My Carbon Footprint

I heart books, but there is no doubt that magazines are my guilty pleasure. Stacks of magazines piled high on my bedside table make me long for long, lazy, rainy days. But I have a dilemma. There were no fewer than 7 magazines shamelessly stuffed in my mailbox today: SmartMoney, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Cook's Illustrated, Shape, Health, and Entertainment Weekly. Add to that to the publications my husband gets (some of which I like to read...Runner's World, Best Life), those I can never resist at the check out (The New Republic, Vanity Fair and Martha Stewart Living), and the weekly issue of People my mother-in-law sends my way, and I am drowning in a virtual sea of print. Before I can even make any head way, the next month's issues are piling up on every cleared surface and in every empty basket in my house.

I'm so completely overwhelmed that instead of reading, I am writing about it here. I don't know what I have read, or why I am saving publications I know I have read.

Not to mention, the sheer volume of catalogs that I get on a daily basis overwhelms me all the more. Sometimes I get the same catalog 3 times in one, single week. I have gotten 2 identical catalogs on the same day. Can you say R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S !? That is just wrong and wasteful, but they do make good kindling and also serve useful for craft and cut-out projects. Especially since, we no longer get the worthless. biased, skewed local newspaper to spread on the table when we break out the tempuras or the glitter pens.

When I get motivated and feel strong enough to part with my old friends, I think about taking my cache to a local nursing home. But I think better of it because I cannot imagine these titles having much appeal to those who aren't cooking, working out or putting their money in anything other than bank cds.