day seven

the past few days i’ve been trying to recall that span of time where i stopped smoking the longest. i remember when i entered college, i wasn’t smoking at all. maybe i was too high on the fact that i was a freshman and a lot of things were uncertain and i just completely forgot about smoking, i guess. i wasn’t smoking as heavy as i did back then but still was already kind of a dodi thing. also add the fact that none of my blockmates were smokers.. none that i knew of back then..

there was one who i found one day who did smoke. how? the nose man, its just the nose. we were waiting for the class to start, he came in later and obviously i knew right away that he just finished smoking. i don’t remember the conversation but i know i admitted to him i was also smoking. kind of like therapy, “hi i’m dodi and i’m a smoker”.. kinda like that hehe. anyway this guy is tatang, his real name is eric but tatang is better trust me. now during around second or third year college, he also quit smoking. he got back to it because of big bad me.

i’m still not sure but i have to correct myself that the longest period i didn’t smoke was june 1997 to december 1998. now that was long right? like i said i didn’t remember how or why but it does exist. so december 1998, it was engg week, erg had a basketball game against k.e.m. at 8 in the morning. they had to call me at home and wake me up because my lazy ass couldn’t get up early for it, and i found out that only 5 people were able to show up at the right time. when i arrived at the game there was only eight of us but we were still in it. we all got tired, that’s what you get if you don’t have subs in basketball. but we did win! barely! we were so ecstatic and we just went crazy like it felt we won the championship of that tournament. so we got back to our tambayan, we talked and laughed about the game and how lucky our asses were. then some of the older erg members lit a cigarette. it immediately struck me like “yeah. victory needs a cigar”. so i lit one, after so many months. and it still felt good. but most of the people at erg were shocked. i was somewhat of a new member, they probably thought i was this naive, innocent, good guy. pffft. and then they blamed the older members for smoking because they thought i was emulating them. that was a funny scene.

“huy bat ka nagyoyosi?”

“chris! bat nyo tinuruan mag yosi si dodi?”

“nagyoyosi ka ba talaga?”

anyway, i was letting them ask and ask and i was smiling. i didn’t expect that in college since basically i saw a lot of people smoke then. it was really weird that they never thought of me as a smoker-type. so i just puffed my yosi while they were talking and then chris said “eh marunong naman pala talaga to eh”. see? that’s why i’m grateful to teresa for teaching me that 3-step technique, it shows that you know how to smoke. most new smokers don’t know to properly do it at first. i’m not kidding. i remember a lot of my friends who i see just sucking at puffing on the stick, then i teach them how i do it and they immediately cough. wahahaha! but they learn, the lesson is the most important after all. so back to the tambayan scene, as my orgmates saw that i could be a valid smoker, their minds probably ran a new process that means smoking isn’t that bad. if a skinny, hog-nosed, innocent dweeb like me could do it then maybe they can. i’m not saying i influenced them but a lot did try to smoke after that and became smokers. so the more smoker friends around, the more you smoke. mob phenomenons. and my smoking habit returned.

now i was a member of erg before tatang did. he was still an applicant when i got back smoking again. one day when i was outside alone smoking, i saw him walking towards me, probably had a vacant period before another class. i offered him a stick, and he refused. being the good friend that i am i persuaded him to join me because apparently i was smoking to burn some time and i doing it alone aint fun at all. he said he can’t because he’s trying to quit, i said one stick won’t hurt. now tatang and i have this kaibigang magsasaka thing, which means we stick with each other’s stupidities and whatever. no pun intended. so he gave in. hehe.

a few days pass and i learned he passed away from lung cancer.. just kidding! a few days pass and i saw him smoking on his own. i said that i thought he was trying to quit and he blamed me for failing. hahaha! i wasn’t even sorry about it, it was fun for me. how do you worsen the fact that you failed to stop smoking? drag another one trying to do so to fail hehehe. okay i didn’t really mean that seriously. anyway, tatang still smokes today afaik. i should share this to him and maybe make up for the wrongs i did to him back then.