Too many magazines

First, we just wanted the New Yorker. It had been a long year without it. Once we saw an ad that someone in Barcelona was selling 2-year old editions for 5 Euros each. That's just plain ugly behavior, and we didn't support it.

But we made our needs known, and my mom and Leah's dad got us subscriptions. The one from my mom got all crazy and started sending one to "Dean and Leah Barcan" and another to "Dan-Leah Barcan" (look for that name again on our first-born someday), every week. Somehow we're down to just one a week from three.

Then came the gift of the American Prospect, a good read but not exactly something you can flip through before going to bed. Then we had some stray frequent flier miles and they offered us subscriptions for 500 miles or so. Where can you go for 500 miles, anyway? Hello Food and Wine, Sports Illustrated, Organic Style, and some house mag that never showed up. In the meantime, Leah got me Dwell for Chanukah, before those others started arriving. We started ordering the Sunday Times, Josh finished things up with a gift of Family Handyman, and the total hit eight.

This, my friends, is too many magazines. Remember the series on Abu Ghraib? I don't. I was finding out Robert Kuttner's recipe for a progressive tomorrow. Susan Sontag's essay on war and torture? Nope. Plans for a new deck caught my attention. The only bright spots are that Sports Illustrated has declined in quality and now takes only 20 minutes from cover to cover, although that number may goup now that hockey has ended, and the fact that Organic Style is unreadable and gets recycled as soon as we see it. That one was Leah's idea anyway.

She's also the one who decided we'd order the paper every day, not just on Sundays. The doctor's office is quickly becoming a birdcage.