When I began to read Taipei on my morning commute, I wondered if I had been lobotomized in the night. On the way back home, I wondered why someone who hates words would take the trouble to arrange so many of them in a row. The following morning, I wondered, Why does he hate me?, the way people wonder about playground bullies, or terrorists. Why does he inflict upon me his “framework-y somethingness,” his “soil-y area,” “the salad-y remains of his burrito”? Why does he take away my joy?
When I received this novel in the mail, I did not understand that Tao Lin was a name I had seen before, during a hazy period several Internets ago, when I was learning about Fat Acceptance and Tracey Egan Morrissey was still called Slut Machine. Later, I recognized the name as something observed in unread Gawker headlines (and unread Millions pieces, as it turns out).
I report this so you will know that when I began reading Taipei, my loathing was pure.
The novel opens and we follow a writer named Paul as he drifts around Brooklyn waiting for his book tour to start. We are with him as he sort of goes through a breakup, sort of goes to parties, sort of “works on things” (sometimes in quotation marks, sometimes not), definitely purchases little lots of groceries contrived as though to generate maximum annoyance (“organic beef patty, two kombuchas, five bananas, alfalfa sprouts, arugula, hempseed oil, a red onion, ginger”), definitely wiles away the hours in awkward communing with pseudo friends “[he was] peripherally aware of a self-conscious Matt slowly creating guacamole”), and definitely upsets his mother.
The subject also has excruciating interactions with a series of distressingly underemployed young women.
Paul noticed Laura looking at his pile of construction paper and said she could have some if she wanted, and she focused self-consciously on wanting some, saying how she would use it and what colors she liked, seeming appreciative in an affectedly sincere manner — the genuine sincerity of a person who doesn’t trust her natural behavior to appear sincere…Laura exited a few minutes later, meekly holding her tambourine and shaker and some construction paper. “I see you ‘got in on’ the construction paper,” said Paul in the sarcastic, playful voice he used to recommend Funyuns the night they met, but with a serious expression. “Good choices, in terms of colors. Good job.” “You said I could have some,” said Laura hesitantly.
Everyone’s ages are recorded, as if in a hipster police blotter: “After the reading Lucie, 23, introduced herself and Amy, 23, and Daniel, 25, to Paul and Mitch, saying something about her and Amy’s online magazine.”
I say this novelist hates words, because the novel reads as though it were the result of strict parameters imposed by a perverse contest, or the edict of some nihilist philosophy, to use as few interesting words as possible. Tao Lin seems to aspire to a prose I can only describe as “affectless.” When an adjective is required, and sometimes when it is not, Lin often adds a “y” to a noun (see: “soil-y”). Some traditionally formed adjectives and adverbs are enclosed in quotation marks; I believe to communicate the overarching theme of the book, which is that the majority of Paul’s powers of observation are absorbed in the business, not of something so studied as introspection, but of prolonged self-gazing from an external vantage. His quotation mark tactic achieves this effect, but it also communicates an embarrassment about words and what they can represent or mean.
He reached outside his blanket and pulled his MacBook “darkly,” he felt, toward himself, like an octopus might. It was 12:52 a.m., almost three hours since leaving Angelica Kitchen. Laura, to Paul’s surprise, had emailed twice — a few sentence fragments apologizing for her awkwardness at 11:43 p.m., a paragraph of elaboration at 12:05 a.m. Paul emailed that he understood and liked her and thought she was “cool.” She responded a few minutes later, seeming cheerful. After a few more emails she seemed almost “giddy.” They committed — earnestly and enthusiastically, Paul felt — to get tattoos together tomorrow.
If Lin is too arch to use the word “giddy” stripped from the safety of quotation marks, he spares no length, no number of unremarkable words, in the service of communicating how his character is feeling. These boring sentences are demarcated from the other boring exposition sentences by their length and the number of commas, which imbue the novel with an arrhythmia that somehow also succeeds at being monotonous:
He imagined his trajectory as a vacuum-sealed tube, into which he’d arrived and through which — traveling alone in the vacuum-sealed tube of his own life — he’d be suctioned and from which he’d exit, as a successful delivery to some unimaginable recipient.
