I particularly enjoyed your memoir from High School, used effectively here to illustrate your point of ‘the occasional smoke’. It is cute to picture a young you dealing with the societal, social, and family pressures (knowing, of course, the tremendous human being you have grown into today).

In light of the humanity of your post, I feel a bit guilty about the harsh (cruel?) tone of my last post, even though it was meant in snark. In the end, though, your points are more salient: it is the overindulgence of the smoking habit which renders it grotesque, not the act in and of itself.