9:54 AM
So this weekend I went out, picked up a pen knife and a box of envelopes (for filing) and laid into my magazine collection. One thing that should be obvious is that I'm a magazine junkie. Architectural Digest, GQ, Esquire, Men's Health, Wired, Macworld, Communication Arts, Print, Dwell, Fortune, Inc., Fast Company, Book, Poets and Writers, even Vanity Fair all make regular – if not monthly – appearances. I keep every issue of Communication Arts and Architectural Digest for professional inspiration, but every so often I look at the shelves in my room and think, Dang, time to optimize.
The way I think of it, it's like defragging a hard drive. There's all this information you want to keep, but a huge amount of stuff that's not being stored in an optimal manner and a bunch of lost space as a result. I go in with my knife and start slicing out pages, and what was once a 400+ glossy becomes two dozen pages of content in which I'm actually interested. There's an amazing feeling to hauling two garbage bags full of advertisements out of your room. Therapeutic, really.
In other weekend news, I went to a farwell sendoff for my friend K.C. on Saturday night, and then my folks dropped by on Sunday, which was really nice. Yes, I'm living outside of Washington, D.C. Yes, my folks live in Ohio. They do these weekend trips all over the place for car shows and antique shows and flower shows and whatnot, and usually if one of these is somewhere between Pennsylvania and the Atlantic, I'm considered "in the neighborhood". Which is cool – it's great getting to talk with them, and I've been a horrible slacker son and haven't been keeping up my end of the communications as well as I should. (I'm not Jewish or Catholic, just naturally guilty.) After they left, I played some more Baldur's Gate with Nick and then chatted on the phone for an hour or so with my old friend Jesica, who's just moved to New York and is in fierce job-hunting mode. Damn, I miss that girl.
So, yeah. It's been a decent weekend. I'm still fighting off the blues for a couple of reasons, but I'm getting used to that by now.
What have you folks been up to?
Wow, and here I thought I was crazy because I now have subcriptions to both the "New Yorker" and "Sports Illustrated." (Two weeklies, and the New Yorker takes me an hour or two to read.) Not to mention that the "Chicago Tribune" had an article last week on "The 50 best magazines," so I visited the bookstore and picked up a few.
I wasn't impressed.
There are a lot of good magazines out there, but I still have a hard time finding any that are really fantastic. Which, I suppose, is why I keep producing Inkblots.
Now, if someone would just provide me with the cash it would take to produce The Dream Issue, which I could shop around to different publishers... Ah, fantasy!