Ceramic Coffee Cup With Quotes

Family room surfaces shouldn’t be reserved for a lifeless parade of ceramic figurines—quite the opposite. They’re meant for four-year-olds to color, teenagers to play games with their friends, and adults to enjoy a cup of coffee.

Is that coffee?” Hunt busied himself with pouring three cups, passing one to Quinlan first. “A drop of coffee in a cup of milk, just as you like it.” “Asshole.” She swiped the mug. “I don’t know how you drink it straight.” “Because I’m a grown-up.” Hunt passed the second mug to Ithan, whose large hands engulfed the white ceramic cup that said I Survived Class of 15032 Senior Week and All I Got Was This Stupid Mug! Ithan peered at it, his mouth twitching. “I remember this mug.” Hunt fell silent as Bryce let out a breathy laugh. “I’m surprised you do, given how drunk you were. Even though you were a sweet baby frosh.” Ithan chuckled, a hint of the handsome, cocky male Hunt had heard about. “You and Danika had me doing keg stands at ten in the morning. How was I supposed to stay sober?” The wolf sipped from his coffee. “My last memory from that day is of you and Danika passed out drunk on a couch you’d moved right into the middle of the quad.” “And why was that your last memory?” Bryce asked sweetly. “Because I was passed out next to you,” Ithan said, grinning now.

Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling and deep, or “French,” kissing, commonly known as “heavy petting”; “third base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as “going all the way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base” meant deep kissing (“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling; “second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way; and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names. Getting to home plate was relatively rare, however. The typical Filofax entry in the year 2000 by a girl who had hooked up the night before would be: “Boy with black Wu-Tang T-shirt and cargo pants: O, A, 6.” Or “Stupid cock diesel”—slang for a boy who was muscular from lifting weights—“who kept saying, ‘This is a cool deal’: TTC, 3.” The letters referred to the sexual acts performed (e.g., TTC for “that thing with the cup”), and the Arabic number indicated the degree of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. In the year 2000, girls used “score” as an active verb indicating sexual conquest, as in: “The whole thing was like very sketchy, but I scored that diesel who said he was gonna go home and caff up [drink coffee in order to stay awake and study] for the psych test.” In the twentieth century, only boys had used “score” in that fashion, as in: “I finally scored with Susan last night.” That girls were using such a locution points up one of the ironies of the relations between the sexes in the year 2000. The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men. Women had been persuaded that they should be just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. Men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility

I wandered vaguely towards the coffee machine, collected a cup, and let the little valve pee brown bean-juice into the white ceramic receptacle.

I heard a story about a former Under Secretary of Defense who gave a speech at a large conference. He took his place on the stage and began talking, sharing his prepared remarks with the audience. He paused to take a sip of coffee from the Styrofoam cup he’d brought on stage with him. He took another sip, looked down at the cup and smiled. “You know,” he said, interrupting his own speech, “I spoke here last year. I presented at this same conference on this same stage. But last year, I was still an Under Secretary,” he said. “I flew here in business class and when I landed, there was someone waiting for me at the airport to take me to my hotel. Upon arriving at my hotel,” he continued, “there was someone else waiting for me. They had already checked me into the hotel, so they handed me my key and escorted me up to my room. The next morning, when I came down, again there was someone waiting for me in the lobby to drive me to this same venue that we are in today. I was taken through a back entrance, shown to the greenroom and handed a cup of coffee in a beautiful ceramic cup.” “But this year, as I stand here to speak to you, I am no longer the Under Secretary,” he continued. “I flew here coach class and when I arrived at the airport yesterday there was no one there to meet me. I took a taxi to the hotel, and when I got there, I checked myself in and went by myself to my room. This morning, I came down to the lobby and caught another taxi to come here. I came in the front door and found my way backstage. Once there, I asked one of the techs if there was any coffee. He pointed to a coffee machine on a table against the wall. So I walked over and poured myself a cup of coffee into this here Styrofoam cup,” he said as he raised the cup to show the audience. “It occurs to me,” he continued, “the ceramic cup they gave me last year . . . it was never meant for me at all. It was meant for the position I held. I deserve a Styrofoam cup. “This is the most important lesson I can impart to all of you,” he offered. “All the perks, all the benefits and advantages you may get for the rank or position you hold, they aren’t meant for you. They are meant for the role you fill. And when you leave your role, which eventually you will, they will give the ceramic cup to the person who replaces you. Because you only ever deserved a Styrofoam cup.

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about systems that benefit from chaos. That when something is too rigid, it becomes fragile. If you slam a ceramic coffee mug onto a granite countertop, the mug will shatter. When something benefits from chaos, it’s not only flexible enough to withstand stressors – those stressors trigger growth. When you lift weights, you make tiny tears in your muscles, and when those tears heal, your muscles are stronger. Your muscles, unlike the coffee cup, benefit from chaos.

Why do you always drink your coffee out of a glass?” I asked. She poured herself a glass and sat down at the table with us. “That was the way my mother always drank it,” she said. “She always said that coffee tasted better from a glass than from a ceramic cup.” I took a sip of mine. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but it did seem to taste different—clearer—more pure. I was always going to drink my coffee in glasses if given the opportunity, I decided, as well as buy my wine directly from the maker.

Circles in time A causal loop (also known as a closed time loop or predestination paradox)2 is a sequence of looped events where an event causes another event, which in turn seems to cause the first event. In a nutshell, each event in the loop is one of the causes of the next event and at least one of the later events causes an earlier event.p It is possible that understanding the general idea of causal loops is absolutely essential to understanding how precognition might work. But the problem with causal loops is that you may start to think of everything as a causal loop, and that can drive you nuts. Let’s take the coffee-cup dropping example. Sure, we can say that one event is dropping the coffee cup and the other is the shattering of the cup on the floor. But what about the initial act of picking up the cup? And then there’s the sweeping up of the shattered remains. Maybe those are really the pushing/pulling events? Oh, but go one more step back into the past and one more step forward into the future, and now let’s look at the idea that you wanted coffee and the disposal of the shards of ceramic followed by finding an unbreakable, plastic mug in your cabinet. Maybe the plastic mug search pulled forward the original desire for coffee? This kind of game is never-ending, and in time you start to go a little crazy and see that your birth pushes your death and your death pulls your birth. You can take any point in time and choose events on the left and the right of the timeline, centred around that event, and create a causal loop, depending on how you think of things. This kind of thinking leads quickly to what we call “fantasy thinking”. When you are engaging in fantasy thinking and at the same time trying to understand precognition, you can take every dream and every thought that you have and try to find the future event that is pulling that dream or thought. For example, you dream you are in a plane crash the night before you go on a flight, and the next day you feel lucky that your flight doesn’t crash. But you decide your dream was precognitive, and you start obsessively combing the news for a plane crash. Within about four months, a plane crashes. So you decide that plane crash was the one you were dreaming about, even though there were no other correspondences between your dream and the crash. While fantasy thinking is vitally important to creativity, it is not helpful when developing your precognitive skills. Even in the forward direction in time, most causes and effects are not understandable in a simple way. Trying to figure out possible causal loops for everything is futile, and, more importantly, unnecessary.