Salient

I am a complete failure. I’ve known it for years, ever since the very first day I entered the adult world (kindergarten). I presented my self-portrait to my teacher, expecting her to exclaim in my mother’s voice, “Juliet, I just don’t know where you get it from. I’m so proud!”, when she instead offered a rather harsh critique, suggesting that I should, in future, include a torso in my representations of the human form. I thought about trying to explain to her the subtleties of abstraction, but instead I took it in my stride. A bad review is a bad review.

Over the years, the taste of failure has become as familiar to me as the taste of toothpaste. I was that girl who always shrieked and froze when she was a metre away from the high-jump bar. I was that girl who only made the B netball team when there were only enough players for two teams. I was that girl who listened to the pretty adjudicator coo “You’re all winners”, as she handed out certificates to the three other people in the school speech competitions.

I learned early on that there is no point in ‘reaching for the stars’. I’ll inevitably fail to reach them—I even failed to grow to an average height.

Over the holidays I decided to give up smoking. My friends snorted when I told them—they didn’t believe for a second that I would succeed. ‘Humph’, I thought to myself, ‘I’ll show them’. And I did. I showed them that they were right. I’m a failure.

This time though, I’m not sure I wanted to succeed. Some people like chocolate, others coffee, others wine. I like smoking. Is that really so wrong?

According to the general public in New Zealand, yes. Bloody sanctimonious gits. I sat down for dinner recently with my mother’s friends, when one of them turned to me and said “You’re a lovely girl, but you stink of smoke.” I thought it was rude to tell anyone that they stink of anything over dinner, but it seems my terrible habit justified this harsh little outburst.

Do these people think that we don’t understand the dangers of smoking? Do they think that their comments will inspire us to run to the bathrooms in tears to flush away our terrible habit? I doubt it. In fact, I think they’d be rather put out if we did, as they’d then have to look for other ways to assert their moral superiority.

There is only one thing worse than sanctimonious non-smokers—quitters. My brother has recently joined this traitorous group. Last night, as I whinged piteously to him about having the flu, he managed to slip in “Oh, being sick is a great opportunity to give up smoking”. Prat.

It is almost impossible to enjoy a cigarette these days without being confronted with a gruesome image of a decomposing lung or a stupid anti-smoking catch phrase. Those ‘trendy’ anti-smoking advertisements at bus stops are so inflammatory that every time I see one I want to smoke my entire packet of cigarettes at once. If I see another failed musician pose under the quote “It’s just a turn-off eh” I will hunt him down and smoke his penis.

At least we smokers rally together. I ran into my high school drama teacher last time I was in Christchurch. A keen smoker, she patted me on the head when she saw that the nasty pictures on my packet of B&H were covered up with holographic kitten stickers.

Of course, I don’t believe that smokers should be allowed to jeopardise the health of others, and so I support the smoking ban in bars, restaurants, and public places. But this nonsense about making parks smoke-free? Fascism. Next we’ll be rounded up and marched into reservations, where we’ll be forced to wear placards stating our preferred brand and daily tobacco intake.

It has been, for me, one of those years that has really made me think about my own mortality. A number of family friends have passed away, struck down unexpectedly and prematurely. I realise that smoking has terrible consequences on one’s health, but really, death is random. I’d rather go like my grandmother—cleaning a pub, fag in hand, than die at the end of a long life of smug self-deprivation.

So maybe I’m not a complete and utter failure? At least I manage, sometimes ten times a day, to blow smoke in the face of social prejudice.

Each year in New Zealand, about 24,000 non-smokers die of non-smoking related illnesses. I, for one, am determined to never become one of those statistics.

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