Other narrative choices indicate either a fundamental laziness that precludes finding interesting combinations of words to describe things, or a concerted effort to describe the world of Paul using minimal “literary” embellishment (both possibilities arrive at the same place in terms of transmitting insight or aesthetic pleasure to the reader). Even the conceit of listing ages seems like a careless shorthand to describe people without really describing them, though this strategy conveniently reveals, later in the novel, that Paul’s authorial fanbase is all younger than he (sometimes inappropriately so: e.g., “Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school,” with whom Paul and his girlfriend Erin do lots of drugs and swim in the hot tub in Calvin’s “mansion” — quotation marks original — in Ohio).
After the initial deep, anxious loathing I felt for the novel, a germ of grudging appreciation made itself felt. Paul’s drug use in the novel begins with what seemed to me like a your-parents-wouldn’t-like-it-but-don’t-call-the-helpline usage — an Ambien here, an Adderall there, a Xanax. Eventually, though, Paul and his friends launch into sustained drug abuse. When the drugs began to flow (MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, heroin, Xanax, Klonopin, cocaine, Oxycodone, Methadone), I thought the novel began to excuse itself for its awfulness, namely because it now had a Problem I could recognize.
The characters seemed destined for emotional or physical trainwreck, and this immediately made them more interesting. The “affectlessness” made sense too; if you were writing about the observations of a person who was usually on a mess of downers, the adjectives might be the first to go. Your characters would also make a lot of totally inane remarks, as Maggie here, while swimming in Calvin’s parents’ pool on mushrooms: “What if we were all obese right now?” This kind of dialogue was conveyed with extreme accuracy and represents some of the “best” parts of the book.
After Paul and Erin make the surprising choice to get married in Las Vegas (“‘I don’t get it, at all,’ said Paul. ‘It’s what people do. This is what people want.’ ‘It seems really insane,’ said Paul.”), together they shamble around Brooklyn, and embark on a regrettable “honeymoon” to Taipei to see Paul’s parents, and ingest an amount of drugs that I think would make your nervous system fall out and/or prompt your parents (or somebody) to call the police. They feel the drugs’ effects and shamble further around Taipei fast food restaurants, recording themselves for an ongoing series of YouTube videos of themselves on drugs. Throughout this sojourn they display the kind of drug- and pretension-heightened honesty that is not exactly honesty, and that is the very opposite of the generosity and warmth I believe are necessary to sustain human relationships.
I began to think that this might be a sad novel — because of drugs, this guy, who already seems paralyzed by a steroidally muscular self-consciousness, is wasting his life, alarming the fast food employees of Taipei with his utter, utter malarkey, breaking his parents’ heart, and annoying the shit out of me while he does it. But, like the other promising problematic things in the novel — like Paul’s relationship with his family, with girls, with friends, with self, with work, or the amount of time he spends in Whole Foods — the novel refuses to pathologize his drug use, even though that is a time-tested way to engage the reader.
Speaking of inane remarks, reading Taipei came as close as anything can come to putting me on mute. I suddenly began hearing my own voice when I spoke within earshot of others, particularly people older than I. On the BART platform, I heard myself say “It was, like, not what I was planning to have happen,” and my voice trailed off as I became conscious of the poverty of my spoken expression, how much I must sometimes sound like the people in Taipei (“‘I feel like I’m unsarcastically viewing this as a major ordeal,’ said Calvin.”) I was born the year after Tao Lin; hearing our shared idiom come out of my own mouth, I realized that some of my loathing for this book is very personal. There is a fearful recognition of those things I want most to cleanse from my self-presentation, and self.
This realization brought another weak florescence of respect for Tao Lin. First, I tested the idea that he was mocking all our imbecilities and modes of expression, but rejected it as false because I can’t imagine that someone occupying the role of cultural critic would be able to stand recording all these encounters, unless he was able to take a lot of Xanax and not remember doing it, the way I manage airplanes (this is not, I suppose, totally out of the question). I next considered that this author might have made a radical and thus laudatory commitment to capturing things as they are or seem to him, no matter how egregious, or egregiously boring, they look on the page (and possibly because they do):
Laura complimented Paul’s hair and level of “casualness” and, going partially under the table, held a candle toward Paul’s shoes — which from Paul’s above-table perspective felt stationary and storage-oriented as shoeboxes — asking what brand they were.
“iPath,” said Paul.
“I can’t see. What are these?”
“iPath. The brand is iPath.”
“I like them,” said Laura.
“iPath,” said Paul quietly.
