kris and i have spent most of the day engaged in a new year tradition - going through the house and getting rid of "clutter". yes, one man's trash is his wife's treasure, but we seem to do a fairly good job of agreeing on about 90 percent of what should be donated to goodwill, recycled or just thrown away. despite the fact that we do this consistently every year [mostly], we both hate shopping and we're not pack rats, it still never ceases to amaze me how much crap we can accumulate. i think part of the problem is the 5 or 10 percent of iffy stuff that makes it through a few rounds of the clean sweep. magazines are one of the usual suspects.

despite our willingness to donate all manner of clothing, public radio swag, "almost working" coffee makers, yards and yards of telephone cable and old answering machines [ just for starters ], we always seem to have a weak spot for saving months and months of harpers, the atlantic monthly, the nation, the christian science monitor and - yes, i'll admit it, even old wired magazines. i think the weakness comes from the guilt of knowing that we've only read a few of the articles from each issue and that someday we might possibly get around to reading the whole thing. this year, we both decided that the madness needed to stop, so we've cancelled everything except harpers, thinking that perhaps if we can get disciplined enough to read it from cover to cover on a regular basis, then we might be allowed to slowly resubscribe to the others.

maybe having less magazines around will help me focus on all the unread books laying around that i can't bring myself to take to the local used bookstore.

i guess there's always next year.