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Ode to Party Cups
7/11/05
by Clay

We don't have party cups in the office anymore. For the first six months that I worked here, there was always a party cup on my desk. Of course it was filled with water and the office setting qualifies as a really bad party, but at least we had the cool cups. Now the cool cups are gone and I am drinking out of small styrofoam cups that always seem to have both too little and too much water at the same time (they are metaphysical marvels).

For the uninitiated, party cups are 16 oz. red platic cups that are single-handedly responsible for more sex, happiness, and forgotten nights than any other plastic object on earth.

(This could be a bit of an exaggeration, but in thirty seconds of considering this fact, I have been unable to refute it. In my book this makes it indisputably true.)

In my move from law school to the office, the keg was replaced with the water cooler, the night with day, the comfortable clothes with ties, and the attractive drunk people with lawyers drunk on their own intelligence. What didn't change was the cups, and this offered me some measure of solace. Until last week.

Now the office is nothing like a party. Not even a bad party where somebody ran out of party cups or some Nazi is holding them charging $5 for each. We only have styrofoam cups. Based on movies, the only time anyone ever has styrofoam cups is when they are waiting in the emergency room to find out whether someone died or when Maverick does flybys of the control tower. Maverick is not flying by anytime soon and death pronouncements are mercifully spartan, but the cups are the same.

Someday I hope the party cups come back again.

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