The times when I’ve had the most to post on the various blogs I’ve had are times when nothing else required much mental energy. Right now school requires most of my mental energy and a lot of my time. Lately I feel like people I know who aren’t in school don’t understand this. Yes, you work, and yes, that’s very important, but your work doesn’t have homework and papers to write. Unless you own your own business or have a very stressful job, you can hopefully relax and let go once you’re off for the day. School doesn’t work like that. It’s not a big deal, but I wish people were more understanding.

However, I’m very excited about going to see mewithoutYou tonight, hence the title.

Fact: Magazines are expensive. Solution: Don’t pay for them.
No, I’m not encouraging thievery of magazines, or to give them up. Actually, we should all be reading more of them. The answer is the public library. Not nearly enough people take advantage of the magazine rack at the library—not nearly enough people take advantage of the library at all for that matter.

A while back I read a post on Russell Davies’ blog on “How to be Interesting,” one of the tips was to read a new magazine every week. At first this sounded a bit ridiculous to me, I mean magazines are expensive. The Life magazine I posted about, for example, $11.99, that’s a bit above average, but still magazines are not cheap. Being a full-time student with just a part-time job, I can’t refuse to spend $7 each week on a magazine, not matter how interesting it will make me. But then I got to thinking, every time I have some extra time between classes why not go to the library and read a magazine.

So I started doing just that. Last week I read an issue of Time which had a great article about the Dali Lama, and whether it made me more interesting or not, I definitely have knowledge now that I lacked before, and I found interest in something I would have passed over normally. Another good thing about reading magazines in the library is that they also have back issues so you can even catch-up on events or topics that you’ve missed.

While it’s good to read a variety of different magazines (sure, I may be female but I can still expand my personal bank of information and be entertained by Esquire), news magazines are about the best for this. They have current events, culture, politics, editorials, and entertainment all in one magazine. Sure the stories may be brief and not give a full picture of the topic, but there’s 20 more magazines right there to give you the other side, and maybe even a specialty magazine with an in-depth look.

Knowing a lot about a few things is always good, but also knowing at least a little about everything else is even better. I think that is how this should work, it makes you interesting by increasing your knowledge and widening the scope of topics you know about. Perhaps the best part of reading more magazines is that it increases your ability to have something to talk about with just about anyone, which means a lot less of those awkward, silent moments when you can’t find any topic you and the other party (or parties) are interested in talking about.