5/4/14
O’Hare International Airport, Illinois
In yesterday’s entry, I talked about “last time.” In this entry I talk about “next time.” There are some trips I take where I need to
shoot for Complete, knowing I will never return to that area of the world. My trip to Dubai was like that. I wanted my trip to Jordan to be like that,
but I failed. I don’t need to go into
more examples, but this trip was not like that.
I knew that I would return to this area, so saying Indiana Complete was
not so important. Not even getting an
Indianapolis keychain mattered, since I would probably return next year. Sometimes I think I will return, such as with
Orlando, but do not. Having no reason to
go to Orlando, saying Florida Complete now requires a very long drive from the
Miami area to Orlando for no reason other than a stamp. Maybe I will never make it back to the pipe
show, but that seems unlikely. The
Midwest is not a place that holds any special sway over me, not like the
Southwest, not like the Canadian Arctic, not like the inland parts of the North
American Tropics. Chicago is a nice
city, not that I set foot inside of city limits, excluding the airport, and
maybe next time I will spend some time seeing the city again. When I finished up the show today, I had
plenty of time, but I had zero desire to fight city traffic and do some
sightseeing. Next time. When people ask if I enjoyed myself, I will
answer honestly, and say that I did not, though it was very fulfilling. Next time I will focus on enjoyment. Next time I will spend some time in
Indianapolis and maybe even see the Derby.
Next time I will spend more time relaxing in the smoking tent and
showing off my pipes, which are some of the best in the world. I know that I have one of the world’s best
collections of Italian, straight grain pipes, but I do not how where I would
rank on the list. If I had to venture a
guess, it would be top 100 in the world, but I could easily be off by an order
of magnitude in either direction. Next
time I will budget a little more to the show and focus on just buying one
amazing pipe instead of just getting two very good pipes. Or maybe next time, I will aim to say Indiana
Complete and Ohio Complete, pretty much repeating this trip. Who knows?
I certainly don’t.
What I do know
and what was originally supposed to be the opening for this entry is that I
will probably still be listening to my Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift music as
I drive. They are, without a doubt, my
two favorite artists of the past 12+ years.
I do not want to provide a critique of their music styles but rather the
way the dress. What does the way two pop
stars dress have to do with philosophy?
Everything. Taylor tries too hard
in her appearance while Avril has a more casual appearance, which I find more
attractive. I find it very unattractive when
someone tries too hard to look good. I
find makeup, lipstick, eye shadow, anything unnatural to be unattractive. I will not go into a deeper exploration of
the impression I get from someone who so tries to subvert her reality. Instead, I will explore how someone who
dresses like Avril exudes pure self-confidence.
The very fact that she is so confident in herself that she doesn’t care
about impressing people with an artificial appearance will make her far more
attractive to me than any amount of so-called “beauty” products, and I have
empirical evidence to prove it.
Reader,
you and I both know that Avril probably spends just as much time working on her
“devil may care” look as Taylor does on her look, but that is not the
point. Avril has a persona to
maintain. The people I am talking about
do not. Whenever I hear about a woman
trying to change a man, it is a non-starter.
I would never be in a relationship with someone who wants to “change”
me. I am who I am, and I am the only one
who gets to decide what is negative about me and what I will do to change
it. It is the Jim/Cheryl (“According to
Jim”) example, which is why he is one of my favorite characters. Whenever Cheryl tries to change Jim, he
reminds her that she chose him for him, and he would not be who he was if he
changed. She accepts that argument
without further discussion.
“I am the
man who does not sacrifice his love or his values.” Any relationship that requires you to
sacrifice your values is not love. It is
convenience. Any man who is willing to
sacrifice his values in exchange for love suffers from breaches in
self-esteem. Any woman who is trying to
attract a man based on the way she dresses or the way she “puts on her face”
suffers from breaches in her self-esteem.
My reader might point out that I am saying I am attracted to people who
dress casually and that might contradict what I am saying, but they would be
misreading it. I would first like to go
off on an aside. In addition to the
casual look, which we can call the Avril Lavigne look, there is also what I
will call the Marissa Meyer look. I find
Marissa Meyer attractive not because she is pretty, though she is, but because
she is the CEO of Yahoo, which means she is pretty much Dagny Taggart made
flesh. The way she dresses exudes just
as much self-confidence as the Avril Lavigne look, and it is a look I also find
attractive. The reason why there is no
contradiction between me saying “I don’t care about how women dress” and “I
find women who dress casually attractive” is because I do not find the way they
dress attractive but rather what it represents.
