For Every Phase of Life, There is a Magazine

I feel almost like I've betrayed my childhood. My teen years, really. The years where one of my many obsessions was music. I played the flute. I played the piano. And I loved it.

I still do, of course. I just don't seem to have time to play and focus on it like I used to. When I think of it, I sigh and say, "Maybe someday."

So it feels kind of awful to have thrown this away.



In my cleaning frenzy today (throw-away tally for the day: a small stack of old phone books, and extra 2009 calendar, several extraneous preschooler art projects, a small pile of broken toys, a mountain of catalogs, and all these little scraps of paper...) I found a heap of these Flute Talk magazines. I leafed through them with a little nostalgia-- at one time in my life, I devoured every one of them, no matter that most of the articles were a little over my head. It was Knowledge for the sake of Knowledge. And I loved the flute. And yeah... part of me thought I could get better at playing by reading which is easier than practicing.

I've always preferred reading over working...

After that little walk down memory lane, I pitched them in the burn trash. I will admit to a smidge of hesitation. But only a smidge. Why was I keeping them? Would I ever read them again? No.

So I pitched them.

It made me think of other magazine piles I have around. Somewhere upstairs I have a box of the journals of the massage therapy association I belonged to when I was in massage therapy school (and for about a year or so after graduation...). My life has taken a different turn since then, but I was pretty obsessive about it at the time. So I have the magazines.

But I think I need to dig them out and pitch them, too.

I have a pile of Countryside and Small Stock Journal from more recently in my obsessive history. Technically, I'm still on that one --homesteading-- but not to where I feel the need to read the magazine. I have an ever growing stack of Family Fun to which I was given a subscription. That has lots of fun ideas that I have plans of using for Jonah, but will I really? I'm not so sure.

So it makes me wonder... What do all these magazines say about me? About my ability to follow through on things I undertake? About the constancy of my interests? About my pack-ratishness? About my hormone-induced household purging?

Hm. Now that I think about it, maybe I don't actually want the answers to those questions...