This weekend I started cleaning the apartment. Not just straightening it up, wiping down the counters, mopping the floors, but really getting into some of the areas that, while ostensibly "clean," really needed to be reorganized or sorted out. Today one of those areas was my stack of old Newsweeks. It had been over a year since the last time I cleaned them out, so what I had on the shelf encompassed pretty much the entire election cycle and everything that happened in that period. There were fawning covers on Edwards and Romney that looked pretty ridiculous in hindsight. There were Iraq related covers, economy related covers, environment and health care related covers. Way down at the bottom of the pile was an issue from well over a year ago fretting over the violence in Gaza and the "hopes for a solution," which was probably the most depressing of the bunch.

Half of them went into the recycling today. It was too much for me to carry all at once, and I felt guilty making the guy who empties the recycling in our building have to do so, so I'll put the rest in tomorrow evening. To get all English major metaphorical about it, today felt like the right time to send the past out the door and prepare to tackle the new issues coming my way.