"Get in the hole?"

[like confession, it's been a very long time since my last blog. Perhaps I shall one day combine the two]

Strangely, over the last year I've developed something that approximates an addiction to golf. I shall not get into the symptoms that suggest I have an addiction (surprisingly the DSM, the guide to mental disorders big and small, differentiates substance use into abuse and dependence rather than labeling the behavior as an addiction. Other addictions like gambling, lying, or stealing are classified under the impulse control disorders). As an aside, golf is more like an impulse restraint disorder. Everything in one's basest and most rudimentary behavioral self is provoked towards unbridled expression starting from the moment the ball is teed (and possibly hit). And yet, golf demands an expression of decorum that only serves to further heighten the tension between the meso-limbic urge to hurl one's driver like a battle axe or auger the green with your putter. Apart from the plaid pants and John Daly (wearing plaid pants), golf is often associated with hushed tones and muted clapping. Until recently.

Apparently over the years, golf has taken on more of a brash, sports-like feel. While I don't think the expression 'rock-star' best characterizes tour players (except John Daly), sports-star certainly does (compared to the old-school legends--Nicklaus, Palmer, Hogan, etc, the new-generation players look like they've followed the lead of Major League Baseball. I mean, Tiger has forearms like a hockey player and Camilo Villegas (however Villegas is pronounced Vee-jay-gus is beyond me) looks more like a domestique from the Peloton than a pro golfer)). Along with this relaxation of restraint comes a new breed of gallery. While one cannot deny the enthusiasm that crowds generate (or is it a mob), there is one element in contemporary golf that must be banished immediately. I'm referring to the guy who is in the gallery at every televised tour event. This is the guy who stands at every tee-box, every mid-fairway shot, every hazard, and green who yells at every shot, "GET IN THE HOLE!"

The Get-in-the-Hole Guy is either the world's greatest optimist (yelling GITH! on the tee-shot on a 650 yard Par-5 is the not the same as Tom Watson hoping to direct the ball rolling against a gentle left-to-right break on a gusty green at Turnberry) or the Get-in-the-Hole Guy discovered that the battle cry GITH! is golf's equivalent to yelling "Freebird" at every rock concert, or the East Coast chant-clap "Let's Go (Rangers-Yankees-Bruins-Sox-etc.) clap-clap-clap-clap-clap" (the last three claps are in triplet time for those who read music). The Get-in-the-Hole Guy must be discovered and awarded golf's ultimate penalty stroke (or, he should go back to the stands at a NASCAR event). Does anybody know who this guy is?

The Get-in-the-Hole Guy must be found and removed from all the courses of the world from St. Andrews to the local 4-and-a-half hole muni pitch-and-putt (using a beer can on a smooth patch of dead grass does not constitute pin placement). That is, unless the Get-in-the-Hole Guy actually is John Daly.

Nickels, Dimes, but more likely Dollars

AAA * * * *

These establishments are upscale in all areas. Accommodations are progressively more refined and stylish. The physical attributes reflect an obvious enhanced level of quality throughout. The fundamental hallmarks at this level include an extensive array of amenities combined with a high degree of hospitality, service, and attention to detail.


Recently I stayed at a local hotel which carries a 4 diamond rating. The name of the hotel isn’t important (let’s just say that the large white hotel faces San Francisco Bay and its name rhymes with that of another expensive hotel chain known as the Fairmont).

Let’s review a few things:

Room, double-occupancy with Bay View: $269
Resort fee: $24
Parking fee: $21
Applicable tax: $27
Room rate total = $341

That’s for one night.

Let’s add in a few other things:

In-room movie: $9.95
or
In-room “CD” jukebox: $9.95
Cocktails or other refreshments at bar: $35
Brunch for 2 = $56 per person, or $112
+ room = $498

Now, to remind everybody—this is for one night. $500 for one night. The hotel room was OK. Not thrilling. Just nice. Only nice in the way you might say, “yeah, that’s nice and all but . . .” Leaving such amenities as room service, spa treatments, and other incidentals aside, and only looking at the ‘base model’ accommodations, our bill was almost $350. Now there are $350 rooms and those which are worth more or less. In my estimation, $350 should include a well-appointed room, clean without stains on the walls, furniture or bedding, furniture dusted and polished, and the desk and bedside table empty of trash and pills leftover from the previous guest, and a bathroom well-stocked with the usual accoutrements (toiletries, hair dryer, a good supply of towels), and ideally, the window-frames painted and the windows washed. Ideally, if you request a wake-up call, one should be placed to the room.

