Tonight Daniel was weighing out the relative badness of things, for a change.  The two main contenders were smoking and being in a war.  He wanted to know if people get sick or die the first time they smoke.  I went the "honest" route, and told him that people don't tend to die the first time they smoke - they merely find themselves wanting to smoke more, until their bodies can't function normally without nicotine (I gave him a few scary examples), but they do sometimes throw up the first time that they smoke.  I'm hoping that will have some mileage: that kind of prospect certainly paralyzed me in my tracks, as a lad.  I also went on to tell him about lung cancer and cancer of the larynx, and what it's like to try to talk without a voice box, and how they have machines that enable people to make metallic quasi-vocal sounds after the larynx has been removed.  I hope that this last detail doesn't backfire, for it's far-out-ness and high-tech factor...

Daniel also asked me what smoking tastes like.  At this point, I went entirely into the realm of super-abstract speculation.  My guess was that it's something that people learn to like, because nobody likes the taste of smoke in their mouths under normal circumstances.

But the question of the evening was really focused on warfare-versus-smoking, and I had to admit that, as bad as smoking is, war is much, much, much worse, because you could die at any time, and you have far less  choice over the matter, etc.  Daniel said that he hopes he doesn't forget not smoke cigars [sic - smoking, for Daniel, equals "smoking cigars," much the way that "to eat" in Mandarin is actually "to eat rice": I don't think he knows the term "cigarette," at least in terms of active usage.  He and Ian used to call all smoking, including cigarette smoking, "smoking a pipe," because they didn't have any other smoking vocabulary, which I thought was great - as in "That lady was smoking a pipe," when a lady walks by puffing on something that most uninitiated observers might otherwise call a "cigarette."

In any case, Daniel said he hopes he never forgets not to smoke a pipe, and not to join the army.  The syntax is exactly as presented:  he hopes that he retains the memory that he shouldn't smoke or enlist, before he ends up doing one or the other (or both!!!) accidentally.  Kinda' like getting married on a whim during a weekend in Vegas, to some stranger you just met in some nightclub - some people just forget not to make big life-defining decisions sometimes.

He also  wanted to know what a person could do, if someone gave them something, and it turned out to be cigars.  But then he answered his own question: you just throw them away.  I explained to him that it's very unlikely that a person would accidentally smoke.

Just the fact that Daniel has made these commitments makes me very happy.  I hope to keep his memory of these resolutions active for as long as I can.

(October 12, 2012)