For the last 3 years or so, I have made fun of Will for his overwhelming collection of New Yorker magazines. For those unfamiliar, the New Yorker comes weekly, and is a very dense read. The only way I can keep up with the subscription is to read it on my lunch break, for an hour, almost every day of the week. Obviously, I do not do this every week, so I miss out on a lot of articles. He reads less often than I do, but he reads more articles (I tend to skip things I don't find particularly thrilling while he reads cover to cover), and the moral of the story is that we have approximately 50923852398572948 copies of this lovely magazine, many unread.
About two years ago, we organized them into two boxes: Already Read (and saving for some reason) and Partially or Not At All Read (and saving to read, obvi). Plus the pile of the most recent four or five (or ten) issues that always land on tables or by the bed. So yeah. A lot. We've talked about just saving the covers of some of them for a mysterious magazine cover project he will some day do (Wallpapering a room? I don't know), but for now, they sit in their pretty plastic boxes waiting for something to happen.
But I digress. I was supposed to be writing about MY Magazine Hoarding (though one could argue that one of the reasons his are still around is that I don't want to be a hypocrite). The point of all that babble was that after three years of making fun of him, he finally got to turn the tables and mock my own MH (see how I abbreviated it? Like it's a real disease?). You see, when we moved, he discovered my hidden stash of Real Simple magazines, tucked away on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf, the view of which had been obstructed by the couch. Whoops. Oh, honey, you didn't know that I haven't thrown away a single issue since I began subscribing a few years ago? I never mentioned that? I did also have approximately 15-20 back issues of BUST, but I donated those to someone on Freecycle when we moved (I knew I wouldn't go back to read them again, lots is available online, and I had a moment of awesome will power).
Since I am currently at a standstill in the War of the Magazines, I look to you, dear readers, for advice. I should probably just put of my beloved Real Simples all in a box and donate them somewhere or recycle them or something. Most of the content is available online nowadays, and though I say I'm saving them for the awesome tips and recipes, I'm sure you know that I have never once opened a back issue to look something up. The (delicious) Real Simple recipes we've made have all been from the most recent issues that are sitting on the table. The plan I've thought of for moving forward is to never keep more than two issues out at a time. When a new one comes, the oldest one on the table gets recycled, and if there's anything I want to save, I must do it then and there.
BUT - do I just start that now and get rid of the other 30 or so magazines that look so pretty in their white magazine holders (with their perfect white spines with pops of colored lettering)? Or do I take the time to go through each one, tearing and saving things that I truly want to keep (and storing them neatly in an organized Real Simple binder of my own creation?
There's something appealing about just purging them all and starting fresh, but I've
What do you think?
