Stairs. I’m thinking of my butt, okay? I’ve never in my life spent this much time thinking about that portion of my anatomy. I wonder how long I have to keep this up before my ass looks like Melanie Griffith’s?

This morning I faced my first round of mockery from a stranger.

A woman waiting to ride the elevator down from the third floor (the nerve!) took one look at me and started laughing. “That’s good,” she said. “Smoke a cigarette and then walk up the stairs.”

“Hey, at least I’m making the effort,” I responded with something less than Wildean wit, hoping that she’d get the point, walk down the stairs herself, and not incidentally leave the next available elevator to me.

She took the next elevator down and wished me luck as the doors closed. Lazy cow. She should think of her butt. It needed thinking about, I assure you.

Yes, I’m a cootie-infested, nicotine-addicted, civilization-ruining, social pariah. I’m a smoker.

Stand back, everyone! Breathing air within ten feet of me has been proven to contaminate ground-water and speed up global warming.

Get off my back, okay? I don’t approve of smoking and I think that when the Federal Government really agrees with me and stops subsidizing tobacco growers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars every year and the price of a pack of cigarettes goes to $10, we’ll see a significant drop in the numbers of new smokers each year. And I’ll be first in line to cheer.

In the meantime, I don’t abuse animals, I believe in revenge-motivated executions of people who abuse children, I conserve water, I think twice before using disposable paper products or toxic-waste cleaning products, I drive a compact, gas-efficient car and I’ve done the one thing that proves, more than anything else, that I care about the future of our planet.

I’ve elected not to reproduce.

From that first soiled, disposable diaper to the last plastic trash bag filled with used Depends, there’s nothing on this planet that’s as detrimental to the ecosystem as a human being and when I leave this vale of tears, I’ll be leaving behind no direct descendants to carry on my wasteful, rain-forest destroying consumerism.

So what if a few cigarette butts make it into landfills as I make my way toward the inevitable white light? (Or, in my case, probably something a bit warmer.)

I’m not actually in a bad mood today.

It’s just that my butt and I don’t appreciate having our efforts toward self-improvement being mocked by a woman wearing tight, white shorts and pink underwear, okay?

I did not want to know that that woman preferred the “hip-hugger” style over the trendier “thong” or the more conservative “brief” and yet the image lingers in my brain.