Smoke and mirrors

I swear that I am not about to plagiarize Denis Leary's routine about smoking except for maybe bits and pieces that I will adequately attribute to him.
I love to smoke (Leary), but only sometimes. I realized the other day that I started smoking when I was 14, but actually didn't start to inhale until I was 16, so depending how you look at it, I've either been smoking for 13 years, or 11 years, and when I put it in those terms, that's just crazy.
I'm going to sound like an after-school special, but I started smoking to fit in with my friends.
My dad smokes like a chimney, and I always sort of told myself that I didn't want to start smoking because our house always smelled of smoke, and he coughed a lot, and it didn't seem like something that would be all that fun.
But there I was, 14 years old, at a painfully awkward age, when my friend Bebe offered me a cigarette, and there was that moment of everyone staring at me to see if I would take it. I briefly considered saying no, but I was much weaker at 14 regarding peer pressure, and I caved like a West Virginia mine shaft.
But I thought if I didn't really inhale, it wouldn't matter, and I got away with that for quite a while until another instance of peer pressure occurred.
"Cool person": "You're not doing it right!"
Me: "Whaddya mean? Sure, I am."
"Cool person": No, you have to inhale. Here, I'll show you."
And it all went downhill from there.
Now, there are days when I genuinely enjoy smoking a cigarette, and there are days when I smell it on my hair or my coat or my hands, and I feel way less cooler than I did when I was smoking with my guitar-playing boyfriends in high school.
I have tried to quit twice, once for my slimeball ex-fiance, which was doomed to fail from the start, and once, last year, just for me.
The first time, the cessation lasted about four days until the headache and desire to reduce everyone in front of me into a fine powder gave way to me ripping apart my apartment for hidden cigarettes.
The second time, it lasted almost a month. I used the patch, which helped, and gum, which didn't, and I was okay until a. I had a couple of cocktails, and b. I had considerable stress introduced into my life.
I started back slowly, just one or two here and there, but pretty soon, I was back to smoking a pack a day and having to suck up the taunting from everyone I had told about quitting that I just couldn't do it.
And if you know anything about me, you know that I would rather eat broken glass that admit that I can't do something, and it really galled me to tell people who were proud of my decision that I was back on the wagon (off the wagon?), anyway, wherever the wagon of not smoking was, this chickadee wasn't on it.
So, now, I still smoke a pack a day. Since moving to Pennsylvania where cigarettes are $4.50 a pack, I've re-evaluated that at times, but at the moment, I have no plans to quit.
I no longer feel particularly cool smoking, and I know there are some people in my life who really want me to throw away my cigarettes.
If I should ever get married and have children, I will never, ever, smoke again. I don't want to subject my children to the health problems associated with growing up around second-hand smoke, but that also means that I have a few years to really have to worry about it, since neither marriage nor children are anywhere in my line of sight right now.