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"I grew up in a haze of smoke. No one in my family concerned themselves too much with nicotine addiction and its attendant diseases. My father lit up at the dinner table and puffed away in the car with the windows rolled up. (The car, incidentally, was a Plymouth Duster without seat belts or a working lock on the passenger-side door. It wasn&amp;amp;#8217;t unusual for that door to fly open when we made a left turn; on two such occasions, my sister and I were catapulted out. The phrases &amp;amp;#8220;child safety&amp;amp;#8221; and &amp;amp;#8220;secondhand smoke&amp;amp;#8221; didn&amp;amp;#8217;t get much play in my house.) But this blithe attitude wasn&amp;amp;#8217;t particular to my family. My high school, an all-girl&amp;amp;#8217;s Catholic school in a suburb south of Boston, had its very own smoking lounge. A note from your parents&amp;amp;#8212;authentic or forged&amp;amp;#8212;was all you needed for permission to smoke the day away. Hey, it was the early eighties. I took my first drag off a cigarette at the ripe old age of eight. My grandmother went to the bathroom, and I stole one of her butts from the ashtray. I lit it, took a quick puff and snuffed it out before she even returned. Then, when I was about 13, my best friend, Adra, and I started smoking at her house after school. Both her parents worked, so we basically had two full hours every afternoon to smoke our heads off. For the next six months our schedule was as follows: School, 8 A.M. to 3 P.M. Chain-smoking, 3 P.M. to 5 P.M. Homework. Dinner. Bed. Repeat. Adra and I tried every brand of cigarette: More, Virginia Slims, Marlboro, Camel, Kent. Back then, you could just walk into a drugstore and buy a pack without an ID&amp;amp;#8212;cashiers assumed you were buying them for your parents. This is how two scrawny eighth graders marched into various convenience stores and bought enough cigarettes to pay a Philip Morris executive&amp;amp;#8217;s salary for a year. Then Adra moved away. With my underage smoking headquarters closed down, I was forced back into clean living until my freshman year of college, when I majored in dance at New York University. Smoking was my life Nobody smokes more than dancers. Dancers don&amp;amp;#8217;t eat food; they inhale cigarettes. By the time I graduated, I was up to a pack a day. After NYU I moved to Los Angeles. I began working as an actor and discovered I was wrong about something: Nobody smokes more than dancers except actors. And makeup artists. And camera operators. And directors. The truth is, as exciting as film and TV work is, there can be stretches of downtime. Cigarettes fill them. They&amp;amp;#8217;re something to do when there&amp;amp;#8217;s nothing to do. They turn a moment into an event. And when I can&amp;amp;#8217;t have one, I&amp;amp;#8217;m f&amp;amp;#8212;ked. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve found myself doing things I&amp;amp;#8217;m not proud of, like, say, digging through the trash for a butt. Or smoking through bronchitis. Or telling people who try to bum a cigarette that I don&amp;amp;#8217;t have any left when actually I do. At times it feels that smoking runs my life. During a five-minute break at work, I&amp;amp;#8217;ve had to make the decision: Should I pee or should I smoke? I&amp;amp;#8217;ve tried doing both at the same time, and it&amp;amp;#8217;s not very satisfying. There&amp;amp;#8217;s been only one time in my history when I didn&amp;amp;#8217;t smoke or even think about it: About 12 years ago, my brother was hit by a car and ended up in a coma. For a period of six or seven days, he was so sick my family couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t leave his bedside. But the moment he showed signs of recovery, so did my urge to smoke. I stood in front of the hospital next to patients attached to IV poles who were also smoking. I thought, Look at those poor bastards&amp;amp;#8212;as if I had no experience with that same lack of self-control. In 2003 New York enacted the Clean Indoor Air Act, which prohibits smoking in bars and restaurants. I didn&amp;amp;#8217;t mind, actually: It forced me to smoke less, at least when I&amp;amp;#8217;m having dinner with friends. But I did start to notice that, one by one, everyone around me started to quit. My castmates on ER quit. My mother quit. Even my father, who&amp;amp;#8217;d