Don't ask me why, but lately I've been thinking a lot about magazines. We seem to have them everywhere and refuse to let them go no matter if they've been read or not. You would think that with all the television we watch, all the time spent on the Internet, all the moments during the day listening to talk radio, we'd be some of the most well informed people on this planet. Yet one of my most favorite moments in every week has to be coming home on Friday and seeing who's on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.
As I mentioned magazines have been on my mind. After thinking over all the different types we've subscribed to over the years, I was surprised how you can literally trace my growth as a person based on what found it's way into my mailbox. Lucy and I had our first date on 12/27/97. At the time I lived in a fraternity house and Playboy may as well have been the local currency. It was everywhere. Stacks and stacks piled up in closets, bedrooms, covering coffee tables. It was openly discussed and critiqued on a daily basis.
After Lucy and I moved in together I didn't bring Playboy with me. I was however one of the many that signed up for Maxim the first year it came out. Actually if you look at my credit card statement from that time I signed up for more than just one harmless magazine. There was People, Details, GQ, Men's Health, Premier, Stuff...I can't remember if I had a crush on a magazine sales lady or what, but they just kept offering and I kept subscribing.
As the years went by I found I didn't care how to pick up women in a bar using various forms of grunts and hand gestures even though Maxim assured me would work....and I couldn't afford to dress like anyone in GQ....or buy any Stuff other than what I could get at a yard sale...and I never exercised...so I put away my crush for the magazine lady and stopped getting magazines all together. Until that is Entertainment Weekly offered to fill my Pop Culture needs on a weekly basis for the low low price of 10 cents an issue.
I was baptized close to 5-6 years ago and went through an intellectual phase in which I felt I needed to read as much as possible about every political, social, medical, statistical movement there was....this lead to Harper's. A monthly dose of left wing propaganda mixed with some poetry and a touch of "exclusive" fiction from today's most deep thinking writers. I soon learned that my desire for more knowledge couldn't over come my distaste for pages upon pages of words without pictures.
I wrote for a pet website for a while so friends and family got the chance to laugh at me while I scoured the pages of Cat Fancy looking for juicy fodder. It seemed like with every new assignment came another niche mag. Golf Digest. Log Cabin Monthly. Of course the moment Fred was conceived we signed up for Parenting. Since we had a child who demanded to eat everyday we thought we'd better learn to make something other than spaghetti hence Family Circle. US Weekly gives us the sort of Garbage-Can-Gossip that EW thinks we are too mature for. Plus Fred even gets a couple in hopes that they will someday keep him quiet during church. We even get one devoted completely to foods made by Kraft. All I can figure is at some point we really must have loved mac'n cheese.
Looking back you might think that things have gone down hill after I let Maxim go, but honestly they have several things in common. They are both full of glossy images that I'll never get to touch in real life, they both cause my jaw to drop and a little bit of saliva to run out of the corner of my mouth, and they both are full of plastic things that are never as good as they look in print. Honestly the way I see it Family Circle is better because A) I got a better chance of experiencing some of the things described in the articles and B)Lucy never complains when I oogle over chicken tetrazzini .
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