OBTAINING juice
You should, by now, have sent off for a few "sampler packs" of juice.
You may have received gifts of juice. You may have even sent off for whole big bottles of it, which you weren't supposed to do yet.
One way or another, you should have obtained a variety of juice. If you haven't done that yet, stop reading this and go send off for some, then come back.
Back? Good.
Most juice is like good Burgundy in that it needs to repose a while. This is important o remember, because when the juice you sent off for arrives, if you get someone to put it into a cartomizer for you, there's a very good chance that you will be appalled and horrified by its taste. It may taste nothing like what the label says it is.
This is not entirely due to your non-functioning olfactory apparatus. The experience will be especially traumatic if you've been blessed with, and become accustomed to, juice you received as a gift, which tasted good immediately, or at least tasted like its name, even if you didn't like it much.
That's because gift juice will almost always have spent some time reposing, while some companies actually make even your little 3ml bottle of juice to order, so it comes to you brand new.
What you should do, when you receive juice you sent off for, is treat it exactly as you would red wine that you plan to drink a few years from now. Put it in a cool dark place and forget about it for a while.
Juice does not go to the bad. Some people say it has a shelf life of 2 years, but frankly, there aren't enough people who have been using e-cigarettes for a lot longer than 2 years who can either agree or disagree with that.
The most sensible thing is to file that 2 years thing in the "Belief" folder until enough time has passed for there to be a healthy amount of solid, experience-based debate on the subject.
In any event, while setting arbitrary dates for something like building new neural pathways and completing an organic upgrade process is a counter-productive invocation of self-sabotage and therefore a terrible idea, it's also only natural to hope that we will have phased out tobacco cigarettes and regained our tasting and smelling capability well before two years have passed, so for our purposes, "juice does not go to the bad" is a perfectly respectable operative principle.
Let's assume that you've done your homework, obtained some juice, left it to nap quietly for a few weeks and you now have a nice clutterly pile of teeny tiny little bottles with microscopic writing on them.
CHOOSING THE JUICE
Everything has a learning curve, and filling cartomizers is no exception. Your first ones may or may not be notsmokable. You WILL mess some up, and you WILL waste some juice. That's OK, that's how we learn.
But we don't want to waste our favorite juice, if we're lucky enough to have one already, and we don't want to spend it on cartomizers that are only partly notsmokable. Neither do we want to waste juice that we really hate, for three reasons:
1) We don't have taste and smell abilities yet, so we don't know if we really hate that juice. In a few months, we might love it.
2) If we still hate it when we can taste and smell again, say, after a year or so, that means that it is not really our juice, and it is our obligation and our privilege to put it up on the PIF section so that we may claim the honor of helping it get to its Forever Home with its rightful owner.
3) Even if our first cartomizer-filling efforts are not up to our normal standards of notsmokability, some of them will be somewhat usable. For example, we may not put enough in, so that we can only puff that cartomizer for a little while. Well, we don't want to puff juice we hate for ANY while! 3.1 Because we hate it, duh.
3.2 Puffing on something that does not taste good to us, today, right now, is in violation of our core principle of building pleasant associations and new neural pathways. Puffing our electric hookah-doodles must always, always, be an enjoyable, fun experience. See point 3.1.
Practice juice must be something that we like, but isn't our favorite, juice that we like occasionally. My personal preference is to practice with dessert juice.
When people told me that I would like non-tobacco flavors, I smiled and nodded politely, but in my heart, I didn't believe them. After 50 years of Marlboro Reds, the idea that I would enjoy inhaling chocolate-flavored water vapor into my lungs was both preposterous and slightly repellent.
Imagine my surprise when, in a spirit of pure experimentation, just to see how wrong on how many levels it would be, I screwed a zero nicotine cappuccino-flavored cartomizer I'd received as a gift onto my electric hookah-doodle, took a puff, and - Whoa! I spent the next hour or so puffing on my totally awesomely delicious cappuccino-flavored cartomizer, with a sheepish grin plastered on my face, as I silently apologized to all the people at whom I had smiled and nodded politely while mentally rolling my eyes...
SELF-DISCOVERY REALITY SHOW STYLE CONFESSIONAL MOMENT
First, let me apologize for the lack of euphemistic ways to say this: I'm a chocolate snob.
Chocolate comes from Switzerland. Thus endeth my views on chocolate.
Well, there's one quasi-exception: Mexico. Chocolate from its homeland is also adjective-defyingly delicious, but it's such a different product that it might as well be a different substance, so the Chocolate comes from Switzerland absolute is neither negated nor tainted with inconsistency.
It's still early days, but it turns out, I may also be a chocolate vapor snob. I've been gifted chocolate juice or cartomizers that came from several different companies, and even included it in a couple of "sampler sets" I sent off for. Maybe it needs to repose a while more...
HOW DOES THAT REVELATION HELP YOU?
Only in that it serves as an example of what makes a good practice juice. I don't HATE the chocolate juice. It's not my preferred dessert juice, like cappuccino is, but puffing it is a pleasant enough experience so that I can do it without disturbing all that Neural Party Barn construction that's going on, but I'm not so dependent on it that spilling a cc or two of it here and there would plunge me into a Juice Insecure situation either.
