My Name Is Jane and I'm Addicted to Magazines

Yes, I confess. I am a magazine junkie. I love them. Can't get enough of them. The smell of a new magazine, the glossy (or not so glossy or even matt) paper excites me. I want to touch them. Fondle them. Flip quickly through their pages and then slowly, slowly go back over each one.

I see magazines as repositories of everything I might ever want or need to know; the cover lines say so. How to deal with my belly fat. What the newest tech toys are. Why Hilary may not be running in '06. I believe what they tell me. Even though when I was writing for magazines, I know how I could work with words to make them seem to say far more than they actually did.

A room is never painted. There's no prep or primer that goes into it. You "merely use your roller to apply a coat or two." A perp never says something. He alleges, which inserts that element of doubt, reminds you that we're talking about legal matters, which are never, after all, totally true.

Here are the magazines that are in my house every month or, god help me, week: Allure, Cooking Light, Eating Well, Hadassah, InStyle, Los Angeles, Money, Men's Best Life, More, Newsweek, O, People, Rolling Stone, Sacramento, Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired. And those are just the ones I have subscriptions to.

And I've just found a new one, which prompted this post: sactown. I got the premier issue yesterday. It's lovely. The cover stock is heavy and dull, sort of like brushed metal. The fonts are varied, as is the way today, but still comprehensible (as is not the way for some mags I could name). I've only done my first flip through, so I can't offer a full J-school analysis, but I will say this: it's the first time in years that my journalists' buttons got pushed, and I started thinking story ideas. Perhaps I'll write them a love letter....