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The Selfishness of Smokers


My home state of Iowa is the the midst of one of the smoking ban debates. The legislature is getting ready to vote on one of the toughest bans yet and the smokers are donning their martyr suits and bemoaning the end of democracy and the pursuit of happiness again. I had to listen to yet another indignant rant from one of my smoking sisters over Easter dinner with my father “amening” in the background. Both of my sisters smoke, but my dad quit almost three years ago when he had his first stroke. Despite the fact that he now suffers from smoking induced COPD and is dying, he is still a smoker at heart. My sisters like to make themselves out to be the victims now that they are banned from smoking in my parents’ house for good. They are supposed to go outside but if it is a bit chilly or rainy or snowing, they will simply go out to the garage and smoke the air blue. Of course it seeps in to the house but not enough to bring down the wrath of either of my folks though I have complained about it often. I have asthma. Smoke does terrible things to me. I can’t even walk quickly past a group of smokers without coughing and getting congested. I try not to cough though because this invites jeers and not so under the breath comments despite the fact that I am just trying to breath and not being insulting. Smokers don’t care. They are the victims. I am wrong to want to breath?

I am led to believe by the comments to my comment at the Des Moines Register discussion that I am wrong and should just keep my non-smoking, needing to breath, asthmatic self locked up in my home so that the smokers of the world can exercise their Constitutional right to impose their habit on others. My objection is that I don’t go to places where there is very likely to be smoke and on those rare occasions I do, I suck it up – literally. But when I am trying to go to the gym or shop for groceries or just walk down Whyte Ave after a movie at the Princess, I am enveloped in smoke. Alberta has really strict indoor smoking policies which basically prohibit it entirely. As a result, smokers (and I have never lived anywhere that I have encountered so many smokers) just crowd the doorways. Mainly to be asses about it. Here they joke loudly and try to embarass when you can’t hold in a cough or try to circle wide around them. They know. They just don’t give a fuck because they willfully refuse to believe that anyone would avoid cigarrette smoke for health reasons. We are just being elitist and don’t like the smell. God, that last argument is so lame I don’t know how anyone with even a half a brain can use it with a straight face. When I was growing up, I didn’t know that smoke really stunk up your clothing. It wasn’t until I went off to college and was visiting home that I realized how awfully offensive I had smelled to people as a child and teen. As a teacher, I had many students, especially when I was on Des Moines’s east side, who just reeked of smoke. I felt terribly for them. Other kids would say rude things or beg not to sit near by. I would think about myself and my siblings and wonder if I had been that bad. I know I was. What an awful burden my dad placed on me. It was selfish of him.

I put up with my sisters and father only until my daughter was born and then I demanded that they smoke outside or we wouldn’t visit. I was a bit surprised when my dad went along and thus forced my sisters as well. He grumbled a bit, to test me I think, but I stood my ground.

Will smoked. Never indoors though or in the truck when we were traveling. He hated that he did though. Cursed himself roundly for falling into the trap. He quit with the help of a hypnotist and would have probably been done for good but the damage his illness did to his brain undid his quitting as well. I finally just arbitarily pulled the plug on his smoking when he went into the nursing home because he was nearly blind and his balance was so bad I was afraid for his safety. Even with dementia though, he continued to be a very considerate smoker. So it’s not just the addiction but the type of person one isthat causes one to be a jerk to non-smokers.

Writer’s Block


I can write about anything but my stories right now it seems and I am a little frustrated. I guess it’s a good thing that I can write at all and so I will try to focus on the up side, but I feel a little like I am screaming into a wormhole. Maybe there are people on the other side who are hearing me but I feel a bit alone here on the blog. I have my loyal commenters and they help, but the anonymous come and read? and go without a sound, just a click of the counter. Maybe it is feed back I am missing? Maybe I should start a page for a piece of fiction? But I worry about exposing my fiction to the web on my own because my publishers consider stuff on blogs as having been previously published which is ironic since they don’t give you writing experience credit for being a blogger in the first place.

I still haven’t heard back on any of the stuff that is out and the superstitious side of me thinks it is because I haven’t gotten my residency card or a work permit yet. If I had one or the other, things would start to happen. I have gotten my first approval and Rob sent in the fee for my work permit which I should have by the end of this month or beginning of the next. The PR card itself is waiting on an FBI fingerprint background check. We didn’t do that back in October because it wasn’t clear that CIC wanted both that and a state check. Another example of how badly worded the application directions are. They have been sent and will take about a month to get back. Add to that another month for CIC to get the results and process them and we are now looking at June for residency at the earliest. Frustrating. 

