Replacing Perfection

I'm crushed. I'm heartbroken. Life as I have come to know and be content with is over. Devastated...

My coffee bowl broke.

It was a huge, heavy, ceramic twenty oz mug that had french writing on it, so that even in my bathrobe, I felt a little haute' coture. I'm aware that it was probably made in Taiwan, but I didn't let that burst my bubble in the slightest. I've had that mug for years. I had all my measurements and add to levels memorized to the point of complete and total morning automatic pilot. Another wonderful thing about that mug, was that I could empty the coffee pot completely in 3 cups.

Knowing that I'd only have to get up from the computer twice, which would be plenty to remind me to do laundry, take out meat for dinner and attend to my son's sippy cup and his butt-cover-changes. It also usually took about the time for me to empty a cup, for my bladder to fill, which created a nice and easy flow of pee-refill cup-drink-pee-refill cup-drink...

For an admitted coffee junkie, the number of return trips to the coffee pot to drain it's contents to the last drop is a critical assessment of a coffee mug. I haven't seen any specifically-a-coffee-mug nearly as large in my few and far between wanderings... then again, I wasn't looking. I mean, when you're perfectly content with something, you don't go looking for a replacement, do you?

It simply worked, perfectly in so many ways that I didn't realize them all until... until the morning I went to wash it out and found a full wall crack had developed that I could feel with my finger tips. It was time for the blessed perfect bowl to go.

Oh, for a couple of days I used my old Dunkin' Donuts mug. I got it the summer I was sixteen and worked there. It used to say "The Big One" on the side, cause back before Starbucks, 16 oz was a huge amount of coffee... do y'all remember those days? Well those words wore off years ago, so did the feeling that 16 oz was a large amount of coffee. I mean, come on, that was over half a lifetime ago... That was hair-bear, seamed fishnet stockings and granny boots ago!

Needless to say, with my new-millennium-maniac-junkie coffee needs, those 16 oz were too scrawny to fulfill my needs. I'd just sit down and have to get back up to refill the cup. I'd be deep into writing a post and have to sidetrack my train of thought to get more coffee. I was getting up long before I had to pee, or before the first load of laundry had even finished washing! This was so not going to work as a permanent replacement.

One morning, desperate to not have to get up every 12.2 minutes for more coffee, I used my new cold drink mug. It's heavy plastic, has a handle and is 32 oz of drink holding new-millennium technology. The whole pot in two cups! YEAH!!!-Completely-Wired-On-Coffee-YEAH!!! Oh so much better... kind of...

Now, I have a mug that holds too much coffee. Hang on, I have to make sure I said that... Yeah, it was me, I really did say that... it holds too much coffee, at one time anyway.

I still have coffee when my bladder informs me that it's time to take a break from the computer. I keep telling it to wait, I'm in the middle of something. I'm looking at this and signing up for that, and what are you talking about anyway, bladder, cause I still have coffee! Note to y'all when your bladder speaks ~ go to the bathroom; where you can question your sanity in private and where your bladder will not exact painful revenge upon you for not listening to it when it spoke to you. Your bladder's ego is far larger than the organ itself, and it's vindictive, do whatever it says.

The other problem that has emerged, is that when I do finally crawl out of my computer cave, it's so late, that dinner-meat has like a 50-50 chance of thawing in time to cook ~ at best 50-50. And my son, is making me suffer for not popping in to check on him more often... and then there's the flavor of the coffee itself.

I quit using sugar this year, in my coffee ~

and

and most of all

however, are still totally fair game!

But, in my coffee, I started using hubby's Sweet-n-low. You know, that pink-packet-chemical-will-give-you-cancer shit. That stuff. I started using that. So in the now defunct coffee bowl, 1 pink packet. I'm figuring in the new Big-Gulp mug, two. But two is not enough for the Big-Gulp mug, it's only 12 oz more than the bowl, but somehow, 1 extra packet of kill-you-chemical is not enough. So this morning, I broke down and added another packet, cause I totally want some tumors like a lab rat. Now, there's too much pink-shit in my coffee.

Now all I can taste is chemicals and I'm wondering how the FDA hasn't swooped down on the Sweet-n-low factory and shut them down for chemical warfare on the American public, or at the very least, as a toxic waste dump site. This was the poison that cartoon queens put in their rings and dumped into unsuspecting princess' drinks.

Hubby has been using this shit for years, and my mom has been using it since I was old enough to ride my bicycle to 7-11 and get her the morning paper and her coffee. How? That's what I want to know: How? As in how the fuck did you get used to this chemical tasting foulness that still has the balls to proclaim itself as 'sweet' when there are other substitutes that taste far sweeter and way less chemicaley (yeah, made that one up, kiss my ass spell check). They're also more expensive, which brings to mind the old saying about getting what you pay for...

Wow, see the effects of loosing one perfect mug? I didn't even mention the 32 oz-of-coffee-in-one-shot-over-caffeinated-rants... you probably figured that one out though, huh?