I’ve stayed in a number of hotels from motor lodges to motels to luxury hotels domestically and internationally. I’ve seen hotels that provide a spread of amenities included in the base price and those which charge for just about everything. For example, I had the occasion to stay a number of nights over the course of a year at the Holiday Inn Express and a night here or there at the Marriott. Comparing these two brands provides enough to illustrate my point:

Holiday Inn Express

Room $89-$100 per night includes: free parking, free wi-fi, free cable TV, free local calls, business center, pool, fitness center, breakfast included, coffee available 24 hours, ice and vending.

Marriott

Room $100-150 per night includes: room.
Wi-fi or high-speed internet access= $11 for 24 hour access in room; .50 per minute if accessed from lobby; business center carries per minute access fee; parking $10-20; pay-per-view TV; local calls charged; breakfast $15 (average); coffee available from on-site snack-bar $2.50 for Starbucks Grande drip coffee ($1.85 is the average cost for a Venti at Starbucks).

The nickel-and-dime approach to hotel stays (much like the airline industry) infuriates me. You spend over $100 for the bed and everything else is tacked on charges. This is not to mention the usual visitors-and-convention fees, resort fees, occupancy taxes, frequent flier surcharge, non-frequent flier surcharge, surcharge for administrative processing of other charges. I’m surprised there is not a Gideons Bible storage fee also charged onto one’s bill.

However, the counter-argument has to be taken into account. Save for the parking fee, everything else is an incidental. While most will make use of the bed, the bath or shower, and most will remove that paper band tucked around the lid of the toilet seat reassuring us that it has been sanitized for our safety or comfort or what-have-you, things like wi-fi, pay-per-view movies (including those films charged to your room that simply show up on your bill as –In Room Movie . . . $15 when other movies only cost $9.95—), coffee, breakfast, shrimp cocktails, dry cleaning, secretary services, and child care are generally amenities or luxuries (or absolute requirements for those with un-audited expense accounts). Nevertheless, spending nearly $500 for a room should afford such a guest certain built-in conveniences like free local phone calls and free wi-fi, and a clean room, and a bedside table empty of half-eaten red vines (unlikely that these red vines were purchased from the mini-bar, unless, half-way through eating the candy, the previous guest realized the price of the licorice was exactly one-half the cost of a steak dinner, that the guest choked on the licorice and died, hence the reason why the room wasn’t entirely clean upon our arrival).

Before concluding, it is important to note that all things related to hotel costs and nickel-and-diming guests are best illustrated through the presence and cost of items contained in the room’s mini-bar. Apparently a mini-bar should be the model for interest-bearing accounts and other situations where rapid growth or valuation is sought. For example, in the world where I live, the average 12 oz soft drink, for example a relatively rare brand like, um, Coca-Cola, may be purchased from a vending machine for $.85 whereas in the magical world of the mini-bar the same can now runs $3.50. That is a 311% increase. If only my mutual funds and other accounts were similarly productive.

Symptoms, or a Sense

Originally written: Wed, June 6, 2007 - 11:05 PM


And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spread-eagled in the empty air
of existence

--Constantly Risking Absurdity
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Symptoms are often thought of as obstacles on the path of health or happiness, or some other via regia. Western medicine treats symptoms and in doing so, treats symptoms as indicators of dysfunction. Curiously symptoms belong to the patient (they happen to the patient) whereas they are called ‘signs’ by the physician (one could say that signs happen to the doctor). Symptoms require a relationship of the sufferer to the suffering and may not become signs to anybody else until they become complaints. In the medical model, the signs and symptoms of suffering are the projects in need of fixing. They become the vocabulary of a specialized relationship. In the psychoanalytic arena symptoms are the specialized language of one’s personality. In this sense, symptoms are obstacles and invitations to communication. At times they are secrets (the symptom of narcissism thinly veils the secret of feeling un-grandiose and not special) or demands for something to be different (anxiety as dread that perhaps something will not change, or too drastically change) but too often the sense of a symptom eludes articulation while pressing forward in its need to be expressed and recognized.