smoked two packs a day for I don&amp;amp;#8217;t know how many years, quit. He told me he&amp;amp;#8217;d just picked a date and done it. If only I were a &amp;amp;#8220;pick a date and do it&amp;amp;#8221; kinda gal. My best pals I have tried to quit&amp;amp;#8212;a few times. But I usually give in at around day four, when I&amp;amp;#8217;m weeping at the drop of a hat and considering eating my steering wheel. In Martin Amis&amp;amp;#8217; book The Information, the main character, who&amp;amp;#8217;s having a midlife crisis, talks about smoking a cigarette in between each cigarette. When I&amp;amp;#8217;m stressed, that&amp;amp;#8217;s exactly how I feel. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve considered getting hypnotized; I&amp;amp;#8217;ve considered taking antidepressants; I&amp;amp;#8217;ve considered getting acupuncture. But I haven&amp;amp;#8217;t done any of those things. Part of the reason could be that on one level, being a smoker is tied up with my identity, which is absurd. I also have this misconception that cigarettes are my little best pals. When I&amp;amp;#8217;m upset, they comfort me. When I&amp;amp;#8217;m anxious, they calm me down. When I&amp;amp;#8217;m tired, they wake me up. It&amp;amp;#8217;s a great little drug, nicotine&amp;amp;#8230;until you try to give it up. But recently I&amp;amp;#8217;ve decided my little pals are turning on me. It really started with vanity. A few years ago, I began noticing wrinkles around my eyes and mouth. I thought, Oh, no&amp;amp;#8212;I&amp;amp;#8217;m beginning to look like Aunt Evelyn! The aging process is traumatizing enough; I don&amp;amp;#8217;t need to speed it along by sucking all the collagen out of my face. And it&amp;amp;#8217;s not just about that. It&amp;amp;#8217;s about being healthy and taking responsibility for myself. I hate being a prisoner to these little pieces of paper filled with weeds. I hate being a hypervigilant freak about what I smell like. I hate stepping outside from any indoor occasion to get my fix. I hate that I&amp;amp;#8217;m one of the few who hasn&amp;amp;#8217;t come to her senses. Every day I see young women smoking, and I want to go over to them and say, &amp;amp;#8220;Listen, please don&amp;amp;#8217;t smoke&amp;amp;#8212;please!&amp;amp;#8221; But they won&amp;amp;#8217;t listen. I didn&amp;amp;#8217;t. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve now been smoking regularly for 20 years. That&amp;amp;#8217;s just appalling. I&amp;amp;#8217;m going to stop. I do have a plan actually. I&amp;amp;#8217;m going on vacation with my family, and my plan will start the minute I step off the plane. You see, I hate smoking in front of my niece and nephew. But when it comes to my smoking, they both seem to have developed psychic abilities: No matter where I sneak off to fire up, I eventually hear, midpuff, the scamper of their approaching little feet. Not only do I not want to be that weird, smelly, smoky aunt who sets a bad example, but at this point, I figure the tension of trying to quit can&amp;amp;#8217;t be much worse than the tension of trying to hide my habit. I&amp;amp;#8217;m not taking any cigarettes, and I&amp;amp;#8217;ve loaded up on Nicorette. I won&amp;amp;#8217;t be driving, so there&amp;amp;#8217;ll be no steering wheels to eat. Everyone in my family has seen me cry before. I plan on coming back from this trip smoke-free. And this much I know: I will be prouder of that accomplishment than anything I&amp;amp;#8217;ve ever done. Maura Tierney stars in NBC&amp;amp;#8217;s ER and recently appeared in Playwrights Horizons&amp;amp;#8217; Three Changes. How to give it up &amp;amp;#8220;If you&amp;amp;#8217;re serious about your health, you&amp;amp;#8217;ve got to get tobacco out of your life,&amp;amp;#8221; Michael Fiore, M.D., director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, told Glamour. Here&amp;amp;#8217;s how: 1. Hit the drugstore Try a nicotine-replacement therapy like gum, nasal spray, the patch or a nicotine inhaler. They work. 2. Talk to friends A research-proven strategy: social support&amp;amp;#8212;from friends, hotlines (800-QUIT-NOW) or online quit forums. 3. See your doctor Clinical studies show that prescription antidepressants like bupropion and nortriptyline help people quit."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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