Could Tao Lin be… post-shame?, I wondered. Philip Larkin jumped to mind, “High Windows:” ‘When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, / I know this is paradise”). This association, however, was actually what caused me to finally reject this hypothesis as well: Tao Lin might freely record things that seem humiliating to me, i.e., sounding like an idiot, but his sex is the sex of The Truman Show. When the panties come off, the camera, narratively speaking, looks politely away. All we hear about it is that it happens, its location, and duration.
One might perceive this as another form of cultural or personal critique: for someone very focused on the self and what the self is feeling, and how many drugs to put in the self, sex is one of the first normal human priorities to be abandoned. But then we read a conversation Erin and Paul have in Taipei, when they ask one another for opinions and “critiques” about their prowess. While Paul says that sex is not “that big of a thing” for him, Erin still reassures him, and us, that he’s “good at everything” and “[keeps] it interesting” and that she “[has] orgasms…regularly.” It feels a sterile, cowardly way to treat sex from a radical cataloguer of human experience.
I felt it necessary, back there, to mention the initial purity of my loathing, because after Googling around, lighting up new links and links long dark, the loathing quickly becomes sullied and amplified by outside influences. I even found a rejection of my more charitable positions toward Tao Lin from the horse’s mouth: Entertainment Weekly asked, “While you were writing this book, you predicted that it’d be your ‘magnum opus.’ Did that pan out?” and Tao Lin answered: “Yes, in that I didn’t save anything for a future book. I used, as source material, everything I know or have felt or experienced, or could imagine knowing or feeling or experiencing, up to this point in my life.”
Then at Thought Catalog, I was treated to a first-hand account of “What It’s Like To Be In a Tao Lin Novel“:
I’ve always wondered what it was like for people friendly with, like, Hemingway and whatnot. These authors, like Tao, write pretty closely to their personal experience… I will treasure this book for the rest of my life not because my friend wrote it, or because it’s the best book ever written (goddamn is it good, though), or because I’m in it and so are a lot of other people I care about, but actually because of a scene I’m not even in. Six simple lines of dialogue.
–“You said you only go to like one party a month. But you’re at almost every party,” [said Daniel].
“This isn’t normal at all,” said Paul. “Before we met I probably did less than one thing a month.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Probably because I met people I like.”
Daniel hesitated. “What people?”
“You, Mitch, Laura… Amy,” said Paul. “I’m going to the bathroom.”–
Gah.
(I don’t mind airing my loathing, because Tao Lin seems like he can take it. In Taipei, he anticipates it: “He read an account of his Toronto reading, when he’d been sober, describing him as ‘monosyllabic,’ ‘awkward,’ ‘stilted and unfriendly’ within a disapproval of his oeuvre, itself vaguely within a disapproval of contemporary culture and, by way of a link to someone else’s essay, the internet.”)
My loathing was never pure, of course. Not really. I think that really great writing is bracing, and makes you feel like making something of your own, either another piece of writing, or a joyful noise unto the Lord. Then there are things you read, a little less great, that don’t make you feel one way or another, creatively speaking. Then there is a small, deadly class of book that make you never want to set pen to paper again. Tao Lin’s novel is a grave case of this latter kind, where you are faced with the consequences of writing down all the things you do or think. What if they sound like this? Colorless, witless, humorless. Picking out individual passages cannot express their cumulative monotonous assault on the senses.
The good thing about Taipei, if you’re like me, is that its characters will make you want to hug your lover, have a baby, go to work, call your mom. But maybe you’ll rethink that novel, that personal essay. In the cold ruthless scheme of things, that might not be such a bad thing. But it makes me look upon this novel as dangerous and threatening to life, like as the anti-choicer looks upon the abortionist.
Last week I participated in an online survey about ethics in book reviewing. One of the questions asked something like, “Is it okay to review the book of someone to whom you are aesthetically or philosophically opposed,” and I think I answered “Yes,” although I think the correct answer is “No,” or possibly “I’m not sure.” The next day, I saw (on Twitter) an assertion by no less a person than Joyce Carol Oates that reviews should include a minimum of opinion. I am not sure what all of this means for my ethics or my prospects as a book reviewer. But I’ll say it: It is my opinion that this novel is awful, and I am aesthetically or philosophically opposed to it. Likely it comes from some hypocrite-lecteur-mon-semblable-mon-frere place, but Taipei brought out all of my conservative instincts. Only a real codger would say this, but if this is the output we can expect from one of our bright young things, we’re fucked.
