A Thing a Day 5

Day 5 - Fourteen Entertainment Weekly magazines

I think ATAD for me might just start out boring.  Everywhere I look, I have stacks of magazines.  I had no idea.  But that's the point, right?  You start looking, you realize where the piles of clutter are and you start tackling it.

In another failed attempt at clutter control, I bought four large plastic tubs.  As I worked my way through the house earlier this year, if I found stuff out of place that had been there for some time, I would put it into the appropriate person's box.  If I wasn't sure, I put it in mine, figuring I'd be the one who worked on my box the most since it was my idea in the first place.

So far, no such luck.
But, looking for some clutter to go through for ATAD, I seized on the tub, cracked it open to find yet another trove of Entertainment Weekly magazines.

For a period of time after college, I worked in the entertainment industry. I read Entertainment Weekly every week and my employers provided me with access to Variety and Hollywood Reporter amongst others. But after I transitioned out of the industry (to put it nicely), I found less and less of it all still interesting me.

So eventually, I gave up on Entertainment Weekly. My wife, however, is still an avid fan of entertainment and pop culture. After she's read a magazine, she passes it off to me. I'll typically skim the magazine, reading the Hot Sheet, the Must List, occasionally an article of interest, and then to the reviews at the back to get new movie and book titles to add to my growing list. But even that became a chore I wasn't keeping up on.

So tonight I grabbed a stack and flipped through them, got 19 movies and 8 books to add to the list. (Some of the movies may already be on the list. You can find both lists on my Facebook profile. There's a tab for books and when you get there, there's a second tab for movies. As we request books and movies from the library, sometimes I remove stuff without looking into it if it's got a popularity percentage under 70.) Skipping the Hot Sheet, I was able to plow through 14 magazines in less than an hour. And then I remembered this is a weekly magazine and so that was suddenly slightly depressing to realize how small a dent I had made. Some were from 2010, but quite a few were 2009 and a couple were 2008.

So, yeah, I might have quite a few posts where it's all about magazines, but on the other hand, I'm finally forcing myself to address the clutter. Eventually I might declare bankruptcy on the rest and just recycle them unreviewed.

Still, this feels good.