For most of my life, I’ve kept my pens and pencils in a coffee mug. It used to be a Miami City Ballet mug, but I knocked that one off my desk and broke it a few weeks ago. Now it’s a sturdy white number which sports a colorful (and accurate) self-caricature of the one and only Cup of Chicha, one of “About Last Night”‘s favorite bloggers. You can purchase this item, and others no less fetching, by going here.
While I’m on the subject, you may not know that Nathalie Chicha, the blogger in question, has just launched a second blog called Another, which I added to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column last week. Here’s the mission statement of “Another“:
This is an online space for my thoughts on depression and literature. My hope is that, in assembling an honest account of my depression and by providing relevant excerpts from writers’ autobiographies and psychiatric literature, I can offer readers moments of identification that undermine the loneliness and shame of mental illness. And I suspect that blogs can contribute to the public discourse on depression in ways that more traditional representations of depression can’t; since a blog is continually updated, its representation of depression is less likely to hide or mitigate contradictions and ambiguities, and more likely to challenge practiced wisdom and “pop psychology” simplifications….
To which I can only add that speaking as a chronic writer who has his own psychic ups and downs, I think this is a great idea, thoughtfully and imaginatively executed (as if I’d have expected anything else from Chicha).
Take a look–and buy a mug!