A couple months ago I danced with a girl who wore a shirt that said “lips that touch alcohol will never touch mine”. Now, if I was a charming, romancing sort of dancer I would take that as a challenge. Alas, I was, and still am, not. I was the kind of dancer who was analyzing how one should best apply her weight for maximal radial velocity during a star-promenade. So I took her t-shirt, the fact that I drank two glasses of wine at an impressive dinner party the night before and the fact that she was probably younger than most of my students (and certainly younger than what the fiery anthropomorphic incarnation of The Law of The Commonwealth would approve of) as a big neon sign saying “do not hit on her”. Good thing I was (and am still not) also not the kind of dancer who hits on people on the dance floor.
This completely escaped my mind until a few weeks ago. I was reading William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties. In chapter thirty-seven or so, one of the main characters impulsively and reluctantly kissed a man. Later, she found out that he was a drug user who was using drugs right before she kissed him. Her resulting high led to the trademark Gibson use of lots of commas and disjointed sentences applied in a psychedelic but reasonable way. I, however, as I do too often, digress.
Smoking is really the least attractive thing for me. If you ever find me attracted to you and want to get rid of me, smoke a cigarette. In fact, I should make a t-shirt that says something like “lips that touch cigarettes will never touch mine”. However, unlike the girl with the “alcohol” shirt I am not cute and adorable and random people who smoke do not hit on me. So I really don't need to waste valuable chest space for a sign. I could, instead, use the chest space for pockets that hold fountain pens. If I had ten times the testosterone and one-tenth the brain cells I currently have I would wear a shirt that says something involving sucking smoke. I would also be weightlifting at the beach and drinking bad beer instead of writing this.
See, women, no matter how attractive they are, just falls off my scale of attractiveness as soon as they smoke. They don't drop to zero, or even the negatives. They just get taken off the chart. In Magic: The Gathering terms, smoking removes them from the game, while something like, say, murdering their ex-spouse puts them in the graveyard. In more mundane terms, a cute girl smoking causes me to think “she's cute, also, semicolon, ick”. (Well, I suppose that was not really "mundane" as most people can't differentiate between a semicolon and a comma or a period today.) Smoking does not make me hate you. It just makes you completely unattractive to me. This also applies to men.
Really, I'm not sure why this is the case. I've never kissed a smoker, so I can't tell you whether it's because they taste like ashtrays. Maybe it's because the only smoker I knew when I was growing up was someone I did not like. Maybe this is some rebellious streak against corporate America and what it wants me to think is beautiful. Maybe it has to do with the though experiment titled “What If I Dated a Robot Who Exhaled Poison?” I did when I was twelve. Who knows.
I have no problems with many other things, within moderation. Alcohol, for example; as long as she helps someone when she can. (Country music reference alert!)
I could potentially dig further to figure out what causes all these behaviors; all the way back to the butterfly that carried a speck of nicotine on its wings who flapped them in my ears when I was asleep in my mother's womb. I'm not that kind of person, however. So I suppose I will shove this into the “box of mystery” that contains questions such as “Why do I love bacon?” and “Why do people read Harry Potter fanfic?” and call it a day. How about that?
[ add comment ] ( 46 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Archives
