The one where I accidentally got addicted to nicotine
I’ve never smoked a cigarette. I just never had any desire to. The 1990s anti-smoking PSAs, the demonstrations in middle school health class that show the effect of tar on your lungs, the fact that it always seemed like an expensive hobby were all enough to make it unappealing to me. It’s not that I don’t have vices! I do, and they’re bad for my physical and emotional well-being. It’s just that smoking cigarettes isn’t one of them.
It seems counterintuitive, then, that I would find myself irritable and quietly in the throes of nicotine addiction withdrawal in the cold early months of 2019. To explain how I ended up in this situation, I first have to explain how I came to be in possession of a little nicotine delivery device called a Juul. A year ago, on my 26th birthday, I was eating dinner in Williamsburg when a friend bestowed upon me a gift. We have a long history of giving each other very stupid gifts for our birthdays and Christmas (in 2017 I gave him a custom-made fidget spinner decorated with an image of a hunky Martin O’Malley in a Superman outfit. It said “O’Malley would have won.” I was very proud of this gift in particular). A Juul is a perfect kind of dumb, ironic gift that also has functional value. Obviously, I loved it conceptually, even though I was sure I’d never use it.
