Have Fun in a Library - It's Your Tax Money

Lots of tax money is continually being spent for our own benefit. Sometimes we take advantage of these benefits without even noticing, like when you drive on a public road. Sometimes our tax money saves our lives, like whenever a police officer or firefighter does a heroic deed. Other times, we have a choice to either use or ignore a benefit. This is the case with libraries.

Just think about it - where else are you allowed you relax in a quiet air-conditioned place, where you can read all sorts of magazines or surf the net at high speeds, where you often can take a nap, check out movies and CDs, read whatever you please, meet some pals for a board game or chess or cards, nab free bookmarks, amble around aimlessly, talk to nice librarians, find out about sundogs and how automatic transmissions work, entertain children, read newspapers from the 1920s - and all for free! Well, you maybe pay for the gasoline to get there, but it's better than splurging on unnecessary stuff at the mall or cinema.

A library is an awesome place that is underrated in today's society. It's really a nice place if you think about it. I'm sitting in one right now - to my left is a young lady typing something and doing something serious. Two chairs to the left of me there's some guy with headphones on and I can hear his music, but it's not too loud. This guy is having lots of fun on some page that looks like MySpace. I'm not staring at them but I just glanced quickly. People nowadays do come here just to use the computers and often to enjoy themselves on social networking sites or with online games.

On my way into the library today I heard some truck honking at me. I ignored it at first because I wasn't in his way or anything. But then as the truck got closer I saw this mustachioed guy waving at me and smiling. He was a librarian I've known for about eight years now - he's pretty cool and jokes with me. I haven't seen him for a long time though, because the cozy library where he used to work at was messed up by Katrina and now he works upstairs in the AV department.

If you find it hard to be entertained then just walk through the bookshelves of your library and pick out random books - and start reading anything - a line or two - on random pages in them. Sometimes people leave funny papers or bookmarks behind in their books - once I even found a dollar used as a bookmark. Well, don't count of finding any money of course, but at least there's a decent chance of finding a cool bookmark every now and then.

I once picked out a random book to read, and it led me to read many others by the same author. It was "The Rainmaker" by John Grisham. After reading this book I knew I had to try reading his other ones, which were easily available in the library too. And so it helped me to get into reading more, but I haven't read Grisham's last three or four books so I should pick that up again.

Our library has a pretty big audiovisual department too, which has lots of DVDs and VHS movies. If you can just avoid reading the new movie reviews and watching Hollywood news you can happily watch two or three year old Hollywood hits for free. Usually there's a waiting list on them though, but if you request them online our library will notify you by phone when they arrive. You get them for a week, and every day late you're charged a buck. That's a pretty good alternative to renting movies if you ask me. But I do understand the benefits of Netflix and I can see that many of you would way rather pay the price and get it now. Well, it's fine.

So I hope you visit your library soon, or at least feel less annoyed at paying taxes towards them. Perhaps this article at least changed your mind about whether someone who frequents the library is just a nerd or bookworm. They are one of the best public services in my opinion. Also, libraries are much more prevalent in the U.S.A than in other countries. In fact I just googled "public libraries cairo" and the first thing that pops up is the library system in Cairo, New York's. Who even heard of Cairo, New York? And after googling "public libraries moscow" the first hit is Moscow, Idaho. So the huge city of almost 10 million is surpassed by a city of about 20 thousand. Many public libraries are a sign of a well-educated nation and relatively strong economy. This is a really great benefit we should recognize - widely available knowledge. Libraries are costly - you have to hire people to run them, work there, fix the computers there, maintain them, and pay for shipping books, etc.

It would be a great humanitarian project to fund more libraries in developing nations. This would help improve the educational and hence economic situations there. So we should at least take advantage of our own libraries, and now you know some fun ways to do that.