NEXT: Squeezing tiny bottles into Barbie water tumblers made of silicone
You should, by now, have sent off for a few "sampler packs" of juice.
You may have received gifts of juice. You may have even sent off for whole big bottles of it, which you weren't supposed to do yet.
One way or another, you should have obtained a variety of juice. If you haven't done that yet, stop reading this and go send off for some, then come back.
Back? Good.
Most juice is like good Burgundy in that it needs to repose a while. This is important o remember, because when the juice you sent off for arrives, if you get someone to put it into a cartomizer for you, there's a very good chance that you will be appalled and horrified by its taste. It may taste nothing like what the label says it is.
This is not entirely due to your non-functioning olfactory apparatus. The experience will be especially traumatic if you've been blessed with, and become accustomed to, juice you received as a gift, which tasted good immediately, or at least tasted like its name, even if you didn't like it much.
That's because gift juice will almost always have spent some time reposing, while some companies actually make even your little 3ml bottle of juice to order, so it comes to you brand new.
What you should do, when you receive juice you sent off for, is treat it exactly as you would red wine that you plan to drink a few years from now. Put it in a cool dark place and forget about it for a while.
Juice does not go to the bad. Some people say it has a shelf life of 2 years, but frankly, there aren't enough people who have been using e-cigarettes for a lot longer than 2 years who can either agree or disagree with that.
The most sensible thing is to file that 2 years thing in the "Belief" folder until enough time has passed for there to be a healthy amount of solid, experience-based debate on the subject.
In any event, while setting arbitrary dates for something like building new neural pathways and completing an organic upgrade process is a counter-productive invocation of self-sabotage and therefore a terrible idea, it's also only natural to hope that we will have phased out tobacco cigarettes and regained our tasting and smelling capability well before two years have passed, so for our purposes, "juice does not go to the bad" is a perfectly respectable operative principle.
Let's assume that you've done your homework, obtained some juice, left it to nap quietly for a few weeks and you now have a nice clutterly pile of teeny tiny little bottles with microscopic writing on them.
CHOOSING THE JUICE
Everything has a learning curve, and filling cartomizers is no exception. Your first ones may or may not be notsmokable. You WILL mess some up, and you WILL waste some juice. That's OK, that's how we learn.
But we don't want to waste our favorite juice, if we're lucky enough to have one already, and we don't want to spend it on cartomizers that are only partly notsmokable. Neither do we want to waste juice that we really hate, for three reasons:
1) We don't have taste and smell abilities yet, so we don't know if we really hate that juice. In a few months, we might love it.
2) If we still hate it when we can taste and smell again, say, after a year or so, that means that it is not really our juice, and it is our obligation and our privilege to put it up on the PIF section so that we may claim the honor of helping it get to its Forever Home with its rightful owner.
3) Even if our first cartomizer-filling efforts are not up to our normal standards of notsmokability, some of them will be somewhat usable. For example, we may not put enough in, so that we can only puff that cartomizer for a little while. Well, we don't want to puff juice we hate for ANY while! 3.1 Because we hate it, duh.
3.2 Puffing on something that does not taste good to us, today, right now, is in violation of our core principle of building pleasant associations and new neural pathways. Puffing our electric hookah-doodles must always, always, be an enjoyable, fun experience. See point 3.1.
Practice juice must be something that we like, but isn't our favorite, juice that we like occasionally. My personal preference is to practice with dessert juice.
When people told me that I would like non-tobacco flavors, I smiled and nodded politely, but in my heart, I didn't believe them. After 50 years of Marlboro Reds, the idea that I would enjoy inhaling chocolate-flavored water vapor into my lungs was both preposterous and slightly repellent.
Imagine my surprise when, in a spirit of pure experimentation, just to see how wrong on how many levels it would be, I screwed a zero nicotine cappuccino-flavored cartomizer I'd received as a gift onto my electric hookah-doodle, took a puff, and - Whoa! I spent the next hour or so puffing on my totally awesomely delicious cappuccino-flavored cartomizer, with a sheepish grin plastered on my face, as I silently apologized to all the people at whom I had smiled and nodded politely while mentally rolling my eyes...
SELF-DISCOVERY REALITY SHOW STYLE CONFESSIONAL MOMENT
First, let me apologize for the lack of euphemistic ways to say this: I'm a chocolate snob.
Chocolate comes from Switzerland. Thus endeth my views on chocolate.
Well, there's one quasi-exception: Mexico. Chocolate from its homeland is also adjective-defyingly delicious, but it's such a different product that it might as well be a different substance, so the Chocolate comes from Switzerland absolute is neither negated nor tainted with inconsistency.
It's still early days, but it turns out, I may also be a chocolate vapor snob. I've been gifted chocolate juice or cartomizers that came from several different companies, and even included it in a couple of "sampler sets" I sent off for. Maybe it needs to repose a while more...
HOW DOES THAT REVELATION HELP YOU?
Only in that it serves as an example of what makes a good practice juice. I don't HATE the chocolate juice. It's not my preferred dessert juice, like cappuccino is, but puffing it is a pleasant enough experience so that I can do it without disturbing all that Neural Party Barn construction that's going on, but I'm not so dependent on it that spilling a cc or two of it here and there would plunge me into a Juice Insecure situation either.
NEXT: Squeezing tiny bottles into Barbie water tumblers made of silicone
