quittin' smoking

[gwen]

On 3/14/06, ysobelle at aol.com <ysobelle at aol.com> wrote:
> Say I want to go to a show. I can go if I want, but I know there'll be folks swinging large meat cleavers standing on the dance floor. I can go as long as I can avoid the meat cleavers. There's my choice.

HEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That made my day.  Seriously.

As for this whole debate, I'm going to point out a few things:

1) I meant "I support the ban on smoking" semi-facetiously.  See, it's
more that I just don't object to it for my own personal reasons -- I
can't stay at the clubs for very long without my eyes starting to
water heavily if there's heavy smoking going on.  In fact, they're not
just watering, they're hurting in real pain, and I start to lose my
ability to see.  I really really enjoyed going clubbing in SF where I
didn't have that problem.

2) As pointed out, the argument that "I should be able to smoke inside
because *I* want to," is a fairly selfish argument.  People like the
guy (I'm about to go to a meeting, and don't want to look up who right
now) who said he's a severe asthmatic can actually die from cigarette
smoke.  My mother is another of those, and we do have trouble at
restaurants where the non-smoking section isn't really.  I mean, this
is seriously about life or death for some people.  Yah, they don't
have to go... and that would work if...

3) There aren't a reasonable complement of non-smoking bars and clubs
to the smoking ones.  It'd be great to say, "Well, go to the
non-smoking ones," IF we had a non-smoking goth club.  But we don't,
so the only choice really is, "Go to the club where everyone on this
list goes at some point or other, or don't go at all."  That's not
really giving people options here.

4) As I pointed out, going outside to smoke is five minutes of your
time.  It's a small amount of time that you take your smoke out of the
contained area so that all of the people who do have problems with the
smoking can enjoy their night.

Honestly, ideally I'd love to see bars and clubs just go non-smoking
on their own right, but owners think this is death for their
establishment (whatever the truth really is), so they won't until
there's a law for it.  So hey, I don't object to this particular law.

--
gwen.
gamergothgeek