Remember when you really wanted something as a kid and you’d implement an extremely subtle and not at all obvious strategy of trying to get your parents to buy it for you? My move was always the same: I’d linger next to the thing: a cool T-shirt or video game or whatever, stare directly into my mom’s eyes and say “Wow. This is so cool. I wish I had one.” My eyes, like laser beams, shooting what I could only hope were pangs of equal parts guilt and persuasion into the depths of her soul.
“But you don’t,” she’d sometimes say (brutal). Or just plain “no.” (brutal-er). She could shut down my attempts with just a glance. Once in a blue moon, it would actually work.
These days when I see something that’s “so cool, wish I had one,” the laser beams turn inward. In charge of things like my own financial destiny, it’s up to me to decide if I want spend my hard earned money on things like an overpriced earring shaped like a croissant (yes), fancy hand soap (yes but not anymore) or the $45 plastic souvenir cup I found on eBay this week (also — yes).
As much as I wanted it, I had a general disinterest in spending so much money on a cup. Despite the fact that it was deemed “RARE” by the seller and despite the fact that I once had and treasured one almost exactly like it. One that had recently gone missing from my mom’s house.
I google searched it on a whim then texted my mom the link and said flat out, no subtlety to be seen: “I want this for Hannukah.”
Her thumbs up emoji spoke volumes -- it’s the “but you don’t” for the digital age. Like me, she wasn’t keen on spending $45 on a plastic cup. Especially since the missing one in question had been free.
We spent a lot of time at Shea Stadium when I was a kid watching the Mets play and eating ice cream out of tiny helmets. I don’t remember what game or when we acquired the “rare” 46 oz. souvenir hot/cold thermos with cover and straw, but eBay tells me it was 1996, which would have made me seven. I loved drinking from that cup. I would fill it up with lots and lots of ice and water and sit with it on the couch, sipping slowly. It was so cold, such a superior vessel for supreme hydration. As I got older, it became my hangover cup, half a lemon squeezed in, icy cold water, the perfect way to ward off mistakes from the previous evening with the least amount of effort required. So big, you rarely needed to move out of a horizontal state to refill it.
So, when I went home recently and found the cup was no longer in its spot at the very tippy top of my mom’s kitchen cup cabinet, I was devastated. My mom’s cup cabinet borders on a hoarder level. How could this one, most beloved cup have not made the cup cut? I was devastated, gobsmacked even, to find out it was gone. When I asked her about it she said something like -- she must have thrown it away. “Who knows? It’s a cup.”
In her mind it was a cup I had left at her house all these years instead of taking it with me to all the many places I have lived besides her house. A cup that was so faded you could barely make out where it came from, the top and straw long gone, taking up 46 ounces of precious real estate in her apartment-sized kitchen. In my mind it was THE cup. Why hadn’t I brought it with me to my apartment if it were, in fact, my favorite? And why did I assume that she knew it was my favorite?
What had happened here is something has happened before: I make assumptions that people know things about me even though I have never communicated them and then I am irritated when *surprise, surprise,* they have no idea what I’m talking about. As mentioned earlier, my communication skills have only somewhat improved since childhood. I’m working on it, OK?
But I still wanted that dumb cup. So I offered the seller $30 and what do you know, they accepted the offer. Something tells me there wasn’t a whole lot of interest in the cup, regardless of how “rare” it claimed to be.
I could have probably found another good cup to drink water out of. But it wouldn’t make me feel the way this cup makes me feel, just like none of the other baked-good shaped earrings I saw on the Internet didn’t make me feel like the one I bought myself as a layoff present in March. I have bought so many things thinking they would fill a void of some sort only to learn that not only do things fill the void, they actually just expand it to make room for more void.
And maybe that’s what this is, too. But I don’t think so. It feels good to be more intentional about purchases, both big or small. If I have to give up a few mindless buys to afford a cup that brings me unbridled joy (and did I mention so much water?!) it’s well worth it. Let’s buy, do, make and surround ourselves with more things that make us happy. This cup won’t solve my problems, but I will love drinking out of it. And so I’ll drink more water, and it will make me a more hydrated.
And so really, this cup is good for my health.
Now that my mom can take the cup off of my Hannukah list, I’m making a new list of things that I actually want: a book deal, a job in a writer’s room and a vintage Rolex. In that order.
So my new Hannukah list is more of a manifestation list. Because I’m reserving the purchased stuff for things that make me feel amazing. No matter how seemingly silly they are.
Stay hydrated. I love you! Not as much as this cup but close.
Love,
Jamie AF
Once again, I live to be your muse!!
Happy Hanukkah and a very merry Christmas 🎄
YF#1F
xoxo