Given my family’s… history of having smokers in it, some people are surprised by the fact that I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life, at least until they find out how severe my asthma is. Some of them are still surprised that I haven’t “managed to find a way to smoke”, as though nicotine is this powerful of a drug. Having no prior history with it, having never smoked in my life, I can’t say either way. And I never intend to have history with it, having seen my own grandmother and mother smoke to the point that they came down with lung cancer, then metastatic lung cancer, then die as a result of it. Some people may think that I’m being a bit blunt saying that, but it is what it is — my mother cared for her own mother, who died from lung cancer, did not stop smoking, came down with metastatic lung cancer herself, did not seem to mind that smoking had heavily contributed to this, and died not seeming to mind. I fully intend on breaking this cycle.

To be honest, I’ve never understood the allure behind something that is a known carcinogen and life shortener. With things like caffeine, there isn’t the drastically increased risk of cancer — there isn’t the surgeon general’s warning, the black box label. There’s only the admonishment that children shouldn’t be drinking it, and the advisement that you should only consume so much of it in a twenty-four hour period (as well as the fact that children should not be drinking energy drinks, which I wholeheartedly agree with, as well as guidance on the consumption of energy drinks within a twenty-four hour period… and as an adult who doesn’t mind the occasional energy drink due to their taste, that is also something else that I actually agree on). If something is a known carcinogen and will shorten my life by my repeated consumption of it, that’s not something that I am even willing to start putting in my body, especially when the risk of cancer drastically increases with use over time, as we’ve seen with cigarettes. And I have family history on my side.

And as I’ve mentioned in here, I’ve also got the “gift” of shoddy lung function, which would not help matters out at all. Knowing my luck, I would develop cancer even sooner, worsen my lung function even quicker, and be even worse the wear for it… and who would that effect? My children. Regardless of their ages, that would affect my children. And I know this now. Why would I even bother doing this to myself if I know all this now?

Maybe I’m a bit naïve (which I would rather happily be), but is nicotine really worth all of this?

Are cigarettes worth coming down with cancer and shortening one’s life by years, maybe even decades?

Are they really?

Quite frankly, I’m aghast that another popular way of delivering nicotine still hasn’t managed to be marketed given that lung cancer is a leading cause of death. The least we can do is find a safer way to imbibe nicotine.

And given what has been on the news about vaping, so far it’s not really the safest alternative.

For the better part of December, I had to screw around with PayPal not wanting to charge the intended funding source for a purchase that I had wanted to make, then attempting to do unauthorized funds transfers on various other funding sources of mine. It was only at the end of December that I was able to amicably “resolve” this in that I was finally able to delete my eBay and PayPal accounts, which was what I decided that I wanted to do after PayPal decided that their repeated attempts to do these unauthorized funds transfers were allegedly “authorized”… rather than attempting to use the funding source that I had wanted them to use in the first place, doubling down on their faulty logic because it padded their bottom line. Over the course of December, Google searches revealed a similar line of logic in that PayPal sided with whoever stood to make them more money in claims and disputes like this, and it was around then that I decided that I wanted as little to do with them or any site that they were owned by as humanly possible.

I think that if I do make another PayPal account, it’s only going to be connected to the bank accounts that are connected to the kids’ ABLE accounts since those can not have funds transfers done on them and the money in those can only be used for very specific purposes. But that is probably not something that I’m going to do right now, although it is something that I will consider on down the line since the money in their ABLE accounts is something that I would like to spend on their behalf at some point. Obviously it’s not something that I would like to spend right now. I would like to spend it on bigger expenses for them later.