to get pregnant - and it's about that time.

Plus, there is no species on Earth more perplexing, disturbing, or just plain icky than the 'smoking mommy.'