re: #298 Alouette

Zedushka smokes and he knows I hate it. He is banned from smoking in the house so he has made himself a “homeless guy’s camp” in the garage where my new car lives. I have caught him sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom. He thinks that if he keeps the window open that I won’t notice.

And he also drinks gallons of Coca Cola even though he is a diabetic.

I don’t know what to do to keep him from offing himself with cigarettes and soda. Telling him that it’s bad for his health just pisses him off.

I can not begin to tell you how hard it is to quit cigarettes. Yes nicotine is fiendishly addictive, yes there is the social aspect of it and the way it becomes habit. All of that conspires. But the thing that non-smokers don’t get is that once you’ve gotten off of them, and gone through the sweats and the irrational desire to eat people and use their femurs as toothpicks as a legitimate response to petty annoyances… the thing that non smokers don’t get is that if and when after a week or a month or even a year after you quit and you do break down and have “just one” it is like sex. It is that intoxicating - and then boom you are right back at it.

I am not even close to defending an addiction I fought with a lot. Of course it is terrible for you. Of course cigarettes are horrible and the smoker knows this. He already feels horrible about it and then tries to only have them a little and on the sly. Nothing will make him feel worse than a woman he loves telling him how bad it is (he knows) that you love him (he knows) tears (he sees) and the frustration that he feels because he was already hiding it.

You are of course correct that he needs to quit, but the standard Jewish guilt approach will only decrease Shalom Bayit.