Today, after drinking 12 cups of Mocha Frapuccino, 4 cups of Peppermint Café Mocha, 3 cups of Peppermint Hot Chocolate, 1 cup of Crème Brulee Frappuccino, and 1 cup Toffee Nut Latte (whew!), I finally received the much-sought-after, almost-out-of-stock, unbelievably-late-released Limited Edition 2006 Starbucks Coffee Planner.
I can’t believe I fell for this merchandising/publicity hype and drowned myself in all that caffeine, but I did, and you know what, I love it! The planner, that is.
What makes a planner a really good one? Aesthetically, the Starbucks Planner is quite simple really, even plain-looking. Very minimalist. It’s hard-bound, the covers are colored with a shade of espresso (a deep, dark, brownish color), cream-colored pages for the calendar, with the Starbucks’ theme embossed in the front cover “find your favorite”, which is probably why each month has a featured drink (for January, it’s Grande Double Espresso Frapuccino Blended Coffee, for February, it’s Hazelnut Caramel Mocha, etc…) and an accompanying collage/story/trivia for it. In the inside back cover, I found two pockets with coupons (buy one, get one free, etc.) for the coffee lover (really, it’s hard-sell marketing at its peak!).
What I especially like about this planner is that it has ample space for writing, not just your appointments or errands or tasks for the day, but more so, your musings on the most mundane of things. For, isn’t life really lived in the ordinary moments, in the most ordinary of days?
I haven’t tried writing on it, though. I hope the ink doesn’t run. That’s another detail planners have to possess. The paper should be able to soak up the ink from your pen, otherwise, your writing will just be a blur at the slightest touch. And you wouldn’t want to find messy “writings” combined with your, similarly, messy handwriting, right?
So, was it worth it - drinking all that coffee for a plain-looking, trying-to-be-profound-and-poetic-about-coffee planner? For non-coffee lovers or non-Starbucks patrons, it’s probably silly to go through all that just for a planner but then I’m not one of those people, so there’s no point of argument there. As to whether this planner will live up to its promise (of being the womb of imaginative journaling) or just another one of those common planners from your local bookstore (which I would abandon in the middle of the year), we’ll see…tune in next year when we look back at the year that was. For now, let me get some sleep...zzzzzzzzz...
