Goodbye dear coffee mug
July 31, 2010
I have too much stuff and it gets in my way. It gets in my way when I try to walk across my room, and it gets in my way when I’m trying to find something specific amongst the mess. So I’ve decided to try and become more of a minimalist. It’s always intrigued me, but I could never bring myself to get rid of things with “sentimental value.”
Until now.
This summer, I’ve started to do the 100 Things Challenge, where you try to get rid of all your personal belongings except for 100. It’s all the rage among the people on the internet.
So far, I’m at around 270 items and am still finding things I forgot to catalogue. In the category of “clothes and accessories” alone I have more than 100 things.
Today, I’m about to make a breakthrough. It starts with a travel mug.
At one point in 2007, everything was going perfectly in my life. Or at least that’s how I remember it. On Thursdays, my friends and I had a book club, then usually went to Brewed Awakening the local coffee shop, then I had dance.
I was going through my list, getting rid of things I didn’t need, and I found that I had two coffee mugs on my list. The first was a leaky broken one from Brewed, and the second one was a pretentious Starbucks mug with a really clever design.
I tried to fix the old mug. It reminded me of that time, and it looked more like a proper coffee mug than a green piece of eco-friendly bullshit. But not even crazy glue could keep it from leaking.
But I still held onto it.
Until today, when I snapped a picture of it and threw it away.
Dear coffee mug, you had a good life. You held my mint tea when I first bought you in the evening light on West Street, and have smelled like mint tea ever since. You were there when I tricked myself into believing that mint tea made me smarter (I defined “self-fulfilling prophecy” in English class, and the prof thought I was reciting it from somewhere but I’d really just said it off the top of my head – I never do anything really well in English, so it had to be the mint tea. I now give mint tea credit for my grades.)
You tolerated me dropping you on the floor twice in a row in Leo’s, and have scars to prove it. You have often helped me keep my eyes open in dynamics class when our prof used those soporific things called powerpoint slides.
(Note: Soporific means something that makes you sleepy. According to my computer’s built-in thesaurus.)
O coffee mug, though you look very classic and you smell very sweet, it is time for me to let you go. You’ve become old, you leak fluids where you shouldn’t, and you tend to fall over a lot. It is my hope that you go quickly to coffee-mug heaven and coffee-mug-Jesus will be there to greet you or whatever goes on in heaven.
And now, moving on, I have 269 items left and I’m going to attack my t-shirts. Assuming I do laundry once a week, I have about three times as many as I need.
Ciao!
