Every Friday since I graduated from college six years ago, my mother sends me a FedEx package, using her work discount, of magazines.

In one week, she might send GQ, Parent, People Magazine and Los Angeles Magazine. The next, she might send Mad Magazine, More Magazine and Town and Country.

I’m not a mother, a man, an Angeleno or a woman over 40 as some of these magazines might suggest. Yet my mom sees something in each of these issues she thinks I might like, and her weekly selection has become a means of communication just for the two of us.

I can see what she’s shocked by (Wendy Deng and Tony Blair!) what she’s moved by (transgender rights in America) and what she thinks of me (“You can draw better than this,” she wrote on a New Yorker cover by Roz Chast).

Sometimes she sends me magazines just to share an observation.

“Where is our hotel here?” she wrote on a TIME magazine issue with an aerial view of lower Manhattan on its cover.

She’s referring to the time we stayed at a hotel near the 9/11 Memorial last December. I scanned the photo for a second and yes, just as she said, there it was.

Her sharing magazines with me is nothing new. For as long as I could remember, she brought magazines home from her job at the airport. Passengers would leave them at the terminal before boarding the plane, and she would pick up her favorites to bring home. She prized export editions (like Vogue Italia) and magazines in unusual sizes (like ArtForum) — but above all else, they had to be recent.

I don’t think my mom realized at the time how much my life would be affected by those magazines.

As a kid, I’d hunt pretty pictures of flowers and cakes, cut them from the pages, and collect them like stickers. Then I started making my own magazines.

My first one, which I made in seventh grade, was called The Monthly Mal. I modeled it after Seventeen. It had quizzes, advice columns and even Delia*s and Tommy Hilfiger ads.

As a teenager, I started to actually read the articles. Every magazine, from Readers Digest to PAPER, was a window into the world far beyond American suburbia, but also to a different point of view.

Those realizations inspired me in high school to start a real magazine of my own. It was called Sever and it was about music and culture. I learned QuarkXPress from the journalism club and laid everything out, then printed them using the photo copier at my uncle’s clinic. I asked my mom to drive me downtown to distribute them, for free of course, at little bookshops and cafes.

Then I went to journalism school. Then I graduated, tried to move to New York, failed, and finally found a job as an editor.

Somewhere during my early 20s, I started another magazine, The Runcible Spoon, about food and fantasy. It featured made-up recipes, strange food sculptures from Brooklyn artists and a cut-and-paste layout using magazine scraps. People loved it.

Eventually, I sold the Runcible at some of the same bookshops I gave Sever away for free in high school. And it was featured in the very magazines I tried to get a job after college: Saveur, Oprah, The New York Times Style Magazine.

People ask me why I still bother with magazines, making them and reading them, in the digital age.

To me, it’s not about nostalgia or being anti. They’re art installations. The information can only be consumed in the way that is presented right before you. If you want more, you can’t Wikipedia it. You have to reread the text, read between the lines, scrunch your face up to the thumbnail-size photo from the article and think about why.

They’re also just fun to read.

I’ve already zoomed through the Better Homes and Garden and Fast Company that my mom sent in her package last week. I’ve put them in a neat pile in the corner of my living room, to be cut up and used in future zine projects.

I doubt I will ever see the answers to the New York magazine crossword puzzle I attempted, or get to enjoy another Glamour UK anytime soon (what a treat!).

But you never know what she might send this week. It’s always a surprise.