This year,  we attended a New Year’s Day party at the home of family friends in New Zealand.  This house could have been in the latest issue of Dwell or House Beautiful.  It was everything you could want – large rooms, freshly done – a back yard with a pool and separate changing areas – outdoor barbeque set-up – gorgeous landscaping and eating area shaded by a huge umbrella – with this new kitchen that opens out into the area – just perfect for entertaining…

The host and hostess were cordially welcoming to us – and as we began to absorb into the party, we realized that we were in the minority of “non-smokers” – which as I now think back, struck me as surprising in today’s smoking banned environment – I suppose that it made me feel like I had made some erroneous assumptions about the world…  Yes, there are still, despite the information available to us about how bad smoking is for everyone and the planet, lots of smokers out there.  They have just been forced into closets, of sorts… some very flash, I might add.

Likely, nicotine is the top addictive substance in the world, ever known to man, second only to food.  It is not like alcohol.  One cannot “just quit” without some pretty substantial physical and mental effects.

Smoking is noxious, but the smoker, when smoking, does not behave offensively or kill people as a result (except insidiously over time, maybe, and of course, themselves, likely…over time).  It’s not like the smoker takes a puff or smokes several cigarettes and goes out and wrecks cars or some other thing that “addictive substance abusers” of other types might do…  I guess that is why it is such an insidious and horrible addiction – it isn’t obviously addicting.  You don’t really notice when a person need their “nicotine fix”, except when the person under observation, who has been starved of tobacco for several hours might get cranky or otherwise “crave” nicotine, but it’s not the same as other addictions…

Anyway, I digress…

The party was also “racing and gambling” themed, meaning, we were entered into a pool of $ by our family members, and we had an amount to use to “bet” on horses that were racing nearby and watch on TV as the races transpired.

Well…this was interesting, especially for me, who tries to figure stuff out, being an analyst and hobbyist at social studies – observing the culture and people watching being two of my favorite things to do…

First, I don’t usually gamble.  I really am shitty at playing games, mostly – except maybe Angry Birds or Solitaire… when I am bored, but effectively, I am not a gambler. 

Let’s face it, my son and daughter in law got married in Vegas and I NEVER touched a slot machine the whole time we were there.  Why?  Well, one reason is because of the SMOKING. 

Gambling and smoking go together like peanut butter and jelly.  Seems that there are zero “non-smoking” gambling establishments in Vegas.  Yep, they have these supposedly super systems for sucking out smoke and have areas of their casinos designated “non-smoking”, which I prefer to say are “roped off areas for second-hand  smokers” –  but these are more sections that sit right next to the smoking areas (the majority of the casino), so you still breathe in that second-hand smoke, and smell like an ashtray when you get back up to your room (yes, thank God, they have non-smoking rooms).

But anyhow, the two go together.  And in my family, we have several gambler personalities (not in a really bad way) that love to play games and fritter away their hard-earned, while in Vegas, most being ex-smokers…

Whatever.  Not my cup of tea.  All I can think about is work, fresh on my mind, and how hard it is to earn a dollar, and somehow it just takes all the fun out of it… 

Damned if I didn’t digress again (sigh).

At this party, I played along – after saying “no”, then getting talked into it by my husband.  And it did suck me in, to try to figure out the whole process and how people make decisions about what to bet, how to bet, the spread, and of course, it all happens so fast that you can’t really figure it out anyway, because I think that is by design for it to be so complex to make it difficult for the average Joe to understand it, right? 

After all, there are people who are professionals at this – kind of a type of “financial analyst” except that they are trying to predict how an animal of some sort will behave against other animals of the same type while doing some sort of forward locomotion…  Then it gets into the animal’s past behavior, the upbringing, the trainers and the training, the animal “controller” (jockey in this case), and all sorts of predictive soft analytics, maybe a bit of hard analytics thrown in with statistical analysis and such… but anyway, this is quite an overwhelming quick-study, to say the least, when you are trying to play a game with the correct timing and such. 

It was crazy and it was kind of fun, but of course we did not win, and we did observe that others did by orders of magnitude – likely because they had more practice.

Everyone was very cordial, but in the end, the female contingent took off, and we were left with the “group of guys” who were more or less into it for the day… At that point, we departed and moved on out to spend the rest of the day doing whatever you do on New Year’s Day – think about resolutions, and reflect on the past year…

But now here we are in 2015.  Another year coming at us.  We have already heard of the passing of another colleague, which sets the tone for realizing once again how transient and precious life is on this planet. It says to me that there are meaningful times that touch lives more than gambling it away. 

I know I need to remember this always: Seize the moment and make it meaningful…you never know when your number is up.