I have a bad rep here for writing overly long posts, so I’ll try to keep this one shorter than usual. And put in a few pictures!

My neighbour was moving out, and as I know them rather well, when they asked me to help them pack things last weekend, I immediately agreed to help them. Others from around the block also came to help.

Just being good neighbours and all.

They had a lot of fragile and delicate things to pack. We’re talking cups, plates, china, saucers, ceramic and glass stuff. Our job was to pack these safely in boxes. Easy enough, I thought.

We had to wrap those stuff first, along with packing some padding into the box so they wouldn’t break during transport. Here’s the kicker, we were given some materials to do just that. And the materials were?

Old magazines, along with a couple of books.

They had dozens of them, and they were like “Here, you can use these, use as much as you need, don’t worry, we don’t need them anymore”. There were several stacks of them, enough to rival the local library here…

So, we’d tear the pages out of those magazines, and use them to wrap the items. We’d also tear out some pages, crumple them, and stuff them in the box as packing paper. Quite clever actually. I would be lying if I weren’t “excited” for almost the entire day, I’m not one to tear out books or magazines, but I’ve been watching those “tearing magazines ASMR” youtube videos to like… enhance my experience for some time, so… I did feel things. It wasn’t that easy to keep a straight face around others.

Now let’s get the important stuff out of the way first : most of the magazines were NOT interesting. Not stuff you’d see here. Most of them were :

• Architectural magazines
• Interior design magazines
• Gardening magazines
• Cooking magazines (they exist!)
• Travel magazines
• Brochures
• Old textbooks and notebooks
• Some posters

So if you were expecting that day to be me swimming in magazine haven… unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

The architectural magazines were actually larger than the average magazines, and the paper were delightfully thick. Same goes for the interior design ones. They also had incredible print quality. Of course, they were filled with… pictures of homes and buildings that weren’t interesting to me.

The gardening, cooking, and travel magazines were… quite generic, I have to say. There were also old textbooks that I was sure once used by their daughter. Again, not interesting at all, they were like schoolbooks.

The posters were like… posters of artists that I had no idea about, I’m sure they were probably collectibles to fans of them, but they were used as if they were scrap paper…

Anyway, I spent that day helping them pack stuff. You know how it goes. I’d pick a magazine, tear the pages out (which made my heart skip a bit every time), crumple some of the pages and stuff them in those boxes, then use some to wrap the items.

At first, I tried my best to only choose the least interesting magazines for the tearing (of course I did). Then I made sure to only tear out the least interesting pages, like pages with just text or uninteresting ads. And I took special care to tear the pages carefully and cleanly.

This didn’t go well though as I worked noticeably slower than others who just tear out random pages and quickly stuff them in without any care on what were on them. I was holding everyone back. So, as the day went on, I cared less and less about the magazines, and eventually, I teared them out indiscriminately anyway.

The sounds of paper tearing was a bit painful at first, but I guess I was desensitised enough eventually to just ignore them.

Now you know this was coming, as I worked on the packing I kept looking for any interesting magazines that I could “save” from the ripping. I couldn’t make it too obvious though, the room was kind of small..

When others were taking smoke / coffee break, I told them that they could go on without me, saying that “I’m in the flow right now, can’t stop,” or “I’ll be with you in a moment” or some kind of random excuses. I ended up not taking a break at all for the entire day! After all, when I was alone in that room it was my chance to look for good magazines among those stacks with no one looking. It wasn’t easy though due to two reasons :

1. Most of the magazines already had their cover removed. They figured out early on that the thicker paper of the covers were a better fit to wrap the fragile items, while the pages inside were used as packing paper. So they kind of “harvested” most of the covers first, leaving just coverless pages.
2. They tear out magazines without care. Often they’d pick a fresh magazine, tear the pages randomly, and before all the pages were used up, they’d pick another new one to tear out. Or sometimes they’d just stuff the entire magazine into a box for items that needed more protection. Can’t blame them of course, I’m the odd one out for caring so much about magazines after all. But I did find a couple of magazines that “might” be interesting, but they already had all the pages worth keeping already torn out. The room was full of half torn magazines.

When it was all over and they were carrying the box outside, I told them that I’d stay behind to do clean up. The room was a mess, loose magazines pages everywhere along with ruined magazine carcasses. It was my last chance to find interesting magazines, but it wasn’t easy. I ended up… throwing the towel and simply swept all those pages into the trash. We collectively burned through like… dozens of magazines, thousands of pages.

THAT BEING SAID, thanks to my lifetime experience of spotting magazines, I managed to bring home a couple of interesting ones! I have to say, they’re not in the greatest of condition. Most of them already have their cover removed, or multiple pages missing. I can only pack in so much in my backpack, so here’s a compilation of pics for your viewing pleasure (heh).

Here’s a couple of pics. They’re mostly from 2009-2014. Only the most interesting parts of course. Again, many of them are already in sorry conditions with the majority of the pages already torn out. Those were the ones I could reasonably salvage.

This one magazine has a special feature of Emilia Clarke around the centerfold, but this page is the only one left of the entire feature. I assume because centerfolds are a bit easier to tear out, they were the first one to be ripped out.

It’s unfortunate…. I wonder how the other parts of the special feature looked like….

Some of these ones are water-damaged, but they have nice closeups for those who are a fan of them.

The last one is my favourite… And, sorry to say this, but I already used it so I don’t have it with me anymore. When I first saw it I was like “I can’t wait to use that one!” I was already itching to use it since I first took it home. I really like the picture. So wholesome! And I have a soft spot for wholesome things…

It’s good that those magazines found a loving home, in more ways than one of course (heh).

There’s still some more! In fact, those weren’t even the best ones! I can post a part 2 if any of you are interested. Of course, the “story” part is already over, so if there was a part 2 it would be just pictures.

What do you think of those pics? I’d like to know what you think…