My mood of the day is frustrated. It’s not spring. I can’t focus to write really. I feel fat. My child is crabby. And the coyotes are too afraid of Cat to eat her like we hoped they would. Seriously, we have a Cat that is too feral to keep indoors but too tame to dump in the woods and a fields all around us stocked with coyote. Since it has been warm, Cat has been living outdoors instead of in the garage and not one blessed thing has happened to her expect perhaps she is keeping the coyotes away from our yard. I kid you not, even the toms in the neighborhood are afraid of her, so the idea that she would frighten wilder animals is not that far-fetched.

Jordan was home for supper last night. She brought her “friend”. He is an ex-boyfriend whom I am not fond of simply because of the things that Rob and Farron have related to me. Jordan has a way of attracting decidedly off-beat, and in need of social skills, young men. She was telling us about the latest to be attracted to her, a young man with two inoperable brain tumors who works at the liquor store with her. He has attached himself to her like an extra appendage and she is too polite to reclaim her space. And it’s not just the brain tumor. She would feel sorry for him regardless because he is just one of those people who appears to have been raised by wolves but probably just had your average two people who shouldn’t have ben parents upbringing that so many of us get stuck with. Except that most of us survive that and he didn’t. The brain tumors are just icing on this rather untasty cake.

Katy was quite taken with Jordan’s friend because he played games with her before dinner. She gets so excited when either of the older girls comes to visit but she doesn’t understand that they are much too old to be the sisters that she longs for. Jordan’s friend promised to play games again after dinner but instead sat at the table chatting – as adults are wont to do. After a while of waiting patiently in the living room, she ran upstairs and burst into tear. I went up and comforted her. Her feelings were hurt and it’s hard to explain to her that she just isn’t going to have a sister kind of relationship with Jordan or Farron or anyone they bring home. That is just something she will have to learn over time. There is too much of a gap and despite their willingness, neither of the older girls is going to be able to bridge it given the short amount of time Katy sees them and that will likely only get worse as they get older too.

Environment Canada promised sun today and it’s 2:30 and only just peeking. I am trying to be patient but I want spring. I want warmth and sun and dry.

Brood Brangelina


I used to read the celeb bashing news/blog Defamer quite a bit in the early widowed days. It was funny. Mean. Biting. Sarcastic. And really, really funny. Except for the grocery check-out displays of the obligatory mags designed to make me feel inferior and underprivileged in comparison to the rich and famous of the world (and whenever Rob visits WWTDD and reads me the more outrageous stuff), I don’t get much celeb news reverent or otherwise. However I was tag surfing here at WordPress and ran across a Defamer piece on Brad and Angie’s menagerie of wee ones that I had to share. Seems all is not peaceful or blended in a home with four very small children too closely spaced in age and acquistion. The boys fight and the girls fight and apparently all three of the adopted ones beat on the bio-baby. Not only that but in order to get a moment’s peace, Brad and Angie – the Dalia Lama eqvialents of parents – feed their children junk food! Makes you smile a bit, doesn’t it? To know that even parents with staff can’t crowd control any better than normal parents. What was really funny about the article was the comments. Most of the people replying shared stories of their own war-torn childhoods and sibling unrest. My own family is comprised of four children. We fall in a five year age span that conspired to make my mother’s life such that when warm weather finally arrived in the late spring, she would send us all outdoors as soon as breakfast was over and lock the screen doors, front and back, behind us. We were only allowed in to pee. If we needed water, there was a hose in the yard. At lunch she would call us to the picnic table and feed us sandwiches and kool-aid. Afterwards she would cart everything back inside along with anyone young enough to nap and the rest of us were locked out again until just before my father would get home from work. Nothing Brady Bunch or Mama Partridge about that. News that the oldest Jolie-Pitt son was beating on the younger reminded me of the many times I pummeled my little brother. Right up until the day he chased me through the house trying to poke me with a wooden pole attached to a flag we’d gotten for the fourth of July. I managed to slam my bedroom door shut just as he launched the thing at me javelin style. It drilled a hole right through the door. We covered it up with an Andy Gibb poster on one side and Shaun Cassidy on the other. It was a month or more before our mom discovered it and we were forced to confess to the hole’s origins. The hole is still there. My dad was too cheap to replace a whole door just for a little hole. Sibling spacing. A lesson for us all.