In “Aren’t You Dead Yet?”, one of the stories in Elissa Schappell’s new collection, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, the narrator, an aspiring writer, receives a black, leather-bound journal as a gift from her best friend. Although she loves the look of the journal, she never writes in it. When her friend discovers this, he’s angry, and even accuses her of slacking off:
One of the best presents I ever got was The Nanny Diaries. I really wanted it, but there were over 300 people on the library’s waiting list (I live in New York), and I wasn’t going to shell out $25 for something I was unlikely to read twice. The funny thing is, I never told my roommate that I wanted to read The Nanny Diaries. She just guessed that I had a secret craving for it. Of course, it can be as hard to gauge your friend’s taste in pop culture as it in high culture, but it’s better to guess wrong in the pop culture arena, because your friend is more likely to exchange it for something she likes better. Whereas, if you give her Gravity’s Rainbow, she’ll keep it for years out of obligation.
The Gift examines the role of artists in market economies, taking the lives of two major American poets as case studies. It’s the perfect antidote to all the earnest, helpful guides that aim to teach writers how to be more publishable, saleable, and disciplined. Where most writing guides make writers feel they could succeed if only they were more productive and efficient, The Gift argues that productivity and efficiency are market-based terms that have little meaning in gift economies, which is where many creative writers exchange and share their work. Another way of putting it is to say that The Gift makes feel writers feel less crazy.
I like the article, but it should be titled “12 Gifts to Give Your Female Writer Friend” cause I don’t think my best friend would enjoy lipstick and manicures and bathrobes because he’s a guy. Great ideas for my girl friends though.
Men wear bathrobes! And there is often a man or two in my local nail shop!
What’s weird is that the men I see in my nail shop always come in wearing fabulous looking bathrobes, AND bright pink lipsticks! Just gorgeous.. Although I don’t know if any of them are writers….
I wholeheartedly love this list. I’ve never had a manicure, but I certainly wouldn’t turn one down. And I do need a new bathrobe… (this is painting a really lovely picture of myself. I better stop while I’m ahead.)
But I also love having a billion little journal and notebooks stashed around. I like that the hardcover ones stand up to my abuse, and while I will use unlined pages, I do like lines better.
Though feel free to just pass along the booze and coffee. It will never go to waste.
I really wouldn’t want any of these things. Maybe the booze, and that internet blocking thingy, but I don’t need any more booze. When I saw “Gifts that Writers Will Actually Use” I thought I was gonna read about stuff like pens. Or cool paper. Or a cool new app that makes my prose purple. I need a good pen. I’m always looking for a new, good pen. Manicure, not so much. My cuticles are just a mess. And I would rather have the $10 Steinbeck complete works advertised on this page than any crappy best seller. Just saying. This list is more kind of funny in that ironic, I’m-writing-this-cause-I-know-it’s-funny way. And nothing make me more Grinchy than our tired old friend irony.
This is a brlliant list. I’ve just tweeted it as I’m on a deadline for Monday and want my frozen Christmas pressies now!
I LOVE it! My addition to the gifting list is: 4″ heel, Donald Pliner thigh-hign boots. You’ll look fantastic and your feet won’t hurt sitting in a chair. When you need inspiration, just throw those babies up on the desk and let inspiration flow… unless you write children’s books… then it would just be wrong.
I liked this, not because I’d want anything on the list except the yoga class but because it made me feel more apart of something where I thought I was being so utterly abnormal. See the good in negativity you did keep the interest of the readers/writers enough to gain a comment. That in my journal is always a good sign
Happy Holidays
I never realized how much of a normal writer I was until I read this. I do the exact thing with journals–I buy TONS of them, but can never sully their pages with my mundane words. Also, the nail-biting. I broke the habit of regularly biting my nails many years ago, however when I write a nail always finds its way to my teeth.
Thank you for this brilliant article.
Brilliant! This is an excellent way to ask your friends and relatives for the gifts you want, Hannah. I’ll have to craft a “12 Gifts That Stevens Will Actually Use” article immediately and see if The Millions or if Stevens Quarterly has room for it before the holidays.
Lame! I love fancy blank books. If they seem too pristine for ordinary musings I use them for dream journals. Yoga classes and handwritten letters are great, but all the rest of these gifts range from sad to insulting in my book. Lipstick and manicures? Really? Here is a news flash: my nails are kept extremely short to help me type faster. Also, I use the Internet for research. If I’m going to be distracted, blocking the Internet isn’t going to help. I’ll be distracted by a book, or by something that needs to be done in the house, or (negating #9) a cat.
