Puff-puff. Cough-cough.

Every day I am appalled by the number of students, or people for that matter, that smoke cigarettes. It’s no longer the 50s. We no longer believe that cigarettes are good for you. We now know they will, in fact, kill you more quickly. Yet people are still lighting up every day.

Why?!?

You know it’s not good for you. You know it’s addicting. You know it costs a ridiculous amount of money to support your habit. But still, each and every day people light up and enjoy cigarettes.

What boggles my mind is that people still pick up the habit to this day. Back in the day, before even our parents were born, they used to think that smoking was actually good for your health. “Guard against throat scratch!” hocks a Pall Mall advertisement from the 50s. Fast forward to 2009, where we know that smoking will almost always lead to lung cancer, among other severe maladies.

Not only that, but when you smoke, you stink like a week old ashtray. Everyone has come home from a party or a restaurant and gotten a whiff of your clothes. It’s not appealing.

But hey, if you want to die sooner than me, then so be it. Enjoy that cancer stick and standing out in the rain and cold to enjoy the little white roll of death. What really irks me is how oblivious to the rest of the world these smokers usually are.

The rest of us, the ones that enjoy breathing clean air, don’t want to suck in your dirty smog. Walking down Dorm Road to get to class I try to dodge and avoid the puffs of smoke and the person it’s emitting from.

There’s even a Facebook group entitled “You Were Sexy Until I Saw That Cigarette In Your Hand.” The group boasts more than 80,000 members. That should speak for itself.

If you want to keep smoking, please do it far, far away from me. There’s nothing I hate more than having to walk through a cloud of your smoke.

By the way, I’m that guy that coughs very loudly when there’s a smoker around. I aim to be as loud and annoying as possible. I hope all smokers find that practice of mine, and many others, to be a thorn in their nicotine-filled sides.