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]