Tobacco Addiction
Tobacco Addiction
things young people say that make old people think
The other day I heard a history student at a local coffee shop confiding to a classmate, “I think I might have tobacco addiction.” He looked down at his very pink hands and ran his thumb over a not-at-all-yellowed fingernail. The young woman reached out an arm and patted him. “There are ways to quit,” she said. “Try edibles.”
“They don’t have edibles for tobacco,” he said, glum.
“They have gummies I think,” she mused. “Or gum? Something chewy anyway.”
Beyond the questionable product knowledge of these 20 year olds, the exchange made me realize how insidiously language affects society. For decades, we (I and my peers) have called tobacco addiction “smoking.” With the legalization of weed, young people call marijuana use “smoking” and tobacco cigarette use, “using.”
This blew my mind because it makes me realize that all the addictive products we use might one day be anathema to the glowing health-crazed, anti-addicts of the future.
Having coffee, getting a drink together, smoking, exercising on machines, chemical sugars, natural sugars, streaming tv shows, gaming apps...
Imagine replacing all your interactions with addictive products with a form of the word “using.”
“Want to use some coffee with me while we have this meeting?”
“Welcome to Carmine’s, would you like to use some wine or maybe use a cocktail?”
“This party can’t end until we all use some cake!”
…and the one that is already part of our vocabulary?
“Mind if I use my phone a second?”
Writing News
I gave a draft of my novel to a first reader! (For the non-writers, my process is to write a piece, let it sit, edit it, let it sit, rewrite it, then send it out to a first reader who is (generally speaking) someone who I find extremely intelligent and well read, who either likes my writing in general or likes writing like the writing that I’m attempting to write. Next I’ll get back notes and edit one last time then I guess I’ll go after getting a new literary agent (my third, I’m that old) - and see what happens next. Hopefully I won’t be too impatient.
This week I also hosted another Pen Parentis Literary Salon, this one featuring four authors—I have interviewed over 300 authors. It’s staggering. This is the reason I never count anything. People get angry I never know when I first met them or how many years ago it was, but I think the history that sticks in my head is the details and not the year or age or date or other numerical data. Let’s call it a quirk of being the daughter of a chemist - he did all the numbers for us.
Besides that Salon, I got to see my grad school friend Sarah Langan do a reading from her novel at KGB Bar, and someone significantly older than me realized at a dinner that I was their oldest friend (not age-wise, but because all their actual old friends had passed, so our twenty years of friendship became suddenly important). I feel this way about all numbers: They mean nothing until given context, and you are rarely the person who gives them context.
Numbers put everything outside of your own control. If you have ten dollars as a ten year old you are rich! If you find ten dollars on the street you are lucky! if you find ten dollars in a coat pocket you are lucky! if you have ten dollars left to pay on your mortgage, it’s nothing and you’re overwhelmingly thrilled! What was your last experience with ten dollars? Was it to buy something you didn’t need and only vaguely wanted and to alleviate the shame of scratching that itch you told yourself “eh, it’s only ten dollars?”
This musing brought to you by this week’s plethora ingested creative content! Finished reading Thistlefoot - the lush novel about Baba Yaga’s hut entering today’s America (it’s secretly about storytelling and the Jewish experience) and am already deep into Little Eyes (this one is not for everyone, but I can’t put it down). Attended a Tribeca art show where my friend Luba Grosman’s photographs are viewable (she’s the excellent photographer who took the portraits I use for author headshots) -
The gallery bathroom is a terrific art installation.
Saw One Love - the excellent Bob Marley Biopic. Saw the terrific public art installation “The Great Elephant Migration” - not only fun but also deeply meaningful. And possibly coming to a city near you!
Attended Bestiary - the fantastic off-Broadway farce gives a WHOLE new definition to chewing the scenery. Still glowing over The Wild Robot - highly recommended for anyone with a kid over 14, not for the kid, for YOU, to help you let go. What a film!
And then I took the weekend off - went to see the crazy fields of Jack-o-Lanterns at the Great Pumpkin Blaze near Hudson. Gorgeous day for a long walk in the woods followed by a frosted cider donut and some crazy pumpkin carving!
(more photos on my Facebook author page — don’t miss the HUGE OCTOPUS)
Random Final Thought
I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out the singular for pasta. This led me to the singular for spaghetti, penne, and ravioli and rigatoni (spaghetto, penna, raviolo and rigatone!) - for the record, “pasta” itself is a “mass noun.”
As usual, apprecite the energy and effort you put into your newsletters. I really do think of myself as a lazy person, yet I can't resist opening them when they arrive, which is an awfully good sign for their merit. I thus have one of the requirements you need for a first reader.
Trying to make head or tail of the "use" distinction....Use, of course, does not have to be pejorative. We are often forced to defend something's usefulness, after all. There is useful over here, excrescence over there.
Taking the cases of coffee and cake, where we substitute "drink" and "eat" for a supposedly less frank "use", about the only difference I can see is that "drink" and "eat" are more specific. They are subsets of use. So I think the argument is rather the opposite of what the young people are proposing. Euphemisms are typically more general, not more specific. I do not think to say that one uses coffee is really to get more to the bottom of what one is doing. Now, to cite the caffeine and not the coffee, if that is ones motivation for the use, certainly would add a level of directness.
So, is smoking an addiction or a fashion statement?