8.11.2008

don't stop till you get enough

Since I enjoyed almost success in my attempt to post every day I thought perhaps I would try again...practice makes perfect right? I can't believe we are now well into August. It was difficult rousing myself this morning...my weekend of r+r proved not be to be a weekend of debauchery rather one of sloth and the overindulgence of copious amounts of television and websurfing. I did find the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics every bit as electric as I'd hoped, and I have been watching it into the wee hours of the morn.

Returning to my relaxing weekend...

I had hoped to do very little and on that count I excelled albeit briefly. I am, by nature, a restless spirit and fancy doing many things at once...not paying the proper amount of attention to any. I wish I was more focused, well... not really. I rather like that about myself and it has developed into a deep love of many things. Wasn't it Van Gogh who said..."the way to know life is to love many things?" If that is so, Life and I are well on our way to a beautiful friendship. Anyway...despite my weak attempt at doing nothing I still found time to clean the kitchen, go to Target, crochet a bit, start and finish a book and purge a few magazines. This discourse refers to that...the purging of magazines.

I don't know how I can be so ruthless in the vanquishing of so many past issues of People and US Weekly when I can hardly bear to part with a Creating Keepsakes, Domino or God forbid someone try and pry a back issue of Martha Stewart Living from my hands...they might get cut. Why is that? Sometimes, while watching edited episodes of Sex and the City on TBS I spy all those bookcases in Carrie's living room and I imagine they contain countless volumes of Vogue. I think...what commitment....what utter devotion must she and the set decorator have to lovingly keep and store each one of those precious issues. And, while I find it insane, there is a part of me that longs to do the same. Just not with Vogue...I mean I love fashion as much as the next gal, but I approach it the same way as I do fine art...magic, but sadly I am more of a print kinda girl. I have been known to buy it...usually overpriced and at the airport although I prefer Vanity Fair but despise the insipid faces of all those socialites staring blandly into the camera. Oh and I don't care for Dominick Dunne either, but I digress. This post is really about what I can't throw away.

So I came across this issue of Creating Keepsakes scrapbook magazine. (all of you non-scrappers may want to leave me now) How young Elsie looks on the cover. I began flipping through it and was immediately struck by how much things have changed in the Scrapbook industry in just two short years...and how some things stay the same. I mean...we scrappers are constant in our quest for "fast and easy pages," "low cost accents" and "how to use up those scraps." Wait...didn't the recent issue of the magazine cover the same thing? Uhm yeah. It did. Perhaps that's why I stopped subscribing two years ago. There was some good stuff...like an article on eco-friendly scrapping which is well known now but would have been a bigger deal then and I liked seeing the work of the scrapbookers that I'd forgotten about...but WOW...when I read complaints on message boards about all the contributors being the same...I never really thought or cared about that. But, those complaining people were right. I recognized pretty much all of the names from the last few issues I bought. I even recognized their kids...a few years older, but the same kids. I think they need some new folks. That's why, no matter how they change their cover design or the typeface of their logo they can't do anything unless they work from the inside out...meaning brand new contributors.

In the end...despite my struggle...I tossed it. But not the MS Living's....I plan on meeting my maker with a few of those puppies under my arm.

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