It’s like how Dr Zizmor fixes your complextion by putting lipstick on you and doing your hair! http://tripinbrooklyn.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/020303_ad09_drz1.jpg
Seriously though. Please stop smoking, people.
Thromboangitis obliterans, effects the hands, makes it harder to use the correct paramaters on your camera.
My gal sent me a link to this thing a couple of months ago (I’m a lifelong smoker who has set a reasonably firm goal to quit in the next couple of years, in time for my 40th). It’s clever, but I kind of feel like they went overboard trying to prove their point.
Folks, smoking may effect your reproductive viability. It can also temporarily effect your physical potency (alone, or in conjunction with other factors, like stress, weight, blood pressure). That said, I’m prreeettyyy sure it doesn’t cause your peepee to literally shrink to like, half its original size.
Scratch that… I’m definitely sure.
I wonder if this might be correlation rather than (or more than) causation.
Smoking is correlated with lower income, which is also correlated with rougher working conditions, or whatever.
Note: Definitely makes you smell horrible, get more cancer, get lots more heart disease, spend money on cigarettes, etc.
You’re going to prepare to quit by smoking for a couple more years? It won’t get easier and you’ll never be fully ready for it. Just drop the expectation that it be easy and do it. The most helpful thing in the first days is, if you feel like you are going to break down and have a cigarette, put it off for an hour. Then remind yourself that you survived the last hour and put it off for another hour.
Just think how well hung you’d be if you didn’t smoke…
I must say that I’m not a particularly big believer in the accelerated skin ageing thing. For whatever reason all the smokers I know have babyfaces, including me, though I quit a few years back.
It’ll certainly wreck your teeth and generally mess you up otherwise though.
Smoking turns you into a zombie… QUIT NOW OR YOU WILL BE TURNED INTO A ZOMBIE!!!
http://9gag.com/gag/6628315 (best I can come up with a quick google search)
I smoked for about seven years (not a lifetime habit, for sure, but still plenty hard to break) and quit about 12 years ago alternating between the patch and the gum, and keeping a ready supply of toothpicks. It’s no fun, but it can be done, and while–I know–it seems absolutely impossible now other than as a vague “I’ll get to it in the next couple of years, most likely,” it will never get any easier than it would be today. And I know you didn’t comment here looking for a “Hey, just quit now!” pep talk, but, seriously, you could totally do it. (And the patch doesn’t appear to have gotten significantly more expensive since I used it–which means that it was the same as about 12 packs of cigarettes when I quit, but, depending on where you live, it only costs about as much as 5 or 6 packs now.)
On my first attempt I ended up quitting for about a year and then backsliding for several months. The good news on that score is that it was significantly easier to quit the second time, because of how quickly I noticed all the gains (breathing capacity and smell/taste sensitivity chief among them) I’d made over the previous year disappearing.
I think you’re trying to be helpful. I’ve been smoking for a quarter century; trust me, I’m laboring under no “expectation” that it’s going to be easy.
8+ years ago, I stopped using alcohol, marijuana, crack, and heroin. Nicotine, however, has been tied to practically every action and waking moment of my life since I was a barely even a teenager: not only have my previous attempts to quit resulted in depression, flu-like symptoms, fatigue, and bursts of irrational rage, but I have trouble conceiving the very idea of “waking up” or “finishing a meal” without the linked behavior of lighting up. It’s the most insidious drug addiction I’ve ever faced, and I’ve faced plenty.
Putting a hard date limit in the future may strike you as silly, but it’s how I feel best prepared to deal with it.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a “babyface,” by any means, but people usually are astonished to know my actual age. They typically guess something like ten years younger than I am.
I’m assuming this is because of my not-overly-aged skin, not my perceived maturity level… 
Not sure how old all of you are, but I assure you as the years go on, it ages people for sure. It might take a while to catch up.
I gotta admit one of the reasons I quit (after 25 years) was vanity. Who wants to get even uglier when you get older! 
But seriously, even though it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I miss it all the time (christ, I love the smell of other people smoking) I feel 10 times better, get to be even more active than before and know that I will be healthier for a lot longer.
For me it’s been 43 years smoking Pall Mall straights. They have been the most-constant friend a boy could want, and the best mediator of my ADHD.
But as 60 looms --days away – I would like to be quit of them; they’re starting to slow me up. During the past two years I’ve tapered down to 4 per day, and those are purely to feed the nicotine habit. As with you, nicotine is my bitch goddess, and I’m figuring my next move is to e-cigs for a less-noxious delivery system.
The funny/ironic thing is, I find myself worrying about the safety of the e-cig loads…“what will these do to me?” Silly human race.
Well, back when I was drinking/smoking/snorting everything that looked like it could be drunk/smoked/snorted, I used to get on a pretty high horse about anti-depressants and other pharma products. I don’t want those weird brain pills to screw me up, maannn! We are, indeed, absurd.
I’m also considering e-cigarettes as a quitting mechanism. At this point, I figure I’ve done some fairly irreversible damage (yes, kids, I know that it is never too late!!1!), so even if they didn’t ultimately help me quit, at least there might be some harm reduction.
Check out the twin study (with picture) that Jim linked above. It doesn’t entirely bury all correlational objections (even twins could have different work environments, and so on) but it strongly suggests that there isn’t some other factor at work.
While there was no desaturation as a result of my smoking habit in my teens and college years, even though I have been quit now for upwards of 20 years, recent X-rays show there is permanent scaring “consistent with smoking.” Kids, don’t start!
Wow, maybe that’s why it was okay to smoke during the 50s and 60s. Photoshop didn’t exist yet!
This reminds me of the lies put out in the Faces of Meth ads. It is amazing what conclusions you can imply by cherrypicking data.
Rule of thumb: if someone with an agenda says a drug does something, don’t believe them. It doesn’t matter whether the agenda is good or bad, they will lie to you. The only way you can find out what a drug actually does is to look it up yourself, be it nicotine, caffeine, marijuana, ecstasy, crack cocaine, or meth. And by George, if it is a police officer that says it, trust it even less than a lie.
Edit: And talking of drug scares, does anybody remember krokodil? It turns out none has ever been found in the US (this from the DEA!). And the famous paper that claimed to track users was just retracted.
