We all engage in rather strange, inane hobbies.  Girls don’t understand why boys spend hours playing online RPGs, boys don’t understand why girls spend so much time at Marcella buying barettes.  Men have sticky handkerchiefs, and women have those handy neck massagers at the back of their underwear drawers.  But gender aside, the oddest hobby of them all has to be smoking.

   It takes me two pesos and seven minutes to smoke a cigarette, which robs me blind of two pesos and seven minutes off my life.  Like many smokers, I have lost touch with my seven-minute hobby: I don’t know, and I don’t care for, why I smoke.  All I know is that a cigarette is a good way to kill seven minutes.

   As a hobby, smoking is extremely strange and completely inane.  Drug addicts can justify snorting cocaine: family problems, personal setbacks, depressive episodes.  Nymphomaniacs can blame their perverted sexual behaviors because they have hyperactive strata in their id complexes.  Smokers don’t… no wait, smokers can’t.

   Some smokers give all sorts of reasons for smoking, and to be honest, I don’t buy into them.  Flavor-wise, cigarettes are extremely unappealing: there is no “flavor” to speak of when it comes to sucking a burning rope.  We smokers have diminished oxygen capacities, which means that we easily get tired.  The myriad health problems associated with smoking makes tobacco a biological weapon in itself.  More people have died from cigarette smoking than from World War II.

   But for every reason that there is to stop smoking, there is no good reason to continue smoking.  The only problem is that I can’t quit just yet.  I could care less.