The early psychoanalysts were comfortable talking about symptoms as attempts at self-cure (most mechanisms of disease, in the medical model, suggest the same thing—a fever is the sign of the body’s attempt to sterilize itself by heat) but nowadays this formulation is not maintained as a useful way of understanding. For one, to suggest to a patient that their illness is a best guess at self-cure fails medicine-as-a-model for how humans should live. Who wants to pay money and time to philosopher when you want to stop feeling depressed? On the other hand, going to your internist for Prozac to address the signs and symptoms of depression isn’t much different than scoring a hit from your local dealer when neither is likely to listen to the story of your depression. (I often think of talking about depression and anxiety in a physician’s office as equivalent to synopsizing the Iliad by naming the chapter headings). Even if you receive a prescription, going back to your therapist may only satisfy the story-telling instinct but then what do you have? The symptoms keep telling the story. Most people get the meds but do without the therapy. It’s the American way.

Nevertheless the symptoms stick around. I have often wondered about the role of the symptom of suffering as desire. Symptoms tell you that the grass is always greener on the other side. A symptom says there is something else to want; another satisfaction to be sought. I want something that I think I do not have so what I suffer from is the experience of wanting and of lacking. I don’t want to be depressed, so I want to be un-depressed. I want to be happy, so I don’t feel depressed. The stage is the same; the characters change clothes and names, so to speak. In between the want and the lack, a gap has to exist. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud notes what we all know, between the pleasure of getting (what we think) we want and what satisfaction actually results “provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at an position attained, but . . . (presses ever forward unsubdued).” Life is the tightrope strung between wanting and getting.

Does the sense of a symptom reside in balancing what you want and can’t get, or is it more about reconciling desire as a relationship between an aim and its starting place? We often think of desire as the measure of distance between what one has one’s eye set upon but what about when a symptom reflects having too much of something? I am not sure if I refer to a state of too much desire, or too much lack?

The symptom paradoxically illuminates the lack of something while proposing that psychological ignorance is a viable way to live. Symptoms are a Winchester Mystery House with doors leading nowhere while suggesting that it should lead somewhere. The symptom convinces by its apparent success. You can have this pain with its promise that it can be undone (this is what psychoanalysts call a symbolic equation, or the collapse of potential space); that is, there is no gap. The symptom promises satisfaction by providing a form of satisfaction (psychoanalysts call this a compromise formation) by filling in the gap. When a symptom provides partial satisfaction, this is what Freud pointed out in his formulation that a dream fulfills a disguised wish. A symptom, to borrow from the philosopher-analyst Jonathan Lear, makes “every problem look solvable.” The symptom promises fulfillment and distraction, a pleasure in itself, by replacing something seemingly unmanageable or potentially overwhelming (that is, a trauma) with something that has grab-irons. If the space between desire and the desired is filled by a symptom, who needs to think? Moreover, who needs to feel?

Sunday Neurosis

Originally written: Mon, July 30, 2007 - 11:10 PM

“’Sunday Neuroses’ that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest”

(Frankl, 1946, p. 112).

For some years now I’ve hated Sundays. Especially anytime after two or three PM. By Sunday night a sense of foreboding or dread reaches ‘clinically significant’ levels. When I was younger, Sunday night seemed an abrupt transition from that pit stop called the weekend. The return of school in the morning was dreaded. Once more into the breach. What was the resistance to Mondays and the school week transformed into distaste for Mondays and the work week.

Luckily there is a term for this: Sunday Neurosis. The Hungarian psycho-analyst Sandor Ferenczi described in 1919 how his patients seemed to be more symptomatic on Sundays (some early analyses were conducted six days a week). Twenty-five years later, the Viennese analyst Viktor Frankl also referred to the Sunday Neurosis as a symptom of existential emptiness when one faces the lack of structure and identity that the work-a-day world creates and maintains in an individual. I do not believe I suffer from this form of Sunday Neurosis, or its synonymous condition—the Weekend Syndrome. I think I just have a neurosis that is most prevalent on Sundays. Since I am a psychologist and shrinks are good for creating jargon and terms that suggest nothing but a stab at self-importance, I will coin a new term—the negative Sunday neurosis.

Whereas in the conventional use of the term, the Sunday Neurosis describes a sense of anxiety around a lack of meaning in one’s life; the negative Sunday neurosis (‘negative’ in this case refers to a converse or opposite scenario) is a sense of dread that the work-a-day world has little or no source of meaning and identity-making and impinges upon sources of meaning. Then the question immediately arises, why don’t you get a new job? Good question. But I am not sure that the work is the problem and I do not sense I have an aversion to work (I work hard and once I’m in the workweek, it’s non-stop from Monday to Friday and usually spilling over). Then is it exhaustion? That sounds like such a wimpy word. “He had to take a rest cure in the country for his nervous exhaustion.” Perhaps the transition from potential space in the weekends to the structures of the work-week is a difficult navigation between productive leisure and obligatory production.

