I think I am a healthy person, even though I don't always maintain the healthiest of habits. During winter break, I spent quite a few nights sitting at the Waverly Diner on 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in New York, as I have habitually in the past. As a born New Yorker and bred New Jerseyan, I am accustomed to sitting for hours in diners eating cheese fries and drinking milkshakes. My friends and I all have consumed endless amounts of coffee and many of us have consumed similar quantities of nicotine. As of March, when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's new smoking restrictions take effect, the Waverly, a restaurant that remains today without a non-smoking section, will be smoke-free. I for one am thoroughly disappointed.

Perhaps it is some romantic disregard for the stringencies of surviving by science that drives me, but I refuse to be swept up by an obsession with health. I may be alone in my utter contempt for soy, but I stand by it. I come from a classical school of life -- the word I use instead of health -- which insists only on hearty food, comfortable living quarters and relaxation. If you want to lose weight, and according to the statistics, most of you should, go out and run around the block a few times. Forget soy -- soy will kill you.

But, beyond what is best for our own lives, we as a society must immediately cease to care what is best for our neighbors' lives. I don't mean that we shouldn't be socially active or caring, but we should certainly stop demanding healthy practices from one another. Smoking cigarettes remain legal in every nation in the world, and for good reason, as it is a significant part of human culture. To limit a person's ability to smoke in public, especially after reasonable smoking restrictions to prevent non-smokers from the risk of secondhand smoke have already been put in place, is testing serious liberties.

To ban smoking in bars is just absurd. How will one ever again be told they "smell like a bar"? No one has ever been forced to pursue bartending as a career, and thus to imply that bartenders have a legal right to breathe clean air at bars they choose to tend is ludicrous. Everyone has a simple right to breathe clean air, but it is the prerogative of the bartender to decide to work in an establishment that meets this criteria. A non-smoking bartender who wants to breathe easily may also open his own non-smoking bar or seek employment in one of the many such existing establishments. The bartender who complains that such a job does not pay as well must realize that it is possible he has chosen the wrong profession.

Bloomberg is also trying to get smoking banned in Central Park, Manhattan's largest open space. It is irresponsible for the mayor to claim that the rights of a non-smoker trump that of a smoker in open spaces. Central Park is large enough for a smoker to find a spot to himself, far from the pink lungs of non-smokers.

To ban a smoker this last refuge simply because a non-smoker may pass by is hardly conscionable. When the pollution in Manhattan makes simply living there horrible for one's lungs, the health-conscious New Yorker should get over having to breathe smoke every so often. And, if someone is smoking on the jogging path, as many have complained, punch him -- he is an inconsiderate jerk.

Everything aforementioned is really rather silly to argue at all when you consider what we are all fighting about. Bloomberg fought hard to force smokers into holes and obscure corners of the city, although I doubt he would have been happy about this when he himself was a smoker, and he won the day. I wish he had put as much effort into reinstating the city's recycling program. There are much more important issues in which to put this much effort.

I simply want to live unhealthily. I want my unhealthy friends to keep doing what they're doing. We all make little decisions in life to eat that bacon-cheeseburger or smoke that cigarette. In the end, many of us will die because of these decisions. Then again, many of us will die from any number of already known or soon to be identified environmental factors.

A friend of mine once told me that by the time he got lung cancer from smoking, he'd be able to buy new lungs on E-bay. I've made my own decision not to smoke, but in the abstract, I'm right there with him.

-- Matthew Bettinger '05 submits a column to the Justice