Subscriptions: Passive reading, active choosing

Most of us are looking over things in our life to cut vs. keep, and magazine subscriptions are the most glaring waste (though I'm not sure how much you really save by cutting). The difficulty is that subscriptions are so inexpensive (e.g. $12-50 for many) compared to buying at the magazine stand. Plus, you can use airline points towards many magazines so the downside ends up being the paper waste and the pain of recycling.

Still, here's my list so far to clean house and mind, not including the freebies:

Keep:

Monocle

The Economist

The New Yorker

Creativity

Glimmer Train 

Zoe All Story

Ad Age

Adweek

Could give up:

New York

HBO

Travel & Leisure

Food & Wine

New Republic

This Week

Communication Arts

Did give up:

Showtime

Netflix

The New York Times Sunday

T-mobile hot spot subscription

Plus I'm using those services, like Green Dimes, to cancel catalogs which is starting to work. Catalogs and other junk mail really bugs me, so I'll be curious to see how much this type of service can help. To be most effective, you have to enter specific catalog info as you get receive them, which is a pain but worthwhile if it works.

Fighting the cold: Comparing remedies

Like many people, I've been suffering from a cold the last few weeks. It started suddenly, brought on by a mix of allergies, cat hair, exhaustion and someone passing it to me. Thanks to a week of back to back presentations and working until 11 or midnight, it's taken longer than it should to kick it. 

One positive outcome is I've had plenty of chances to sample different remedies and compare. For basic stuffy head and running nose type of symptoms, I've switched loyalties from DayQuil (a reliable favorite) to Robitussin Cough & Cold. The change to Dr Mom was big for me, but not only is the bottle smaller, it tastes terrific and I feel less dried out than before. This cold, I also went with liquids rather than pills, and for pills I still recommend Tylenol Cold or Sudafed, which can dry you up like a desert.  At night too, I started with NyQuil and switched to Robitussin. Without alcohol though, it was harder to fall asleep so I'm not sure this was the brightest idea. 

Immunity powders you mix into your water is quite trendy and while I started with Boost for Vitamin C, several kind souls at work left me packets of Emergen-C, which tastes a lot better. I'm also toting around Halls new watermelon flavor, which helps a bit.

Not reviewing tissues. I basically blow my nose in anything handy. Sorry. 

Customer Service outlets

Customer Service is a big pet peeve of mine, and I answer those Rite Aid 800# customer surveys (i could win $10,000e) and the paper surveys at Starwood Hotels and I'll even randomly send in notes to brands I visit with compliments or complaints. It makes me wonder how well we're monitoring complaints and how quickly brands are responding to them and in what way.

I take note of response time, and I'm impressed by recent notes back from Dunkin' Donuts and Jet Blue which uses basic e-mail to respond to queries from their web site. Dunkin Donuts answered my query about styrofoam cups with shared outrage but reminded me that shops are franchises, individually owned. Jet Blue answered my query about breaches in the Customer Bill of Rights, denying that I was due $25.00. I am annoyed by both answers (one, lame; the other, wrong) but I did get a response within 36 hours which helped me feel listened to. Both were sweet-sounding women. I can't tell if they're real or not yet but I am digging.

Of course, there are more modern ways of getting service, such as through microblogging services. Zappos, Jet Blue and BA are on Twitter and are famous for answering customer messages. A savvy writer on my team had Zappos and JetBlue bid against each other for his tax refund.  The Consumerist, Pissed Consumer, and the Squeaky Wheel are all about anger and you getting yours out.  Measured Up is my new favorite, because it includes amusing stories with the expected nasty ones about Time Warner Cable.

Brands should remember, it's not just what the response is which matters; what matters is there is one at all.

7 years

I really hate today. I hate remembering today. I hate how this day was, where today led, what today means, how people suffered, how we all did. 

Tonight, we go downtown and, even though we hate it, we go to remember. 

Middle School

A good friend from childhood notes that her son now has a locker in what was our middle school. The teachers are mostly all new but do we remember Mr X or Ms Y?

A few of us write back, and of course we are stunned. It's one thing to age, but another to have its progress benchmarked by little ones now big. 