Leisure is hard work it seems.

“As we have seen earlier, human beings feel best in flow, when they are fully involved in meeting a challenge, solving a problem, discovering something new. Most activities that produce flow also have clear goals, clear rules, and immediate feedback—a set of external demands that focuses our attention and makes demands on our skills. Now these are exactly the conditions most often lacking in free time . . . free time with nothing specific to engage one’s attention provides the opposite of flow: psychic entropy, where one feels listless and apathetic” (Csikszentmihaly, 1997, p. 66)

I suppose that’s why most of my so-called down-time is spent writing or doing art-work. The time I could spend being social has been earmarked for art and words which leaves me little in the way of hanging out with other people. On the one hand, I get the satisfaction of artistic creation; on the other, unsavory isolation.

And then, of course, comes a case of the Mondays.

Csikszentmihaly, M. (1997). Finding Flow. New York: Basic.

Frankl, V. (1946/1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Ilse Lasch [trans.] Boston: Beacon. [originally translated as From Death Camp to Existentialism from the original German Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager]

Fool me, you kiss

Original: Thu, October 5, 2006 - 10:22 PM
Revised 12-31-2008

In kissing do you render or receive?
--Shakespeare “Troilus and Cressida”

[On the occasion that some people ring in the new year with a kiss, I’ve retrieved this from the archive.]

Kissing is like the forms of love: storge, philia, eros, and agape, or familial, friendly, sexual, and charitable. Kiss my boo-boo, says the child to the mother like an invoking of a magic potion; kissing as greeting between friends like in France (the other French kiss probably means a different kind of intimacy) or in Middle Eastern cultures; kiss me you fool, bessame mucho; or Judas’ kiss of Christ as the felix culpa. Kisses can mean so much. When I was in Vienna in the winter of 2004, I stopped by the Belvedere to see the Klimt painting. It seems that everybody else had the same idea that day (incidentally, my favorite painting was Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl’s Die Seelen des Acheron, 1898).

Getting back to The Kiss. Here was this painting in large and splendid form—much better in person that could ever dreamt in thousands of coed dorm rooms across the universe—dedicated to the erotic kiss, or was it a familial kiss, or a charitable kiss? The ambiguity in lips touching, a rendered kiss and a received kiss—he is, after all, kissing her cheek. I didn’t know which it was. Most people assume the erotic. We like the erotic kiss. The first erotic kiss is the second first impression. As Adam Phillips writes in his essay “Plotting for Kisses,” the way somebody kisses and likes to be kissed says something about his character.

…and yet fewer have curiosity or benevolence to struggle long against the first impression.
--Samuel Johnson Rambler (October 19, 1751)

Each first kiss is a chapter in itself. They are incredibly memorable; they symbolize a kind of bodily memory for the rest of one’s ability to remember. And they cannot be repeated. There is no “do-over” even though we are constantly attempting to do it over. I remember my first kiss. I was 18 years old sitting on the deck of a boat for the college’s annual “boat dance” aka “Booze Cruise.” The effect of the latter loosened lips enough for that seemingly magical moment as the boat was pulling into the dock at Tiburon. It was a first kiss. My reaction was “So this is it, wow.” I never saw the girl again. It didn’t matter. I felt as if I had entered into something new. A world full of promise. Or so I felt for an hour or so afterwards. My second reaction was “I like the way her nose touches my nose. Her lips are a little dry, her breath tastes of vodka, and why is her tongue in my mouth.” So much the better. I was ‘alls growns up.’ My next kiss was a couple months later. The nose nuzzling seemed to be the cue. I was learning. Cold tips of noses. Eskimo kissing, is that what they call it? Her lips were again, a little dry, her breath, it didn’t matter, tasted of cigarettes and white wine.

Kissing is like an introduction to the other’s physical self. You can talk philosophy, art, psychology, what-have-you, you may even talk sex to each other but kissing introduces another realm. A private space. A mysterious space. How many of us are learned kissers? How many of us actually have “it” down, or is it all a matter of taste, so to speak. Kissing is funny this way—each of us has to know enough but too much knowing may betray something about our character—geez, he’s forward, aggressive; Oh, she’s forward, aggressive. Not enough, too timid, unless it is done intentionally, is also a turn-off. Nobody wants to be bored kissing. In the early days of one’s kissing, there is an electricity it seems about the contact—our lips touch and magic happens. Eros is blind with his bow but knowing in our lips. Kissing in those early explorations is a brave new world even if this is the umpteenth person you’ve kissed. Once you kiss, you may never go back before it.

