I think Wednesday morning represented some kind of invisible line; a turn which once I’d made I could never come back from. I was sitting in class with a slew of much younger people and talking about vaping. Up until that point I hadn’t quite seen the parallels between my youth and their own. I was raised in an era where cigarettes were slowly fading into the realm of the unclean. Here now is a student vaping in the middle of class and presuming that it is totally okay.
Vaping is the new form of smoking. It is the term applied to people smoking vapor cigarettes. As I understand it a cartridge of nicotine is loaded into a water solution and processed through a small pipe or cigarette like device that permits you to exhale ‘harmless’ vapors into the air. This is so new that many locations (including my college) don’t have rules in place governing where you can or cannot smoke. As a result students are smoking that stuff in class without the slightest concern for whether or not it is disruptive to the environment.
It isn’t disruptive, really, but it is rather weird and difficult to comprehend in the context of my own personal history. That’s the turn I speak of. Growing up in an era where smoking was so heavily criticized it is foreign to recognize that I live in an era where a form of smoking is about to take off and start the cycle all over again. In a sense, history is repeating itself and I am at once the holdover codger of a bygone era struggling to recognize a world that no longer makes sense to me.
Or I’m just being a melodramatic talislegger talking about a relatively small-scale phenomena and equating it to a much broader cultural shift. You be the judge.