Cigarettes Suck!

I just spent five days in Jasper with my best friend, who I have not seen in four years. The visit was great, really honestly an excellent time... except for the cigarettes. She smokes a lot, and I have lived in a non-smoking house for about 10 years now... in a non-smoking province it seems. I have been back to Ontario many times since my escape out west when I was 16, and people still smoke like crazy there, sure maybe because its the same people I used to know, and the people they know, but none the less I find myself in smoking households way more often in Ontario then in B.C. I would say 90% of the people I know here... and I am a social butterfly of sorts, do not smoke cigarettes, and even of the ones who do, the majority of them do not smoke inside.

So I was unprepared for the cigarette smokers in Jasper, especially for my friend. I was ok for the first day and a half until I started to feel the smoke in the back of my throat and nose. I started coughing, and feeling generally ill and tired. It amazed me that she could smoke so many cigarettes when just being in the general area of some of them made me feel so sick. She tried to spare me the brunt of it by sitting by the open window with a fan, but honestly it barely helps. For a non-smoker, you can smell it and feel it anyway. I just resolved myself to deal with it for the remaining days, what else could I do? I did not want to make her feel any worse about it then she apparently already did; she apologized a lot.

This morning, my last at her place, I woke up with a very sore throat and I am not sure as of yet, if it is a cold I have caught, or just the abuse of my poor throat. I drove all the way home, 5 hours, feeling really shitty and zombie-like, with my head feeling congested and heavy. Then when I got here and opened my suitcase... well you can imagine what my clothes smelled like. It's going to take a few days to get it out of my system and off of my stuff, how nice a souvenir!

YUCK!