If an irrational thinker or someone with low self-esteem was dressing
that way, I would not find it attractive at all and perhaps even be disgusted
by their appearance. Paired with WIJG,
it is easy to see why I went on this whole tangent, but I will leave it a
mystery to my causal reader, who can just take it as my reaction to the music I
had been playing all trip. I will
briefly pause before I recall the adventures of the day.
Breakfast was excellent, and I left my bags with the valet as I went
to take my picture of the Capitol. I lit
up my Cohiba, vowing to say Complete next time.
I had once again miscalculated the time zone differences, but the error
was in my favor. I had not set an alarm,
and I will still be at the show ahead of schedule. The drive was long, boring, and unadventurous,
though I barely had enough gas to get to the show. I knew that if I filled up on the way from
the show to the airport I would be able to return the car with close enough to
full, so that was my goal. Towards the
end of the drive, after I lit up my Padron and starting to get tired of Avril,
I put on Taylor. When I had put on Avril
at the office after getting back from the CA-4 trip, one of my coworkers asked
me if I was cheating on Taylor with Avril.
I had replied that I had been cheating on Avril with Taylor all
along. It is important to note that I
have found both of these artists, my two favorite singers of the past 12 years,
to be physically attractive. There are
other far prettier artists, but I enjoy these two artists’ music better. Did my attraction to them inform my
appreciation of their music, or was it the other way around? I’m not sure.
I do not think I am attracted to the Avril look because I like her
music, nor do I think that I like her music because I like the way she
dresses. Sure, there might be some
causation, but I think it is mostly correlation.
As I approached the resort that hosted the
pipe show, I realized that I had no idea where the show would be. Would the valet know? Fortunately, it was clearly marked, and the
smoking tent could not be missed. Other
than the show, my only forthcoming expenses would be a tank of gas, the taxi
ride from the airport, and food. I still
had my original show budget in cash, though I had forgotten to account for the
admission fee and the entry for the slow smoke, but I still had plenty. I walked in, and I was floored. There were well over 100 vendors, each with a
big selection of pipes, ranging in price almost three orders of magnitude. Excluding some antique pipes, the most
expensive ones were 4-6 weeks of my net pay.
I had budgeted 1 week. It
reminded me of New Orleans or Quebec, places that are packed with souvenir
shops. While buying a keychain at each souvenir
shop in New Orleans was an option, buying a pipe from each vendor was not. I figured I could get two nice pipes to add
to my selection, but I was only interested in Italian straight grains. I also was not interested in pipe brands I
already owned. I wanted stuff that would
be new, stuff that I could not get at Barclay Rex back home. In the very first row, I found a pipe maker
who had an amazing selection, exactly what I wanted. I forced myself to hold off until had walked
the whole floor, knowing full well I would be coming back. I stopped at almost every vendor, picking up
a pipe to check it out. If it was
stamped with a country other than Italy or did not have good grain, I put it
down and walked on. By this process, I
quickly made my way through the floor. I
was starting to get hungry at this point, but I wanted to buy my pipes first. There was another vendor with some
underpriced straight grains, or so it seemed.
I went back to the first pipe maker, picked out a real beauty, and I
asked him if he could do any better on the price. Being an Italian pipe maker, his English was
not too great, so I named a price. He
hemmed and hawed but agreed to my offer.
I then went back to the other guy, who was right next to Steve
Monjure.
Monjure and I go way back. I always buy a lot from him when he has a
show at Barclay Rex. I probably account
for over half of his sales at those pipe shows.
On the other hand, half of my Italian straight grains, the pride of my
collection, have come from him. I would
not say that we are friends, our relationship being purely business, but we
have a very friendly relationship. He
knows that I have the potential to make or break his show when he comes to New
York, and I know that he can get me all the best pipes from Italy. It is a very good, mutually beneficial
relationship. He gave me a nice
greeting, and he promised to do something for me if I wanted a pipe. I really did want a pipe, but his pipes were
almost twice as much as the other guy. I
looked at all the Ardor (my favorite of the Italian brands) straight grains and
then moved on. I soon realized why those
pipes were so cheap. They weren’t really
straight grains, most of them being severely flawed. The few that did have good grain were not of
a shape I liked.
