Paris is burning, and no, I don’t mean cars getting torched in the Parisian suburbs.

My first time in Europe was about two years ago. I landed in the Copenhagen airport in Denmark, stepped off the plane, and got a nice big cancer-causing whiff of cigarette smoke.

The last few years living in Europe has consisted of an onslaught of second hand smoke attacks. You can’t walk down the street in Paris for more than a block without choking on someone’s cigarette smoke, unless it’s 7am on a Sunday.

For two years in Korea I was also shrouded in a veil of cigarette smoke day in and day out, and yet it didn’t seem to annoy and enrage me the way it does now.

That’s because I was a smoker at the time. I had quit for a while, but cigarettes were dirt cheap in Korea, and I was young and didn’t care at all about my health.

My mom smoked around me when I was growing up. I remember being in the car with her while she was smoking, that horrible smell, and thinking, “I will never smoke!�

Somehow, I became a smoker. I could go ahead and blame it on a friend who was much cooler and more experienced at everything than me, but that doesn’t explain why I continued to smoke for nearly 10 years.

One day I decided that I wanted to live as long as I possibly could. That day I ate healthy, exercised, and stopped smoking.

Deciding to exercise, eat healthy, and not smoke are things you can choose to do. The problem is that you can’t decide you’re not going to breathe anymore when you walk down the street.

I suppose getting all this smoke blown in my face is karma for all the non-smokers I inadvertently annoyed in the past, but I want it to stop!

Everyday I see countless people smoking in areas specifically designated as non-smoking. My husband comes home smelling like smoke everyday because his co-workers smoke at their desks, even his supervisor! I used to tease him that he was a secret smoker, and then I visited his office building. It was some of the foulest, nastiest air I’ve ever inhaled.

There’s a lot of grumbling going on in France nowadays because there’s an attempt to enforce laws against smoking in public. Smokers claim it infringes on their freedom.

What about my right to breathe oxygen instead of carbon monoxide? I guess I lost that privilege back when I chose to live in the city.

Pardon, could you pass me a bottle of Perrier and a surgical mask?