*Koff*
There are a lot of advantages to living with your significant other. One of them, of course, is that you get to spend your free time with the woman you love (in my case, anyway, and the case of non-traditional female readers). It's nice to know who it is you're coming home to. Plus, you get to know this girl's (see previous parenthetical statement) ins and outs, as it were - what she looks like in the morning, how she smells on a daily basis rather than just before a date.

The less obvious benefits, of course, are things like having someone to share the financial burdens of the household, teaching yourself to cook out of real cookbooks, and not having to be the only person to make the bed.

And interior decorating. That's nice too.

But after living with my girlfriend for the past two years, one thing I miss is one of the most simple pleasures: the cigar.

When you live alone, or rather, with people who don't depend on your attention and whose attention you don't necessarily demand, you can go out, hang out with friends in their front yards, drink a glass of port and smoke a stogie. Come home smelling like crap? Doesn't matter. Have a bit of a headrush from the nicotine and the temporary replacement of oxygen with various poisons? No big deal. Cough up a lung? Only Berney and Pratik can hear you, and one's doing thermo while the other steals umbrellas.

Last halloween, I dressed up as Bill Clinton for a party, and decided to carry around a cigar to complete the effect. Now, I'm not a guy who does everything halfway, and this was one of my good moments. Rather than spending five dollars on a box of Phillies or Swishers, I opted to really step up to the plate and buy four Honduran cigars. I had just seen The Punisher, so you'll catch the reference if you have, too.

I smoked one that night after getting home, and while Kirsten said she didn't mind, I get the feeling she was a little unhappy about the odor. I felt guilty the next time I smoked a cigar when she was around, too, since she doesn't really get a kick out of them like I do.

She's in Washington state right now, visiting her folks for her birthday. So after going to the gym and becoming more impossibly ripped and hunky, I grabbed my last remaining cigar and sat out behind one of my complex's garages, watched traffic, and just kicked back with a few strike-anywhere matches and a nice smoke.

I must have been out there for about half an hour, just staring at the moon and feeling the gentle breeze caused by Cardinals traffic cruising by on I-170. Sometimes, it's the simplest things that make the day.