Smoking at UIC is awful. It's everywhere.
I'm a bit of a loner at school. What's that gotta do with this? Not much. It just means that I stay inside a lot. I love my building. I can get from my dorm room to the cafeteria without going outside. It allows me to avoid being stabbed at 9 pm on a wednesday because I didn't have time for a proper dinner.
I play this game sometimes. I call it "I-need-fresh-air-and-vitamin-D-but-is-it-worth-the-melanoma-and-lung-cancer?" There aren't very many trees around campus (I'm kinda pale, surprise!). Where there are trees there are benches. Where there are benches, there are smokers. I just finished class the other day when I decided some fresh air would do me good. I sat on a bench and tried to relax. Deeeeep inhale..! *Hack* *Cough* Mm... That's the wonderful smell of second hand smoke. I think the smokers should form a club. One month one half would buy cigarettes, and the next month, the other half. The second half can just wander around campus taking deep breaths behind the first half. That's probably not really socially acceptable though. So that pretty much cuts out going outside as often as I'd like. At least the crunchy-won't-someone-please-step-on-me? season is coming.
The two main classroom buildings are Grant Hall and Lincoln Hall. They're working on Douglas Hall right now, so there's a bit of a dead end between the two working buildings. Between or after classes smokers like to stand around in this area to smoke. They also enjoy taking up the benches either in the shade or out. I like to stop at Grant Hall because there's a water fountain in the lobby, and I'm pretty sure there's not one in Lincoln Hall. If there is, I don't know where it is because I can't find the men's bathroom anyway. This means that I have to go through the middle to the left, and then back out across the dead end to the other hall. I can tell you that the cigarette industry isn't suffering in this economy.
I wanted to walk up to this one girl who looked like she had been smoking since early high school. Telling these people that second hand smoke is awful and can kill you won't do anything. You have to take action. I felt like going up to this girl and saying, "Let me explain what you're doing to me." At this point I would slit my throat, just get blood all over her. You can't hand them a pamphlet about lung cancer and how second hand smoke is bad for your children and people you care about. What do they care? You don't like it, stand somewhere else. Sometimes you need to take action. I think she was wearing a white shirt under her jacket. That would be unfortunate. Maybe she'd stop smoking to afford a new fancy shirt. I could have been a hero. At least to myself. It would be a small moral victory: I saved a smoker because I messed up her shirt enough to require a replacement. Probably not though. Then I'd have wasted perfectly good blood on someone who will probably just harvest my lungs later for a transplant. Obviously I didn't slit my throat on her. But if it's the thought that counts, perhaps she, and everyone like her feels bad for killing me slowly. It's unlikely, because I only glanced at her for a second, so she probably didn't even see me.
