antoine dufour - reality

don't buy aromatic

I've been experiencing an ever-increasing desire to write a book lately. I would argue that this is a very good thing but the only problem is that I'm so full ideas of what to write about and all of aforementioned ideas are painfully vague.
I've been reading as much as I can recently in hopes that I'll finally land on what it is that I want to communicate to readers and I think maybe I'm starting to come onto something. I'll come back to this topic.

In other news, after smoking English blends for a while, aromatic pipe tobacco taste AWFUL.

Cheers.

That Country of the Soul

I've been experiencing something lately that is elusive at best. It's a feeling, or maybe a process, rather. I've been thinking about it a lot, trying to put my finger on exactly what it is. I debated whether I'm searching for "me," but I don't really think that's a legitimate search. Searching for yourself is something else, and calling it that is sort of a misnomer.
What I've been doing, I believe, is searching for my center. I'm searching for what fulfills me and makes my soul vibrate with life. It's something that's truly difficult to find. I'm in love with my beautiful girlfriend, and that's something that surely excites me, and she does complete a part of me in many ways, but there's another aspect that's beyond that. It's that aspect of myself that exists, but I need to find it and hone in on it, focus on it.
It seems like this search is taking the shape of a search on how to define myself as a person. This sounds pretty heavy, but I suppose it is.
To steal from my favorite author, Albert Camus, I want to find "...that country of the soul where one's kinship with the world can be felt, where the throbbing of one's blood mixes with the violent pulsations of the afternoon sun."
All of these questions have become more pressing due to the fact that I must find a serious path to a career so I can finish my school work properly. That simple question has forced me to really look for my center, look for my essence, look for that country of the soul.

Chase Banking

If you at one time did your banking at Washington Mutual bank, I apologize, because Washington Mutual is now Chase, and Chase is terrible. I don't like to be one to complain but this bank is just ridiculous.
To begin with, I can't deposit a check and withdraw it that same day. Secondly, they changed the amount of money that went into my savings account from my checking every month, without telling me. Thirdly, their overdraft fees are preposterous.
I am very tempted to pull my $36.56 out of my account and tell Chase to kindly lick my left testicle. They'd probably like that anyways.

The Great Perhaps

If you enjoy reading as much as I do, you've probably read more books than you can count. There are few that really get down inside you and change your views. "Looking for Alaska," by John Green is one of those books.
I don't often feel strong connections with characters, only a select few, but two of those characters are in the aforementioned novel.
It would be a waste of my time and yours to delve into a synopsis of the novel. I'd rather get into one of the main things the novel discusses.
The main protagonist in the novel states that he wishes to leave his rather mundane life to seek "The Great Perhaps," words that were apparently the last of one Francois Rabelais. The moment I read those words, they took my head off. What is The Great Perhaps?? The one thing that came to my mind was that it's referring to the uncertain state of post-death. But to seek that Great Perhaps has a suicidal ring to it, which couldn't be it.
What I'm coming to think of The Great Perhaps is that perhaps it represents our Great Potential. The Great Perhaps is a big unknown, so seeking The Great Perhaps means living life with courage and passion. There is most definitely something truly great to be taken from John Green in his novel. I highly recommend it. I may come back to this issue of The Great Perhaps if more thought and meditation yield more fruitful ideas.

Frog Morton revisited and helping people

If you've read my previous post about a new pipe tobacco I'm trying out, Frog Morton on the Bayou, then you've probably been on the edge of your seat for the past few days, waiting to find out what I think about it, but you probably haven't. After smoking several bowls of it, I like it more than I did when I first enjoyed it but it's not my top favorite English blend. In the beginning of the smoke, it smokes cool and sweet yet without losing that strong Latakia and Perique flavors. About 2/3rds of the way through the bowl, it has a tendency to smoke much hotter and it begins to take on a sort of damp taste which I really don't care for at all.
So all in all, I'm a fan of this tobacco although it will probably be something I buy only on occasion.

Now totally unrelated to pipe smoking or anything of the sort, while I ramble on about pipe tobacco, there are people in Haiti who don't even have a box to sleep in. The majority of us are busy people and cannot afford to travel to Haiti to help those in need, but there is a way to help, and that's economically.
If you've read anything ever about American history in the last hundred or so years, you probably ran across American policy in Latin America, and if you have not, let me tell you, it's really not pretty at all.
I see America's wealth in this tragedy as an opportunity to improve the world's opinion of us a tiny bit.
I'm not going to be the guy who attempts to lay a guilt trip on you and tell you that you're a horrible person if you can't donate $10, because in all honesty, I myself can't even afford to spare $10 of my money right now. But if you can afford to, please do. We're all people, and we really should help each other. For those of you who can afford to donate, I'll make it easy on you, here's a link to the Red Cross

http://www.redcross.org/

and if you're even more lazy, here's a link to the donation form

https://american.redcross.org/site/Donation2?4306.donation=form1&idb=1630508867&df_id=4306&JServSessionIdr004=hd6y3q5hu1.app206b

Planet Earth Series

I had the pleasure of sitting down and watching the latest installment of Discovery Channel's Planet Earth series, and I must say, it's a damn captivating experience.
The best way I can describe the experience is that it's like looking up at the night sky on an astonishingly clear night; it makes you feel dismally small and insignificant. Between watching snow leopards take down rams on a shear cliff face and ancient pre-human ocean life forms swimming around in Mexican underground caves, sitting here at my laptop typing this seems pretty pointless. How can one cope with being so unfathomably insignificant?

