I walk to my car after class and light up a cigarette and someone twenty feet away looks at me like I just drop-kicked her poodle in front of a bus. “Cigarette smoke kills!” she yells enthusiastically. “So does the sun,” I reply. She then responds with something that rhymes with “Glass Coal.”

Ah, the typical day in the life of a smoker.

I love hearing these people who believe that they are educated and enlightened individuals because they don’t smoke, preferring to read pamphlets and quote anti-smoking commercials.

Do people who think that smoking is unhealthy, think that telling smokers is some great revelation to them? That the smokers, prior to meeting this enlightened individual, didn’t know that smoking was bad and could kill them? Like we’re not reminded every day of our lives by several “enlightened” individuals like the one who saw fit to hurl expletives at me from several feet away?

Smoking is no longer allowed indoors anywhere, except in your own home.

Fine, I’ve learned to live with that.

Now people are saying that there should be smoking and non-smoking sections outdoors as well. Paranoid health Nazis with nothing better to do but sit around hoping to live some absurd amount of time like a hundred and fifty years.

These people are now worried about cigarette smoke killing them outdoors. Well, I’m here to tell these people to relax.

There’s plenty of other pollution in the air that will kill you, possibly before the cigarette smoke even gets to you.

Don’t forget about all the other things that will potentially do you in: airplane crashes, car crashes, murder, alcoholism, drug use, disease, war, Hulk Hogan movie marathons on television … and literally millions of other causes.

“So why pay to kill yourself?” someone might ask. Why do people buy alcohol? Or collect stamps?

Why do people do anything?

Because they want to or like to do it. Smokers like to smoke, bakers like to bake, burglars like to … burgle.

We know it’s bad for us, we know we’ll never live to two hundred because we smoke and don’t go home to a plastic bubble completely shielded from all humanity for fear of contracting something.

So if you can’t stand someone smoking near you outdoors, the solution is simple: walk away from them.

Just make sure you’re wearing sunblock … you wouldn’t wanna get skin cancer.