This is a photo I took at a Shinedown concert in Fargo, ND.

I love going to concerts, but I rarely have a valid excuse to go to one. If you remember from my budgeting column, I tend to be rather cheap. This means I can’t really go to a concert by myself on a whim.

Unfortunately, it can also be difficult to convince other people whose musical tastes are wildly different from mine to go with me. The Shinedown and Three Days Grace concert was one of the few occasions where my taste in music and my friends’ taste in music overlapped. I don’t regret attending this one at all. Shinedown did a cover of Limp Bizkit’s ‘Break Stuff.”  It was in a word, truly amazing.

Maybe the reason I don’t go to as many concerts might not have as much to do with me being cheap, but with my fear of being judged for going to a Taylor Swift concert or a Justin Timberlake concert by myself.

As a guy, you can get away with saying that you are a fan of Taylor Swift, but when you start buying all her CD’s, going to her concerts, trying to get her to sign a T-shirt and then framing that T-shirt, and then attaching a photo of Taylor Swift to the top of that the shirt and telling all your friends that you can’t go out tonight because you are staying in with Taylor, then suddenly you’re the weird one.

Not that I’d ever do any of that, of course. Except for maybe that part about buying all her CD’s. And that part about going to her concerts. And the part about trying to get her to sign a T-shirt, and the part about-

I may have said too much.