There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
--Kate Chopin

This leads me to a question: what about the heavy make-out session? Once when I was young, perhaps 16, my friends and I went to Disneyland. We were the bad kids, the alternative crowd. We had a Melrose Avenue street urchin with us named “Fingers.” He was some kind of thief. We piled onto the Small World ride and took the ride (I always think of the Simpsons where they go to the Duff Beer amusement park and Lisa drinks some of the small world ride water and trips out). Fingers was in the front row with a girl we’d met in line. They started kissing. Heavy kissing, lots of smacking, and licking, and tongues going in spastic directions. I sat back in the next row watching with transfixed amazement. This guy just met this girl! How did that happen? Was there something equally casual about kissing? Like sparing for change and bumming smokes? My universe was redefined in that moment. Except for the fact that I never experienced it myself. Even the first kiss on the deck of the bay tour boat was not a heavy make-out session. It lasted no more than one minute and afterward, it led to nothing. I believe it was less Eros and more Agape. Perhaps she was the angel sent to exercise charity on my unkissed face. That’s what I tell myself now. Back then I would have said, “Thank God! Eros!” I still can’t believe that kissing can be a casual exchange, a mouth-to-mouth frivolity like telling a joke at a dinner party or smiling at a stranger.

I like kissing. Sometimes it is better than sex. To kiss is to make an impression and leave an imprint.

Last week it was Xmas Eve, now it's New Year's Eve

list (lĭst):
1. A series of names, words, or other items written, printed, or imagined one after the other: a shopping list; a guest list; a list of things to do.
2. A considerable number; a long series: recited a list of dates memorized.

Once again, in the spirit of the New Year (Frohes neue Jahre fur Die Deutscheniks), I'm again organized by lists. Granted, my lists seem to serve little purpose. In thinking about the lists of usual items compiled around this time of the year, this led me to think about famous lists. So far, I came up with the following exemplars:

1. Letterman's Top Ten
2. The Ten Commandments
3. The Forbes List
4. The Fortune 500
5. Lists according to Craig and his sister Angie
6. The Late Mr. Blackwell's List
7. The Planets (with, or without Pluto)
8. Santa's Reindeer
9. The 7 Dwarves
10. The 7 Deadly Sins
11. The 7 Heavenly Virtues
12. The 7 Deadly Dwarves

I've also discovered that there are lists most people keep, including those I find myself compiling. In a statistically valid, stratified sample using random-sampling techniques that I once heard about in my graduate stats and research courses (yeah, a lot of good this whole Doctorate thing worked in terms of my research and statistics savoir-faire), I came up with the list of commonly occurring lists:

1. Shopping (do most people really put bread, milk, and eggs on their list?)
2. To-Do (and it's variations: ta-do, gotta do, honey do, shit I gotta do)
3. Wish (and the less popular, but heart-warming "Make-a-Wish" list)
4. Check
5. Favorite movies, books, movies about books, books about movies (less popular), songs, albums, or I suppose, these days, top downloaded (legal and otherwise) media
6. Places to visit before I die (or before you die)
7. Things I hate about you (surprisingly, many people have this list, or it's closely related alternative, People I hate)

Other kinds of lists I've come across, and at times have enjoyed compiling:

1. Desert Isle Books (movies, albums, items, companions)
2. So, you're going to prison, what are you bringing?
3. Places to visit after I die
4. All star line-up (musical, sports, super-hero)
5. All star line-ups versus other all-star line-ups (e.g. 1972 Dolphins vs. 2007 Patriots; Knights' Templar v. the Knights of the Round Table)

Listings (mainly pen and paper)

Listing: (lĭs'tĭng)

the gerund of the verb "to list" as used in nautical matters.

With the new year upon us (well, the New Year according to the Gregorian calendar), the requisite lists of resolutions tend to be compiled. In my experience, these lists are aspirational and they tend towards servings high in moral fibre seasoned with righteousness. These lists usually involve starting one set of things while stopping another. Often, the things to cease are replaced by the things to start: stop smoking, start exercising; stop spending money on lattes, start taking own coffee in mornings; stop funding regimes with human rights violations, start funding inefficient NGOs in the (re)developing world.

Rather than list my lists of things I am ready to do (the Estoy Listo Lists), I will provide a list of things that I already do, like, deride, wish for, etc. It's like Schott's Miscellany (http://www.miscellanies.info/) but far less useful, and increasingly more personal. This is solipsism at best and another example of the uses of the Internet at worst (well, perhaps not the worst as I am not posting (a) porn (or pron), (b) terrorist propaganda (wait, is there such thing as antipaganda? And if so, is it a variation on antipasto?), (c) terrorist porn (or pron), or cheat codes for contemporary video games.

