Gay Republican Metalhead Wiccans

Well, it’s 2007. The fireworks have been exploded above the Common. Many people got drunk. Some people, like me, forgot. (I wish I were joking. I simply hung around the house and played video games so I didn’t have to watch Dorian Grey on television. I meant to have a drink before midnight, but never did.)

New Year’s intrigues me for the simple reason that I’m watching many of my friends make resolutions about how they will change their lives. Call me cynical, but making major life changes when you’re hung over and recovering from a week of family, drinks parties and returning various ugly items to shopping malls seems doomed to failure.

It’ll be noticeable at the gym over the next few weeks. The sad thing is, they’ll all be gone by March.
I learned a technique a couple of years ago that helps me a great deal more.
It came from someplace a bit odd — Real Simple magazine. They tend to have interesting articles on time management, many of which are incredibly obvious, but there are some good tips. And the best one was, “Monday has the same feeling as 1 January. Making life changes on a Monday can help energize you.” It does have that feel of a “new start”, but it happens fifty-two times a year, rather than once.
It’s true. So, when your New Year’s resolution fails, take a week off, pig out, and then go back to the gym on Monday.

I find cigarettes interesting.

Not for the usual reason. For whatever reason, despite my own personal best efforts during my misspent youth, I never became addicted to nicotine. I realize in retrospect how lucky I was for this.

But what I find so interesting about the entire beast is that cigarettes diversify so much in their class implications, and their social implications generally.

American Spirit cigarettes are the favored cigarette of hippie kids everywhere. It’s telling that in my hometown of Cambridge, they’re available everywhere, whereas they’re a specialty cigarette in other places I’ve lived.

Camels were the cigarette of preppie kids when I was growing up. Virginia Slims and Eves are the cigarettes of pink-collar thirty-something divorcées. Marlboros are popular among my ex-husband’s friends, machinists and car mechanics and guys who work in factories generally. Dunhills are popular with the sort of gentleman who drives an expensive car, but drives it either so recklessly it becomes destroyed or so poorly that people wail and gnash their teeth to see a Ferrari driven at thirty miles per hour. Kools are the cigarette of older black men and women, Newports the cigarette of younger black men and women, though they’re gaining in popularity among white teenaged kids. Benson and Hedges are smoked by people who went to Oxbridge on their junior year abroad, and are still trying to pass as British. Gauloises are popular among wannabe Eurotrash, and they’re probably the cigarette I see the most outside the Armani Café.

My point is not so much that different cigarettes have different markets. My point is, for fundamentally the same product, Madison Avenue has managed to convince people that it is worth their while to choose a specific box out of thirty or more varieties. This is a triumph of fragmented marketing. It’s not strictly a fragmented market — Marlboros specifically hold a great deal more market share than others — but there’s still a way for everyone to market lung cancer and remain profitable.

And I’m as vulnerable as anyone else. On the rare occasions I pick up a packet of smokes, I’ll walk out and go someplace else if they don’t sell American Spirit blues.