Don't Judge

My wife and I wind up with a gift subscription to Reader's Digest every Christmas. It tags along with another year of Inside the Auburn Tigers (which contains 12 weekly updates during football season).

I understand. RD isn't hip and/or with-it. It's pretty much only read in waiting rooms or some other time when you have unaccounted for minutes. The advertisements seem to be for people much older than me--I'm not even sure what osteoporosis is and I'm pretty sure I'm a couple of decades away from a "walk-in bathtub." But for some reason, I like the magazine.

I like the "ways to enrich your word power" each month. I dominate, too. I haven't finished below 15 in years...but multiple choice helps. I like "humor in uniform" and "all in a day's work," too. Although they've recently renamed those to try to be more hip & with-it. Now they're titled, "word power," "off base" and "@work." My advice: Be who you are, RD. No need to mess with the titles. That's what we're calling them, anyway.

But my favorite section is "Quotes." (What used to be "Quotable Quotes.")

And this month, they were all on the them of "America." Here's some I liked:

"America is not just a country. It's an idea."--Bono

"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."--Jacques Barzan

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."--John Updike

The good ol' U.S. of A. getting props in RD?. Who knew?! :)

I mean, c'mon. It's easy to give props to my subscription to Rolling Stone. You can carry that around with a certain degree of confidence (even if it's moved from anti-establishment to establishment-trying-to-act-anti-establishment). There's a bunch of magazines you can do that with.

But for me, no longer will I be a closet reader of Reader's Digest.

It feels like the weight of the world is off my shoulders.

*gives out a "cleansing breath," and encourages any and all Diner patrons to proudly browse RD whenever and wherever they have the opportunity*