More appropriate gifts for writers: a massage, a wrist brace for carpal tunnel, an ergonomic chair or a stability ball, an ergonomic/split keyboard, better lighting (if this is something their office lacks), editing services, a publishing contract.
What a fun post! Very creative. I especially like the meal idea — while I love to cook, there have been days when I just don’t want to stop writing to figure out what’s for dinner. One of the best “writerly” presents I got was from my sister-in-law, who stuck $20 in a card and said to use it for pizza some night when I didn’t feel like cooking.
And I’m with Monica on the massage — that’s one of the most awesome presents ever for someone who spends hours hunched in front of a computer.
Thanks for the entertaining post!
Hmmm…I’m sure many saw the title and thought it would be flasks, scotch, slippers, cigars, shiny black pens, and leather notebooks for some dude who wears sweaters with elbow patches. I admit it. I did.
I just read a many-part gift guide for hikers, mountaineers, travelers, etc in which all but one part tilted towards men in apparel, and the lonley woman’s section was called “gift guide: snow goddess”. (To give them credit, some items in the non-goddess section came in men’s and women’s versions, but not many). Perhaps it’s a little moment in which we can be honest about the way things are and why lipstick and manicures seemed out of place for us — Hannah didn’t follow the rules. Gift guides that are suppose to be non-gendered (i.e. for writers, geeks, outdoorsy types, urbanites, athletes, etc.) must consist of only items that are man-appropriate, but if any or some items are a little on the feminine side, the list needs to be labeled for women. And includes loads of pink text and photos of shiny things and further indication it is only for women.
I’m thankful Hannah didn’t represent it for men or women in particular and it wasn’t titled: “12 Holiday Gifts That Writing GODDESSES Will Actually Use”. And I’m thankful that some of you were crankypants about it, because it increased my awareness about my own assumptions.
It also made me really REALLY want to ask for fancy lipstick for Christmas.
Animals should never, ever, be given as “a gift,” not even if the recipient is actively looking to add one to their life. A decision to care for a living creature is serious business and should be left up to the person taking on that responsibility. If you give your friend a book she doesn’t like, she can exchange it or give it away; it’s not quite that easy if you give her a cat or dog. Animals are not “one size fits all,” and, sadly, shelters are full of unwanted pets thoughtlessly given as gifts.
There is a typo in this article, which is kind of ironic, since it bears advice for writers and those who love them.
(In case you hadn’t spotted it: “Although she loves the look of journal, she never writes in it.”)
I love fancy blank books too. I have a hard time writing in them – except when I buy a fancy journal to record my daily diabetes stuff. Then I feel I deserve them because they record the crappy side of my life.
I’m always happy to receive books, gift cards from a book store, and gift cards big enough for two for dinner.
Flowers. I love flowers. I love flowers any time. I don’t need an occasion. They just make me happy.
Marilynne, thanks for the heads up. It’s been fixed now.
I have trouble writing in fancy journals at first. I usually have to carry them around for awhile and get used to them. But once you take the plunge and starting writing your thoughts down (no matter how trivial), there is no turning back. Once you finish with them they preserve much better than spiral notebooks, and they look way more cool on your bookshelf.
Love it. I want all of these things. Except for a pet. I have too many. (And they do nothing for my concentration. I guess I’m petting them wrong.)
Great list. Although–no internet-blocking software for me. Reading gossip blogs is totally research… Seriously.
…and if you can’t write ’em a letter, buy em a subscription to a zine, some of which are reliably quarterly and arrive in greeting card sized envelopes!
Also…I had a moment thinking that a 14 year old of my acquaintance was a published author until I remembered he spells his Lewis Louis.
I take yoga anyway, but having a gift of classes would be great. Also the Anti-Social media would be very useful.
Any writer worth the ink in their pen would end your lovely friendship via text! These gifts might be delightful for a high-schooler who just won an inter-school short story contest but for the rest of us who contemplate our raison d’etre hourly, save your money! Here’s why…
1. A Cheesy New Bestseller: Only if you’re trying to remind us of how mediocre we already feel. The lone exception might be Jacqueline Susann’s ‘Valley Of The Dolls.’
