This Man, This Cup

So Scott bought a cup today. Now for a normal human being, this wouldn't have been anything to remark about, but since this is Scott we're talking about, it was less a man purchasing a drink container and more a man's war against himself.

This is why Scott--a man who has expressed his desire to have wax statues made of all of his friends on several occasions, mind you--needs his own blog. Everything's a senses-shattering struggle with that guy, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. He started talking about it at lunch today, and the story was so compelling in its nature that when we were done eating, I went out to his car to check out the cup for myself. What brought it up to this epic status was that Scott seemed to be absolutely disgusted with himself for buying it.

He says he debated it while standing there in K-Mart, and I for one believe him, especially since he explained that he bought it for a specific purpose (drinking while watching movies) and that using it for any other purpose (say, drinking whilst working) would be catastrophic.

It's wider and shorter than a normal glass, see, which makes it (again, in Scott's own words) "perfect for sipping." But the fear was there, even from the beginning, that instead of using it exclusively for movie-related drinking, he'd eventually mistake it for a glass to use at other times when the sheer wideness of the cup would overwhelm him, with disastrous results.

I can only speculate on how long he stood in Housewares, pondering the benefits of cup ownership, but if I had to hazzard a guess using what I know of Scott, I'd say it probably took around thirty-four minutes and he probably thought about Ghost Rider no less than eight times.

But in the end, he bought the cup despite the risks. "What put me over the top," he says, "is that I turned the corner and saw that they had matching bowls. And I saw it and thought 'now that's a popcorn bowl."

And not only did he buy it, but he made a conscious decision to find the most garish color they had, a little shade that the printing industry refers to as "cosmic orange."

I found the story so fascinating that I asked him about it tonight--ten hours after our original conversation. Apparently he bought a two-liter of Pepsi solely for the purpose of testing it out, and I got the results:

"It does accrue condensation like a mofo," he says, "but it's got more texture than I gave it credit for."