Death by Magazine

Today has been a singularly uninspiring day. So, my question of the day is simple. How on earth did I get so many magazines? When I take a survey that asks what magazines I subscribe to and read regularly, I always answer, "None." I subscribe to nothing. I'm totally serious about this. Yet, somehow, I have about 2 feet of unread periodicals sitting in my bathroom. (Well, they were in my bathroom, and now they are spread out over my kitchen floor for the toddler to slide on.)

I am one of those people that has a really, really, really, really hard time throwing any sort of reading material away if I haven't read it cover to cover. I don't really care if I think a book will be horrible, because it might not be. I have to read it to find out. As a result of this, I have three or four books I've been "stuck in" for about 2 years. Trust me, they are dreadful, but there is this little hope that they might improve ... just a little bit?

Just the other day some PAC guy was handing out reading material at a local stop sign, and I let him hand me his wares. They were two magazines about the dangers of our modern system and how the savior is Lyndon LaRouche. I will admit that I even tried to read those. That was the end of my endurance, though. There is a limit to even my tolerance for name calling and comparisons of current political leaders of both parties to Hitler and other historically evil characters. I used the pages of the magazines to clean up the spilled formula in the car and tossed them in the next trash can.

None of this answers my question, though. How does a woman who subscribes to no periodicals end up with two feet of magazines in her bathroom? OK, it answers part of it. I'm silly enough to accept free publications from every punk on the street who hands me one, and once I have them, they seldom leave.

I think the rest of the story is that every society, group, organization, club, playgroup, mailing list, family reunion, and casual meetings of friends for lunch has its own monthly newsletter or quarterly update. I went out for coffee this morning with a former colleague (and my toddler), and I will be circulating to him the layout of our bi-monthly mailing later this month.

Take my law school, for example. They send me two periodicals, and the University to which they are a part sends me two. My undergraduate is bigger, so the number of publications I can expect is bigger as well. I get a newsletter from my college, from another college that houses a club I once joined, from the University itself, and at least two from various athletic groups whose tickets I bought. There is similar deluge from the various bar associations that I ever in my tenure as a lawyer joined, called, emailed, or whose state I drove through. I find it of some note that at least 1/3 of all these scholarly and professional individual issues contain articles about the need for greening our lives. Hmmm.

Well, I suppose there is some sort of tort liability for me spreading them on the floor for surfing lessons. I have managed to throw five of them away today. The rest ... we'll have to see about that.

Happy reading.