2. Good Lipstick: Only if you’re buying it for Thomas Pynchon or Julian Barnes. In which case, call me I’d like to be there for the unwrapping.
3. Foreign Language Learning Software: I can barely master the English language nevermind trying to say ‘verisimilitude’ in French or Swahili.
4. A Bathrobe: Contrary to popular belief, Michael Douglas PLAYING a writer in The Wonder Boys gave us all a bad rap.
5. A Manicure: That’s right up there with ‘Dress to Impress’.
6. Internet Blocking Software: Take away the internet and prescriptions for Zoloft will skyrocket. Don’t let the drug companies win!
7. Booze, Coffee & Stimulants: Wrapping and putting a bow on it would just be hypocritical.
8. Yoga Classes: Pain and suffering are all we have left.
9. A Pet: Fine. But if there’s only one beer left in the fridge, I’m not sharing!
10. Freezable Homemade Foods: We’re writers not handicaps or invalids.
11. A Hand-written Letter: If you promise to write in the voice of a suicidal narrator from 1874, feel free!
12. A Copy Of ‘The Gift’ By Lewis Hyde: I have 7 copies all of which I’ve never read so you tell me.
Pamela August Russell would benefit from having all these gifts, especially reading her 7 copies of The Gift.
Even if it’s true I wouldn’t use it, I’d rather get the blank journal.
These maybe are perfect gifts for some specific writer – that’s to say the author of the article.
I was given a blank journal for my birthday back in HS. My then boyfriend gave it to me and wrote “for your first masterpiece.” The pressure in that phrase kept the book blank for many, many years. Finally I started putting clever clips and quips in it. I still get blank journals and I buy them for friends, but I’d rather not get them.
The rest of the list is delightful and inspired.
Michelle
LOVE this list! I already posted it on my Facebook account with specifications regarding lipstick (Bobbi Brown of course.) And although I wholeheartedly agree with #7, “Booze, Coffee, and other stimulants” I feel strongly that pills should also be included (had to add that to my Facebook post.)
And considering that I’ve had on the exact same outfit since Sunday #4 (bathrobe) also struck a chord with me.
Brilliant list! And to the person who said this list wouldn’t apply to guys, that’s because I imagine their list would be quite short (booze & women.)
Wow. I really liked how this list showed a real sense of how gifts should be chosen with the giver in mind. And the comments are all, but I wouldn’t like that! Nobody’s getting all ten, OK! And Hannah seems to have the pay attention to what people actually like and use down.
But to add, manicures are good for short, natural nails people, you just have to find a place that understands natural nails and does no polish manicures. It’s good to go just to see how a professional does things. Manicures are great as pick me ups, horrible as a weekly expense and time sink. My gift for natural nail pals is OPI’s Nail Envy in Matte. It’s a clear non-shiny nail strengthener. Nails get stronger, but you don’t look like you’re wearing polish. Works for men, too.
I just got around to reading this and I love it. There are some grinchy so-and-sos on this comment thread, which is also kind of delightful. Hopefully someone turns those frowns upside down with a festive new stability ball.
i bought “the gift” as a gift to myself. it’s fabulous!
great list, i especially need a manicure…i bite my cuticles when concentrating. Also, a bathrobe would be perfect. you should see how i write. oy vey.
I think it’s a good list, but as I’ve been sitting in front of the computer writing all day, I think I’d add “massage” to the list to make it complete, and maybe “ergonomically sound chair” and “chiropractor gift certificate” (do they have that sort of thing?).
Thank you so much for “freedom” and “anti-social”, of which I was unaware until I read this. I’m not waiting for someone to give me these–I’m getting them, now, in the hope I might save myself.
Hope you get everything on your list, and then some.
For everyone complaining that the list didn’t have pens, cool paper, etc. Let me go on record as saying–DO NOT buy a writer pens or notebooks. Ever. I am so picky about my pens and notebooks, it just takes up space. I won’t use the cool pens or the nice notebooks if they aren’t “right”. Just like you shouldn’t buy a carpenter a new hammer because it “looks nice”, don’t buy me pens or notebooks. PLEASE.
I think it’s a nice list. Yes, some of the items are women-centric, but things like yoga are for dudes, too. Especially if those dudes have back pain. Bathrobes are definitely for dudes…my husband wears his bathrobe a hell of a lot more than I wear mine.
great and refreshing list.