Memories flood back, but they're not sharp at all, which is too bad. Springfield has a middle school (grades 5-8), though we tried to pretend it was like junior high school (6-9) on TVs and in the movies or in Millburn which is a much bigger town with great public schools. It's really just a year difference and there are probably books about which is better or worse for kids. Plus, our school system wasn't bad at all and a lot of us even had family working throughout it.

I don't flinch with bad memories or good.

Just spotty events like a 7th grade trip to Sturbridge, MA (probably a first night away for most) and how the school was right across the street from our Temple so going to Hebrew School on Tuesday and Thursdays was easy. The 8th grade show was the big performance. Our year, the theme was sections of a newspaper. Beth and I appropriately did the Real Estate Section (singing "In a Mountain Greenery" which I remember ruining) plus I also was Charlie Brown for the comics and sang a solo "Happiness," which was fun rather than humiliating.

Middle school was still an innocent time, perhaps the last period of it, before we went to high school combined with another town where friendship would be re-aligned and cliques broken and re-organized. Just like it had been when we combined from two sides of town for middle school. 

But our bodies now were maturing, puberty and spin the bottle and 7 minutes in heaven all over the place, our first lockers to lock, and some classes we actually chose. 

 

Like all periods of my life, I remember my extra-curricular activities much more than my schoolwork:

• I was student council president in 8th grade, and had terrific election posters, handmade and everything. 
  
• I was at least a writer for and maybe an editor of both the Gaudinews and the Gaudineer Guardian; Since there was no way there were two papers simultaneously, I suspect we rebranded the paper half-way through but I'll ask Suzanne who remembers everything
  
• In one of our first big choices academically, I chose French with the eclectic intellectuals rather than Spanish with the popular kids or Italian with kids who were Italian (Had I chosen Spanish, I suspect entire worlds would be different, especially a higher GPA in high school when it got really hard and I stopped listening.)
  

The more I write or talk about it, the more that floods back. There was a Girls' Gym and a Boys' Gym. Plus there's hindsight, like realizing that a few teachers were gay after all, and that there's no difference to care about b/w junior and middle school — if you didn't have both. 

two years with and without mach

i knew it was this time of year not because of the calendar but because we were in dumbo, right by his old apartment and i started to say, 'that's where' and bryan finished, 'i know.' there's a starbucks right there and he would be happy or not happy about it but probably happier if it were a peets.

i talk to people a lot about how we act is indelibly shaped by those who taught us. those who taught us wrong or right. mach taught me a lot and i know it was mutual (mostly because he told me).

even though i keep my little green bhudda with me (he gave it to me when i became a cd and left his group), and the silver balls, and thanks to emily, i have a lot of his books, he's not in my thoughts every single day but so very often, i like it and treasure it more because i know i'm doing it.

i like how it reminds me to value design for design's sake. when people ask me what i do, i know it's him i'm channelling when i intentionally say 'writer' instead of creative director or agency person (he always said designer - i did so on my taxes two years but it was silly so i changed it back).

i type in lowercase only because i'm thinking of him. he'd hate that.

if i go somewhere interesting, though, i think how'd he'd like that.
if i wrote something beautiful, i think he'd like that.
if i eat something weird and interesting (allergies permitting), i think how'd he'd like that and maybe even be impressed.
if i meet someone interseting. i think he'd like that person and should meet him too.
i like how mach sticks with me and with all of us.
i like how it's shaped me of the person i have become and what i could be if i thought of him more.

i'm writing a lot more now and i know he'd be very very very happy about that.

but it doesn't mean it doesn't mean it doesn't mean for one even one even one second that i don't miss him.

peace mach. buckets and buckets of peace.

The webs we weave

I leased my personal zucker.com email years ago and while I've migrated to gmail b/c of the better tools and experience, i kept my personal web site hosted by netidentity.com the entire time with few problems and pretty great service. 

Times change, and apparently they sold the web hosting to another company without a) telling people or b) me noticing. My site, matzucker.com disappeared into the void and I've had to jerry-rig a web of pieces from a blog here, a portfolio blog on typepad, a gallery web on .mac/mobileme (which apparently doesn't support Flash!), destination pages from old matzucker.com and more. 

The new site host gave me some basic FTP instructions so I could get part of my site's back end files up but it's only partly working and I've temporarily redirected matzucker.com to my mac .me page until i can re-architect the whole mat zucker dot com digital footprint.

Until then, it's several dixie cups and a string forming a, well, um, web.