It's going to be amazing

A few days ago I received a notice that I would be invited to a friend's birthday party, which is to take place this evening. Almost as soon as I learned of the party I started to think about jokes and whatnot that I might bring to the party. After not too long I settled on the idea of bringing a joke present, one which would emphasize a character flaw of my that the celebrant and I have enjoyed laughing about.

I guess I should go back a bit, and explain this character flaw. It seems that for some number of years, at least going back to my high school days, I have been moderately interested in knowing what nicotine feels like (and I should be clear, not what smoking feels like). I think I am curious to know what it is that people like about smoking that makes it addictive, or at least something along these lines. As a result of this fascination with nicotine and the resulting feeling I have tired a number of smoking cessation products over the past number of years.

I started with a piece of nicotine gum that I acquired from a friend of mine who was trying to quite. Contrary to the instructions I received from my friend I chewed away like this was regular gum. Perhaps not surprisingly, I quickly felt quite ill and nothing else. Though this experiment ended with me feeling rather poorly, I have always felt that it was a success of sorts. If nothing else, I learned what a high dose of nicotine will do to me.

More recently I decided that my first experiment with the gum wasn't enough and that I should really try the patch. This summer I was able to get a patch from a friend. It turned out that he gave me the strongest level patch, which was supposed to be equivalent to smoking some relatively high proportion of a pack of cigarettes. Again, not surprisingly, it made me feel a little like death.

This past fall I mentioned this incidents to the birthday boy and he found them funny (meaning ridiculous). A few days afterwards suggested that I might try a nicotine inhaler that he had recently seen advertised. Since then a running conversation we have had is about my non-smoking use of nicotine and tobacco.

When I heard it was his birthday I thought that I could try and bring him in on the fun. As I know that he isn't interested in ingesting nicotine or tobacco, I thought that I could give him some of my dried stash that he could use as pesticide (nicotine can be dissolved in water by soaking tobacco leaves and then used as a pesticide). This should allow him to partake in the whole nicotine thing without having to worry about developing an addiction or bad breath.

Instead of just giving him dried home-grown tobacco leaves I decided to try to make the whole thing a bit more elaborate. I created a name for the product, and then matching packaging material. I then decided that I would go all out and make a 'gift basket' by also included disposable strainers (to remove the leaves from the water) and a spray bottle (for spraying the homemade pesticide). This was all wrapped together, as you can see below.



[Embedded Video]

For those of you who are interested in a more direct view of the product and its packaging, here you go:



Sorry if this is a little disorganized, I was writing this and getting ready to go (hopefully I won't miss the bus).