Let's Talk About Vaping

part 1

Ok. let’s talk about vaping and leave everything else to the side.

The vaping story is actually two-part: vaping and smoking, . This is Part 1.

Vaping. I vape. I’m a vaper. I was vape-curious, then vape-adjacent. Now I’m a regular vaper.

I’m not terribly proud of it but I’m not deeply ashamed by it either. I’d rather I weren’t but that’s not currently an option.

So let’s talk about vaping.

First of all, it’s complicated and messy. A vape isn’t just an e-cig, though it can be. What I use is more of a vaping system, which involves batteries, atomizers, coils and vape juice. They systems all seem overengineered. They’re clumsy and annoying and heavy and messy. And there’s very little sense of design emanating from them; they feel klugy. You’ve seen people walking around with these enormous systems that produce giant clouds of vapor. Mine isn’t that - it’s more of a halfway point between an e-cig and those huge ones. Decent amount of vapor, the device is heavy but not too heavy (though when it falls on a shoeless toe you may think otherwise.)

There are a whole bunch of things you need to do with them - it feels like constantly - to keep them working well. They have short lives and are promoted by young guys on youtube with whom I probably have absolutely nothing else in common.

You can ritualize the process like so many other things, but I don’t enjoy the rituals. They’re a pain in the ass. They stop working for no apparent reason. They just stall. The batteries need constant charging but die quickly. After using one for a few weeks it starts to taste odd, stale in a unique way. And that’s when you have to change the coils. First take the whole thing apart, remove the coil from the atomizer, (still with me?) remove the used coil, take a new coil and douse it in vape juice (to avoid a burning sensation), wash your hands to get the vape juice off, twist the new coil back into the atomizer, connect the battery and fill the atomizer with vape juice.

All the time. All the freaking time.

I don’t find the rituals around vaping particularly attractive. Messy and wasteful and time consuming. I do what I need to, shake my fist at this stupid system and keep going.

It’s nothing like the rituals around smoking, which I loved and will talk about more in Part 2 of this. But this is the vaping part.

Because they’re so finicky you need backups. Lots of backups. And they can be hard to find. During the pandemic lockdown all my sources were sold out and it took a long time for the supply chain to catch up.

And vape juice? That’s its own torah. Unflavored or flavored in a million ways. Different ratios, different nicotine levels. More complexity .

Seriously, only men could have designed a system that’s so unnecessarily complicated.

Juel is different and was never for me. It was designed for kids and that was patently obvious from the marketing. Any attempts by the company to deny that - and there were many - are ridiculous. Teens were the target. Trust the marketer here to know.

And now you can’t get flavored vape juice in NY, and no one outside NY can ship here. Vermont still sells flavored but we won’t be up there for a while.

The vape juice torah - oh man, what a panoply of flavors. Things you’d expect - regular cigarette taste, menthol. But that’s just the beginning. They come in every flavor you can imagine - candy flavors, baked good flavors, booze flavors, savory flavors. Just the names of some of them make me gag.

I’m a sour flavor gal. Sour apple, sour watermelon are the best.

But now that I’m running low on supply (yes I totally should have been paying attention to the flavor ban but I had a few other things on my mind and didn’t pre-order enough. I’ve had enough for months but stocks are starting to run low. What was I thinking? Yeah, everything else was on fire. Oh well.)

So what to do?

DIY it! that’s my next step. I can get unflavored juice locally and ordered flavorings online. We’ll see. It’ll be trial-and-error. When we’re back up north I’ll stock up. All so annoying.

Oy vey with all of this business, but it’s the only reason I was able to stop smoking about 10 years ago. And I’ve never gone back, though the temptation still appears from time to time.

So I deal with the mess and expense and waste because I don’t have a better idea. I used to describe it to people who asked about it as a efficient nicotine-delivery device. But it’s not really that efficient. And until something better comes along (or I reach the age of 80 when a good friend and I agreed to pick up smoking again - we’ll see) I’m stuck with vaping.

I travel with it, of course. And I’ve never had any trouble bringing all the stuff with one exception: Singapore. You know, the place that used to cane foreign visitors for chewing gum. They pulled me off the security line after they went through my bags. I thought they found my weed vape, and I felt a fillip of anxiety.

They didn’t - they found the nicotine vape. And immediately confiscated it. I was told that vaping was illegal there (in a place with shockingly high smokiing rates) and having it meant I was smuggling. Really didn’t want to get arrested for smuggling in Singapore and ending up who-knows-where, especially on a business trip.

But like any committed addict I wasn’t traveling with one vape only. Of course not. I had taken a few apart and hidden the different parts in different places in my luggage and backpack.

It was a slightly scary moment. And a giant exhale when I got out of the airport. While I was there people kept asking me how I brought the vapeworks in; everyone had a story about confiscation. I got lucky.

The luck of the addict, apparently.

So I vape. And it’s the first thing I reach for. Before the phone, coffee, wine, weed - it’s the vape first.

The effects on my health have been fine, if you’re wondering. Once I quit smoking and started vaping I got all my lung function back. My voice is still deep but I can reach the upper registers, lost to me after smoking for so long. When I get sick it no longer goes to my lungs. My breathing is better and so is my entire cardiovascular system.

So I vape. Like I said, not proud. Also not ashamed. It’s just what I do. For now at least.

End Part 1. Part 2 will be the smoking story.