Why Money is just awesome...not so much.

I hate very few things, but when I do hate something, I hate it with a burning passion. One thing I hate, and hate with aforementioned burning passion is money. Yes, that money, the one you used the other day to put gas in your car that you payed for with money and are using money to insure. It all ties into this vicious cycle.
I'm not one of those people who believes in worldwide money conspiracy theories, I hate money for a few small yet significant reasons.
Lists are effective:

1. It creates tension in relationships, namely mine sometimes.

I'm not sure if my significant other feels the tension, but I do. I don't make a considerable amount of money although I make more than the average twenty-year-old. I use the money I have to pay for my car which carts me back and forth to make money. (I'm not bashing my car, I LOVE my car and I love tuning it and yeah, I'm into cars...anyways) But when the weather gets bad and I can't go into work (You can't wash/detail cars in the rain), I have something like $20 to my name. This isn't a huge problem for me personally because I've got enough tobacco to last me until the next payday and I can almost always scrounge up some gas money.
The problem is that my girlfriend has to pay for things if she doesn't want to stay home. I don't know about you but I was raised as a gentleman and I absolutely hate when my girlfriend pays for my meal or whatever it may be. Maybe it's a stubbornness, but either way, it doesn't sit well with me.
What it comes down to is that money, or lack thereof, is preventing me from going out and being able to provide for my girlfriend as I'd like to, creating some unnecessary tension.

moving on...

2. You can never have enough of it.

This is rather self-explanatory, but money never lasts for a significant amount of time. My parents are always telling me to save my money but how am I supposed to do that when I have to pay for insurance, gas, and some minor eating out and having fun. In order to effectively save money, I'd have to stay in my house 80% of the time, and what kind of life is that?

3. People judge you based on the amount of money you have.

This is just ridiculous. I don't do this personally but I know a lot of people that do this, whether they do it consciously or not. It's really quite sad.

I suppose it's just something I have to change my outlook on. There's just only so much attitude-changing that can be done when need money to get around whether you like it or not.

Some new material and frogs.

I've made an attempt at doing pipe tobacco reviews and pipe-related discussions on Youtube videos but I have found that taking the time to create and upload videos doesn't really sit well with me. When I'm smoking a pipe, I don't want to be on camera talking about smoking a pipe, I just want to smoke. I'd much rather discuss those things here rather than make videos.
So if you read this blog, you can be expecting to hear some pipe tobacco reviews and discussions as pipe smoking is something I enjoy. Am I becoming too bourgeois?? I suppose worrying about it would make it more so, therefore I'll just enjoy what I like without worrying about how others view it.
For my first little take on certain tobaccos, I'll start with a tobacco I bought just two days ago, called Frog Morton on the Bayou.

I actually have yet to smoke it because I just haven't got the opportunity but the aroma from the tin makes it hard not to put in my pipe. There's a strong latakia aroma as well as perique, which is no doubt present in this blend. Other than that it seems to have another dimension that's really hard to put my finger on. It almost smells like pears, in the sense of how sweet it smells. I'll hold the rest of the discussion until I actually get to enjoy a bowl of this and I'll talk more about it then. Cheers.

a slim sort of betrayal

So I had plans with two friends of mine, one being a very close friend. The other friend got a hold of me to ask if I could not invite my girlfriend because she apparently just wanted it to be the three of us going to smoke hookah and hang out. I had already invited my girlfriend so I obviously wasn't going to un-invite her. All of a sudden the one friend didn't even want to go at all. I was a little annoyed but I left it alone in hopes that the friend who was closer with me would still want to go through with the plans without the other one. Turns out he's with the girl he's been blowing me off to sleep with for the last couple weeks. So I grow a little more annoyed.
I contacted the friend who originally flaked and she told me that her and my close friend had actually gone to hookah, and they hadn't said anything to me. I messaged my close friend and he said that he hadn't told me because he didn't want me to get mad. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My friends had blown me off only to get together to hang out as we had originally planned behind my back. I was furious. I'm still a little annoyed about the whole situation, and also because my close friend (whom I would never expect anything like this from), has yet to get a hold of me, and it's been two days since the whole incident. I'm still thinking of exactly how I should handle the situation. My gut is telling me to talk to him but my head most definitely knows better. I'll just have to wait and see how it turns out.

updates and writers block

I've really been wanting to start writing more seriously lately. I just don't know where to start, in a way. I guess the simple answer would be to just put the pen to the paper but for some reason it's not that easy. There's a block. I'm probably suffering from the same bullshit excuses writers have been using for centuries, namely "writer's block." I personally don't believe it really exists. I believe the condition is a combination of other factors wrapped up into one convenient explanation.
Anyways...I haven't posted in a while.
It's my own fault, it's not like I'm not on the computer, I'd just rather waste my time than write here. I'm going to attempt to write more often here. We'll see how that goes.
I've learned recently that even though shitty things happen, the world doesn't actually end. Like I didn't do as well as I would've liked last semester in one of my classes but I'm still sitting here feeling fine. Not that I shouldn't have tried harder, but I don't have to be such a control freak. Working doing car detailing has taught me that I suffer from some sort of control disorder that I'm not really a big fan of. But hey, what can you do, right?

I really hope I can remember to write here more often. Till next time, Cheers.