Years ago when I was a teenager still trying to… make sense of the world, I came across this guy selling kebab (I think) down the street near my school. At this point, I already understood my fascination towards printed things, newspapers to be precise, so young me was on a lookout almost every day for new materials to “use”.

So, the kebab guy, he always wrapped his products with a piece of paper after wrapping it with those food-grade wrappers, maybe to help it absorb the excess oil if I were to guess. Usually he took the paper off of random books. Most of the time, the books weren’t that interesting, I’m sure he pretty much used anything he could get his hands on. I was quite observant back then, mostly because the sound of paper tearing was a trigger for me, so I used to watch him during recess or when I was on the line waiting for my turn to buy.

I had seen him using various kind of books. Most of the time he used thick textbooks, like one of those monochrome photocopied books that nobody cared at all. There were times when he used something different or fancier. I had seen him use a colourful english book (which was quite interesting because it had colour, and as a kid, I like colourful things), dictionaries, yellow pages, and once a fancy English language book which was quite rare, as you had to be enrolled in the “advanced english class” to get one of these. Those english book had glossy papers and were super well made, it was quite a treat seeing him tear out the pages like nothing while dozens of students were breaking their backs trying to pass the entrance exam just to get into that advanced class and receive the book. I had also seen him use textbooks that was still new (surplus stock, probably?). They were still wrapped in plastic. He unwrapped them and without immediately tore off pages from the still fresh and unused book. For some reason, seeing perfectly good book being used not for its intended purpose excited me.

Oh, one time he somehow got his hands on one of those spiral bound notebooks. It was pink, and obviously owned by a girl judging from the handwriting in it. I was wondering how he got that in the first place. It was quite… sad, knowing that someone probably loved it and had written in it a lot only for countless pages of her writing to be completely disregarded and the paper used to absorb oil and clean pans.

I had also had heard one of my friend saying that one time he used a yearbook. I had a hard time believing it because how rare yearbook was (albeit sometimes you could find one just lying around or sent off from the library) and yearbooks weren’t exactly good at absorbing anything.

The way he would do it was, well, nothing fancy. He would open the book, tear out the pages, and use them as necessary, whether for wrapping or cleaning. When he ran out of pages, he’d tear off some more. If the book ran out of paper, he’d toss the empty cover and grabbed a new book to do it all over again.

I don’t know why, but it excited me. Maybe it was the sounds, maybe it was the utter lack of attention on what was on the page. This was most apparent for me with that english book, I recall one of the page featured a photo that I liked (basically the picture of a girl that I thought was cute along with great pastel colours), and he simply tore it off the spine and used it to clean his oily stove, not even batting an eye. Or maybe that time when he used someone’s notebook I mentioned above, I’m sure it had taken whoever owned it a long time to write that amount of text with such clean handwriting and poof, used to absorb oil and discarded.

One time I decided to try it myself. I was given a task to clean my classroom’s windows. Instead of using a piece of rag like any sane man would, I got myself a random school book that nobody cared (had been stuck behind the locker for who knows for long) and began doing just that. I ripped out the pages and used it to clean the windows. I ended up busy tearing out pages instead of actually cleaning them, but since that day, I found tearing / destroying good-looking or rare sheets of papers to be rather exciting.

Fast forward to today, and I decided to do a throwback and do exactly this. I had chosen a magazine that I’d do this with (basically a woman’s magazine, not household name because I don’t want to use the good ones) and I’d tear the pages out to use them, before tossing them away. Also currently mixing this with newspapers, albeit it’s not that exciting as newspapers are disposable by design. The rule is simple, I tear off the magazine pages sequentially and should use only 5-7 pages each time. I can’t choose the pages. Some days I got lucky and find a good picture to do business with, along with a couple of untintersting articles / wall of text to clean up the mess (or to make it thicker so they don’t get destroyed too easily). Other days I only get nothing but text so I’d have to make do without any good pictures to go off with. Once I finally reached the “fashion” section and every page I tore was all full page pictures and they were all great, I lamented the fact how I could’ve stretched them for several uses but I’d have to use all of them, including using them to clean up. As of now, the magazine still have about half of its total pages left.

I find this quite fun. It’s like a roulette as I won’t know what sort of pictures (or the lack of) I’ll get from the magazine, and the sound of tearing and using the pages to clean up messy stuff is just the icing on the cake. I wonder if anyone here also does something similar to this.