For the past 5 years or so, I've been a devoted subscriber of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a good paper, I get a lot of info from it, and it's helpful to have on hand for using under my cat's litter box. My subscription has been set up to automatically renew using my credit card, and I have just let it keep on charging over the years... I'm not even quite sure what it costs to get it to be totally honest.
Recently, however, I got a new credit card mailed to me to replace my old credit card. And guess what-- the Inquirer can't automatically bill me anymore since the numbers changed. So my subscription will be running out in the next few weeks or so, and the Inquirer's sales team has been calling me relentlessly to remind me that my credit card account has changed. Being the *ahem* wild and crazy guy that I am, however, I'm going to go cold turkey and just let my subscription slide without renewing it. It will be a test for me to see what life is like without getting the newspaper after reading it religiously on a daily basis.
Currently, I read (or skim) the paper during breakfast at home, during lunch at work, and during appropriate bathroom breaks. That's a lot of time spent staring at newsprint, probably well over an hour each day in total.
So I'm going to switch things up a little bit. I'm going to devote more time to reading books (something that's fallen by the wayside recently), catching up on magazines, and perhaps flipping thru Philly.com to get bits and pieces of articles as they catch my fancy.
On the bright side, by not reading the Inquirer, I will no longer be depressed after reading story after story depicting the waning intelligence and lack of decency in this world. Obviously news, by nature, centers around "what's happening", but I can only take so much of political corruption, violence on the streets, nations at war, environmental destruction, filthy rich celebrities getting into trouble, and so on. My enjoyment of the world definitely takes a hit after reading the news every day, and it doesn't help reading about a Philly team losing a game the night before. For once, it might help to be blissfully unaware of most of the problems with the world, and instead focus on how I can make the world better in my own ways.
On the down side, I will need to find an alternative for protecting the carpet under my cat's litter box...
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