The Collection

Yesterday I mailed three payments for magazine subscriptions. One was a renewal for biking magazine and the other two were unsolicited financial and cooking magazines. Why subscribe to magazines when I do not have the time to read them and fully appreciate the information that is offered? Some days my resolve to just say no is not strong.

I have ten subscriptions currently and with the new additions brings me to twelve magazines. They very the gamut from Consumer information, Health and fitness geared towards men, biking, mountain biking, computer, cooking and now a financial magazine. I know I need to have a mechanical and electronic magazine also but someone has not figured out that I really need them yet. I do find them interesting to read through, but more of a skim looking for the tidbit of information that I feel would benefit me. I mark the page of a recipe that looks enticing or article that I wish to come back to when I have more available time. After looking through the magazine I place it in the magazine basket on top of the 30 to 40 other magazines place there.

I have a hard time tossing magazines into the recycling bin due to one or two interesting articles and not wanting to loose the information and at the time seemed important. Eventually I go through the basket and start the purge. It is not an easy process needing to look through each magazine before placing it in the discard pile or keep pile. After looking at about six to eight magazines I start to fade from the task and the demarcation of which magazine to toss comes to what the cover lists as the key information contained in its articles. At times I have removed pages to keep and dispose the rest of the magazine but that creates other problems with where to put the pages and when do I look at them again. After 30 minutes of sorting I stop the process and after a short debate with myself on weather I should keep any in the toss pile I place the magazines in the recycling container.

Why do I need more magazines? It is not that I need more it is because the solicitations I receive in the mail make it difficult to not to subscribe. The financial magazine’s pitch was 80 percent off the news stand price which brought the cost to eight dollars a year and in addition I could subscribe for two years at the same rate, which I did. I can always use financial advice. The cooking magazine had the same pitch but at the rate of twelve dollars a year and I wanted Rachel’s newest quick meal recipe. I do not always give into the solicitation but I was having a moment of weakness.