Cups and Mugs

We are engulfed in rituals, routines and procedures many of which are pointless, from such an early age, that we come to accept them, rarely questioning their importance or use. One great example of this is the use of cups and mugs. We have a glass of orange juice, a cup of cordial, and a mug with tea or coffee. Plastic cups for kids who drop glasses, but glasses are cups. And when it comes to the consumption of liquid, it doesn’t matter what we drink it out of, yet when we heat up the kettle we reach for a mug, and when we pull it from the fridge we reach for a cup. The cups and mugs are usually the same temperature. They each also have positions in which you can drink them, we can walk talk and casually sip from our cups, but we can hunch over our mugs, holding them in two hands breathing in the vapors as though they warm our spirit through a cold low mood. Juice in a mug, even a portable one, seems somehow silly, as does tea or coffee in a glass. We can walk with our tea or coffee but we pause to drink, we can sit and relax or refresh with our juice but we hold it with one hand and give it no praise. But we seem to have stopped asking ourselves ‘Why’ don’t we drink juice from a mug, simply because ‘we never have, it’s always been this way.’