A New Pen is Announced: My Six Stages of Perfectly Normal Behavior Indicating Excellent Mental Health

Pelikan has announced it’s bringing back the Classic M205 Demonstrator in Transparent Blue as a special edition starting in April.  Pelikan is a weakness of mine.  As are demonstrators.  Also, blue.

I can admit that I don’t happen to love the modern M200. It’s an excellent pen, but it’s a little lightweight for me, and it has the steel nib and I just have never bonded with it. Still, of course all I needed to do was to see the photo, above, to start salivating. It never fails.  Aurora, Pelikan and certain Montblancs affect me like a butcher’s bone does a dog.

Here are my stages, which are essentially invariable.

1. Infatuation. Oooh, shiny.

2. Reasoning It Out. Boy that looks so nice.  And I don’t have the exact same pen already. I mean not exactly the same.  Or, if exactly, I only have one (maybe two, tops) of the exact same pen already.  What if one breaks? And I could always use a different nib size in this pen.  Or a different color.  Or heck the box is probably different if everything else is the same.

And it says “special edition.”  That means: not around forever. Remember that I never got that yellow special edition that, okay I’d never use, but the point is that now I have no yellow pen.  Okay, no yellow pen other than my three yellow Safaris. No, okay, four yellow Safaris. Five? But let’s not confuse the issue.  This isn’t yellow anyway.  It’s so much more useful than yellow.

And for heaven’s sake, I haven’t bought anything pen-related for a week.  Yeah, okay, maybe it’s just four days, really, now that I think of it.  Then there were those cute pants, too.  But sometimes four days can feel like a week — or even a month.  You know that’s true.  And let’s be honest: these last four days have felt like a month.  A pen every month or so is really frugal.

3. Annoyance. What? It’s not out for six whole weeks?  We’re supposed to wait that long? That’s almost cruel.

4. Uh oh. (The price.) Wait, how much is it? Is that dollars or euros? Without shipping? Oh boy, yeah, well that is sort of … yeah.  That’s slightly more than a Safari to be sure.  But it’s not like I waste money on Starbucks lattés every day or anything.  So think of all the money I save there. This is the equivalent of….  Oh.  It’s the equivalent of [33/81/175] Starbucks lattés.  That is a lot of lattés, isn’t it?   Yikes.

And, okay, strictly speaking I already have [four/eight/nineteen/I can’t count that high] other pens of the same brand.  Some of which I bought last year with what I honestly considered “this year’s money.”

And, okay, the stock market laughs cruelly at me, as our “retirement accounts” shrink to the level where they wouldn’t fund a weekend at a Holiday Express.  The credit card bill is on the counter.  My children, annoyingly, “like to eat.”

5.  Acceptance. Sigh. A person is rich in proportion to the number of things which he or she can afford to let alone. Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.  Something something makes us stronger.

6. A Few Weeks Later.  Oooh, I just read online that there’s someone offering it on Amazon dot Freedonia at 10 percent off.  Let me just crunch those numbers again.

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The image of the forthcoming Pelikan Classic M205 Demonstrator in Transparent Blue can be found here, along with more information about the pen.  Drool with me.