Listing:

n. - The act of making an ordered array of items; (A database containing) an ordered array of items (names or topics).

Lists, it seems, make good copy (for example, the January 2009 copy of Real Simple Magazine is called the 'List Issue') so in speaking of magazines, are some of my favorites as I think about them on 12-29-2008. In terms of personally rated snob-factor (SF), 0 is the lack of snobbery while 10 is true snobbishness (resulting usually from magazines that cost more than books, meals, or small cars).

1. The Paris Review (SF: 5.7)


2. Real Simple (SF: 0)


3. Ready Made (SF: 1)


4. The Times Literary Supplement (SF: 8 (but not based on price))


5. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (SF: 9.5; includes price)


6. Esquire (SF: 4.5)

Keeping up with the paper-theme, here are my favorite notebooks, blank books, and agendas in preferred order. There is probably Band-Wagon Factor involved here if one is persuaded, or dissuaded by the apparent cool, or passe, factor of things. Not being a hipster, or other such disaffected youth with practiced cool disdain and see-through, baseless snobbery, I don't care about the Band-Wagon Factor (BWF) on my choice of notebook. Moreover, I don't know how to rate Band-Wagon factor (is it 0-10, 0-100). So, I don't care.

1. Moleskine 3x5 pocket diaries (plain, lined, squared, reporter)


2. Moleskine Large Cahiers (plain pages, black cover)


3. Rhodia 8x11 bloc notebook (lined paper)


4. Field Notes 3x5 staple-bound squared notebook

Diaries, blank books, and agendas I'd love to try but either $$ or malaise keeps me away:

1. Allan's Journal (http://www.bibles-direct.com/category.phtml?Category=64) which at 15 pounds is $21 which is quite affordable + shipping from Scotland.


2. Smythson diaries from London which I hear are quite nice but with prices ranging from $155 to $300 seems a bit excessive (http://www.smythson.com/SmythsonSite/product/Diaries_Portable%20Diaries/WP-1004041.htm). $265 for a freakin' journal? That strikes me as so preposterous that I can't even come up with anything ironic or sarcastic to write.


3. Letts of London 5x8 leather desk journal ($65 USD) seems a little more reasonable.

But with what to write? I've come to discover that I am fairly inconsistent with my choices of writing implements. For a while, earlier in the fall 2008, I was taken with pencils (in particular, the pencils sold by the Field Notes brand (http://fieldnotesbrand.com/about/) and then by their Bic pens). But my stalwarts remain:

1. Parker Duo-Fold Ball-Point (good weight, rests nicely in the hand, works best with the fine tip refill; the medium point is too thick and reminds me of a Bic, which if I wanted that thick of a line, I'd save $200 and use the Bic, or wait until I stayed at a hotel and took it from the front-desk. Nevertheless, I've been using the Parker Duo-fold ball-point pen since 1996 and I'm still pleased with how it writes.)


2. MontBlanc Mozart Ball-Point (little, fits nicely in a coat pocket, and if I had the little leather pocket jotter-holder-thingy, forms a spiffy little pocket jotter-paper holder thingy. Downside: refills are not readily available. Downside #2: sells for $230. OK, I bought myself one. I use it regularly. I am not ashamed).


3. Parker Sonnet Fine-Nib Fountain Pen (Affordable as fountain pens go at around $90. Of all the fountain pens I've used, or own, with the exception of the Diplomat Ambassador, see below, the Parker Sonnet, fine-tip 14k gold nib, black lacquered fountain pen is my all-time favorite when I feel like using a fountain pen. Given that I only go through phases in using a fountain pen, and then only at home, the Sonnet gets the most use which relegates the Diplomat, see below, to the fountain pen hall-of-fame).


4. Diplomat Ambassador Medium-Nib Fountain Pen (around $120, medium nib. Heavy and somewhat stiff. It's relegated to the drawer I now call the fountain pen hall-of-fame which also serves as the storage bin for my other fountain pens including the Cross, the Waterman, and the one whose name I don't know.)

Favorite place to create lists, in preferred order:

1. Places that serve coffee
2. Enroute on Airplanes
3. During meetings
4. Waiting Rooms
5. In my office at work
6. In my office at home
7. In bed, right before bedtime

Coming soon: actual lists