I went back to
Monjure. I found a few that I liked, and
the sticker price was twice the cash I had in my pocket. Not wanting to blow my budget and use my
credit card, I asked him what he would do for me? He asked if I wanted the employees’ discount
or the manager’s discount? I told him I
wanted both and the Friends and Family discount. That came out to be 30% off the sticker price,
no tax, an effective discount of 35%. I
took all the cash I had on me, including the “lucky” large banknote I kept from
Vegas and had been saving in case of an emergency. I was still slightly short of the number he
quoted for the cheaper of the two pipes.
I counted out the cash, told him I had a budget for the show and had
already bought a pipe from the first guy.
He agreed. Absolutely starving, I
went to get something to eat at the snack bar.
It was cash only.
I went to the smoking tent, and
even I could smell the smoke. The smoke
was so thick that you could see it permeate the room. I lit up my first pipe, the one that I bought
first, as I did some work. I wrote one
proposal and put together the folders to prepare two more. My computer was getting low on battery. After I finished the pipe, I was absolutely
starving, but I only had 20 minutes before I needed to get back for the slow
smoke contest. I needed something quick
and close by. I found a fast food place
across the street. As soon as I stepped
into the parking lot, I was whisked back to all of the Star Wars and comic book
conventions I had attended, which used to be my main impetus for travel. Those were the trips that I truly loved,
cheap trips where purchases at the convention took up the vast majority of my
budget. I really want to budget the trip
that way next time. Lunch fitted the
bill, a nice bacon cheeseburger, but I would soon be hungry again. Binging on those Atkins bars the first two
days and not leaving any for today was a big mistake.
People were lining up for the slow smoke when
I got back. They sat us down at tables
and explained the rules to us in great detail.
The entry fee was far less than the cost of the new pipe we were
getting, so it was a really good deal.
They had produced 100 identical pipes and weighed out 100 identical bags
of tobacco, which looked like little bags of weed. We would be given 5 minutes to inspect the
pipe and then we would be given our little bags of tobacco. We would get 5 minutes to fill our pipe
bowl. After that, we would have 1 minute
and two matches to light our pipe. After
10 minutes, we could have a bottle of water.
We were not allowed to use a pipe cleaners, so some smokers left the
stem a little bit out to avoid a moisture build up. If we wanted to use the bathroom, we would
have to leave the pipe at the table and hope it was still lit when we got
back. We were out of the contest if the
pipe went out for any reason, whether or not we had gone through our entire
bowl of tobacco. I had hoped to go for
an hour, but I just wanted to smoke the damn pipe. The tobacco was very dry, and I knew that an
hour was a pipe dream, pun intended. I
was not the first one out, and I went out just as the bulk of the crowd started
to go out, so I had no reason to be embarrassed, considering I was a rookie at
this. It was my first time, and I lasted
25 minutes. There is a sex joke to be
made here. I saw one of my friends from
the NY Pipe Club, and we exchanged greetings.
The president, Lou, of the club was also there. They both finished a few minutes after I
did. Lou was quite impressed with my new
pipes and examined them “under the glass” as he said. I sat down to finish my Aristotle reading,
which I had started during the contest. There
were some obnoxious guys sitting down near me.
They were smoking cigarettes, but one of them showed how knowledgeable
he was when he started asking questions about my new Ardor. I was, once again starving, but I did not
want to go back to that same fast food place.
I figured that I would smoke my Ardor, grab something to eat on the way
to the airport, stop at the cigar lounge I had seen on the road, and then get
to the airport with more than enough time for to write this entry. I stopped at another fast food place and then
tried to remember where the cigar store was.
I had trouble finding it, and it was not a cigar store. It was a hookah lounge with a shitty
humidor. It was good thing that I did
not stop for a smoke, sine we will be boarding in about 40 minutes, and I am
not yet finished. I gassed up, cleaned out
the car, and was on my way. I got to
gate without about 3 hours to spare before my flight, and I spent the proceeded
to write this entry, which I have spent about 2 hours on, so I will now close
and publish as is. I suppose that I will
includes some broader reflections en route, but this is the bulk of the entry,
and I intend to either work or sleep on the plane. I will make one last point before I
close. As I was driving in Illinois,
they had a billboard with Illinois’s 5 Most Wanted. 3 of them were black, the other 2
Hispanic. I am not making any kind of judgment,
just pointing it out.
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