Diary of a vicarious quitter

My boyfriend is quitting everything. Well, actually, he's quitting smoking, again. But he -- and a nasty bout of bronchitis -- has finally scared himself into the realization that (drum roll, please): SMOKING IS BAD FOR HIM. Earlier this winter he decided that his smoking was bad for me, so he started smoking outside. His rationalization: second-hand smoke is worse than first-hand smoke, and it was all worse for me because I don't exercise. Smoking, he argued, obviously wasn't bothering him, since he could still jog five miles every night. But soon it got to be not quite every night, and then not quite five miles, and finally he came sweating and wheezing into the house and declared that he needed to quit smoking. Then he woke up the next morning sweating and wheezing from some hybrid of bronchitis, possible pneumonia, and the flu, and declared that he was quitting smoking immediately.

So he spent the past weekend wheezing and coughing and surfing the web for articles about various lung diseases. "Read this," he would say to me, pointing to a page of medical gibberish. "What does it mean?" When I replied that I had no earthly idea, he would ask, "Well, do you think I have it?" I tried, repeatedly, to gently explain that since I had no earthly idea what "it" was, I could not tell him whether or not he had "it." I managed to keep my patience intact and not resort to telling him that, yes, he had "it" and he'd be dead by morning.

The good thing for him is that he's too sick to realize that he's in nicotine withdrawal. The bad thing for me is that he is not too sick to be in nicotine withdrawal. Having a sick boyfriend in nicotine withdrawal is like having a two-year-old and a new puppy all at once. My co-worker had sent me a 60-page unedited draft to read "in my spare time," and I tried to work my way through it on Sunday night amidst a hailstorm of questions.
"What are you reading?"
"How long is it?"
"Are you going to read the whole thing?"
"Do you have to?"
"What page are you on now?"
"What page are you on now?"
"What page are you on NOW?"

I surrendered at page 40. Which is the only unvicarious quitting I did.

As I said, my boyfriend is quitting everything. In an Advil-and-antibiotic-induced moment of "feeling better" on Saturday, he went to the grocery store and came back with four different kinds of veggie burgers. And veggie lasagna. "I can't eat red meat anymore; I don't want to get colon cancer." OK, but have you ever heard of CHICKEN? Or fish? Pork or turkey, maybe? Nope. Veggie burgers. I ate leftover cheeseburger pizza and gloated about the fact that the pizza guy liked my Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker.

He's also quitting second-hand smoke, so no more trips to our favorite haze-filled Saturday night hangout. "We'll find a bar where people don't smoke," he promised me. What's all this "we"? Are "we" moving to New York City?

So I am heading home to another night of all things veggie and lung-cancer- preventing. My boyfriend felt well enough to go back to the store and get spinach egg noodles and three-cheese sauce. Such is the life of a vicarious quitter.