So here's a weird, rambling little story that I'm going to post for no other reason than that I haven't posted anything here in some time, and I've been think a lot about this.
I was looking at mugs at Target yesterday, but I couldn't quite bring myself to buy one.
Let me back up. I drink a lot of tea. Like, a lot. I start my day with two cups, something dark. I like Constant Comment, I like Earl Grey, English Breakfast (or Irish Breakfast), Darjeeling. I like it strong, and I don't add sugar or milk or anything. I'll make my morning cup, and then when that's done I'll use the same bag to make another. (I also sometimes use loose tea, but it's usually more expensive than the bags so not all the time.)
At lunch I'll make myself green tea. Tazo makes a green with ginger that's really good, or just normal green tea is fine. Depending on what I have going on later, I might have a second cup of green also.
If I work my second job, at a Thai restaurant, I can drink all the tea I want there. So I'll usually have 2 cups of jasmine tea, sometimes four. If I don't have work, I have various herbal teas that I'll usually dig into, peppermint, or chamomile, I have a lemon ginger that's pretty good, or a few other blends. And then I end my night with a cup of sleepytime tea (I'm sipping on some as I write this).
I had this mug that I really liked, and I broke it a few weeks ago. It was a pretty frustrating week, and the mug was just a part of that. It was the week Bowie died, so I was pretty severely depressed all week. (I'm a huge Bowie fan, if I haven't mentioned that on here, and I was devastated to hear of his death.)
That was also the week that I almost quit comics entirely. I had a pretty serious financial setback, or rather, I was counting on bringing in a chunk of money that was going to go to a project, and that money never happened.
I was already pretty low that week, like I said, and then the mug broke, and the money thing happened, or rather didn't happen. It was one of those moments I just really felt like giving up entirely. Kind of an overreaction, I know, but anyway, I ended up launching Campaigners on indiegogo instead, so there you go.
Anyway, yeah. So, I broke my mug. I dropped something (I don't remember what) onto the handle, and it just broke. I was pretty bummed.
I should tell you about the mug. When I started drinking tea a lot, there was this Starbucks mug. I'd never really noticed it in the cupboard before, I assumed it was my wife's. I started using it. It was bigger than normal mugs, and it was the perfect size to make two cups of tea with one teabag. (I'm currently using a mug that belongs to my wife, that's also bigger than a standard mug, but not as big as the Starbucks one.)
So I asked my wife once if it was okay to use the Starbucks mug, or I may have apologized for it getting stained by the tea, or something. I don't remember, all I remember is her saying that it wasn't her mug. She didn't know where it had come from, and neither did I. Like it had just always been there.
That's what was cool about that mug. It had just kind of appeared, the perfect mug, out of nowhere. So I'm at Target yesterday, looking for a new mug, and they had a few that were about the right size, but it felt weird to just buy a mug, just at Target.
The mug I use at work is a mug I got for backing Reading Rainbow on kickstarter. The mug I'm using now my wife bought from a non-profit her sister used to work for. I have a mug I got when the Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer album went on sale, I bought it with the digital download of the album.
And, of course, the plain white mug that just said Starbucks in small letters on it, that had just materialized in our kitchen, and was the perfect size.
So I didn't end up buying a mug. I'm sure I will, and I'm sure it'll be fine. It's just one of those things. You have a thing, and it's got a cool story behind it, and you love it, and then it's gone, and you just go to the store and replace it, with something normal and boring and functional.
I used to have this pair of Chucks. A few days after I'd bought them I spilled some bleach on one. It looked really crappy with just a bunch of big flecks of bleach, so I just decided to bleach it all the way, until it was this pink-ish, orange-ish color. And I left the other shoe the way it was, so I had two mismatched shoes. It was like a signature, and I had those shoes for years. When it was time to throw them out, I thought about getting a new pair and bleaching one again. Or buying two different color pairs and switching them out. It just wouldn't be the same.
(I might still do the second one, buy different colored pairs, one of these days, when I have plenty of disposable income.)
I don't know what the point of all this is, just thinking about it a lot and I wanted to put it out there somewhere. I think I'm about done now. Time to go to bed.
