Well, That Was Unexpected

I like going to the mailbox, because its contents are invariably interesting. Flyers, mail that is for the previous tenant of my apartment, mail that sometimes should have gone to my dad in North Carolina and which is being forwarded to me for no obvious reason, bills, packages, the occasional letter from a friend (yes, I have friends who still write letters the old fashioned way. We roll like that.), and magazines.

Ah, the magazines.

Can we talk about the magazines?

I opened my mailbox Saturday and saw that I had received a copy of ... Working Mother.

I checked the label. It was CLEARLY to me. "Weird," I thought.

I got another copy yesterday.

I subscribe to several magazines voluntarily. A cooking magazine, Rolling Stone, and Real Simple.

Here are the magazines that I receive that I did NOT voluntarily subscribe to:

Reader's Digest

Taste of Home

Fitness

Working Mother

For a while it was a mystery -- where were these subscriptions coming from? Why was I getting them? And then I decided that it was sort of fun to get them. My grampa LOVED Reader's Digest, so reading through it is like a connection with him. Taste of Home? It's DEFINITELY home cooking, and more accessible than, say, Food and Wine (Not as schmancy, recipes seem doable). Fitness? HAHAHAHAHA but, still, interesting.

Working Mother.

Yeaaaaaaah. I got nothing.

I SUSPECT that this subscription was a gift with purchase that I didn't notice. This happens frequently when shopping online -- you'll get a magazine subscription gifted to you with your purchase. However, Working Mother seems like an arbitrary choice, and one that could potentially be hurtful. Can you imagine if you were a woman who was trying to get pregnant and having fertility issues and suddenly receiving copies of Working Mother? How painful would that be? Or if you had lost a child, and you go to your mailbox and there it is? It just seems to me that this is a periodical that should not be randomly sent, because the term "mother" could be fraught with pitfalls.

(I have some experience with this. When my eating habits were very disordered, and I was at my most ill, I got an envelope that was hand addressed to me and looked like a letter. It wasn't a letter -- it was junk mail, advertising a new way to lose weight. I was DEVASTATED, because some anonymous person thought I was fat, and I already thought I was fat even though I weighted 109 pounds. It was significantly damaging.)

At any rate, Reader's Digest seems a safer bet for the gift subscription, I think.

However, I did find an excellent use for my newest copy of Working Mother. I put it on the floor beside my desk.

My cat sniffed it, walked in a circle around it, then curled up on it and went to sleep. I guess she wants to be near her working "mother".