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Why I No Longer Love (Most) Magazines

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Why I Loved Magazines I always loved magazines. This might be because I spent the first 20 years of my life without the internet. In the 80's and 90's if you wanted to know which movies were coming out; if you wanted to see the latest fashion trends; if you wanted to learn about politics, current events and news; you could watch TV, read a newspaper or read a magazine. TV shows ran on a set schedule and newspapers had short articles and gray pages, so I favored magazines. They were a small luxury. You could read them in the bathtub without worrying too much about getting the pages wet, or you could cut out a glossy picture and tape it to your wall. My mom always seemed to be subscribed to at least 7 magazines. Off the top of my head, I can remember her subscribing to: Glamour, Vogue, Self, Working Woman, Metropolitan Living, Country Living*, Vanity Fair, and Utne Reader. I think we also had Time and/or Newsweek for a while. As I entered adolescence, my subscriptions sta...
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A New Start

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I've been on a bit of a hiatus on my project* since roughly my last entry. This time rather than a quick out-of-control binge, it was a slow slide. First, a little cheating (Facebook for 5 minutes, what's the harm?), then a lot of cheating (Tumblr for 1 hour in the morning; I'm too tired for anything else), then excuses (it's Christmas Eve and I really want to watch "The Muppet Christmas Carole"), finally a full surrender to temporary defeat (I'll start again on New Year's Day). I didn't want to admit my failure here. I have read a lot of blogs and books about projects and programs that people engage in: Project 333 , the Konmari method , not buying anything projects, 365 art projects, the Mins game from The Minimalists , Whole 30 , Couch to 5K .** I've even done a few of these projects, some more successfully than others. I rarely see the people who started these projects blogging about totally losing their grip on the project within the fir...
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My Very Own Pinterest Fails

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This year I had the idea that I was going to make Christmas ornaments and give them out as presents. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Not so much. I now realize that this is something that should only be attempted by those 10 and under or by people who actually regularly do crafts. I found a couple of what seemed like pretty straightforward and inexpensive (plus environmentally friendly) projects on Pinterest. There was a project for cinnamon dough ornaments: https://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/cinnamon-dough-ornaments.html and this project for papercraft ornaments: https://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/paper-christmas-decorations.html. Both seemed within my rather narrow range of crafting expertise. At least I found a use for my "Dokdo: A Beautiful Island of Korea" calendar from Dongguk University as seen on the tree-shaped ornament. Also - in this picture Dokdo reminds me of AhCh-To from "The Last Jedi".  Reader: I tried them,...
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A Very Special ("Special"-less) Christmas

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If I hadn't begun the 75/25 Create/Consume Project* I'd probably be watching a lot of  Christmas movies and TV shows this time of the year. As with many people, certain holiday movies and TV shows have become part of my Christmas tradition. For me they had perhaps taken on even more importance because my nuclear family of origin has sort of dissolved** and because for many years I was living in Korea where Christmas was not a big-deal holiday, but more of a eat an ice cream cake and go on a date kind of affair. These movies and TV shows provided a measure of comfort and home, a through-line, connecting me to Christmas past. In past years I've felt an almost primitive urge to watch these movies and shows, but this year I've found that shifting. So, last weekend, when I was very bad and veered off-project***, Lee asked me to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" with him because he had to return it to the library. I did. Now, "It's a Wonderful Life" ...
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Obvious Revelation #1: Movie Trailers are Just Advertisements

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So, last week I was saving up minutes of creative time in order to spend them on consuming "The Last Jedi" in theaters. In the process I realized that I was not only going to need to budget for the running time of "The Last Jedi" (a healthy 152 minutes), I was also going to have to budget about 20 minutes for previews and the occasional advertisement. And that's when I realized something really obvious - movie trailers are advertisements. Movie trailers are designed to get you to go out and pay money for a product - a movie. This is very obvious, right? But I have always loved movies so much, that this capitalist aspect of the movie trailer has been invisible to me. It has felt like a privilege to watch movie trailers, or at least it was something which I took for granted as part of a proper movie-going experience. Trailers became even more special to me when I lived in Korea, because there, instead of 20 minutes of trailers, and maybe a few ads, you would ...
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My Journey to the Dark Side

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"The greatest teacher, failure is." - Yoda, "The Last Jedi" This week brought about my first real failure on my 75/25 Create/Consume project.* I spent Thursday night through Sunday night off the project engaged in a veritable orgy of novel-reading and tumblr-scrolling. It started with a fairly reasonable excuse but turned into a full-on binge. I'm determined, however, to get back on track and use my failure as a lesson. What happened It started Thursday night. I'd been exhausted and in pain all day, and I was running a fever. When I got home I had no energy for anything, so I started reading "Americanah" again, which had been my source of distraction between phone calls at work. Intermittently I was also checking in with Dr. Google trying to figure out whether I had some sort of life-threatening illness like meningitis, the first ailment to pop up when I typed in my symptoms. Anxiety over my health combined with the fever kept me awake unt...
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Day 12: Small Talk

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Something I've noticed since starting this project - the majority of the small talk I participate in is related to consuming culture or news. I don't think I'm alone in this. Except for the portion of Americans whose small talk runs more towards sports (something I've never been interested in), I think this is fairly common. Give a listen to a room of coworkers or any group of acquaintances and you'll hear a lot of "Did you read...?" "Did you see...?" "Did you watch...?" "Have you listened to...?" Until recently, this was so normal as to be invisible.  Now I find it somewhat unsettling. The banality of this conversational gambit now suggests to me a pattern of consuming too much entertainment and information, at least among the sorts of people I find myself hanging out with. So now that I've noticed this, I've been thinking about the possible functions this kind of small talk might serve. It identifies us. Certa...
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