It’s a funny ritual to watch. Students trudging down the aisles of the USM bookstores, eyes slowly scanning the shelves until they find their required texts, then begrudgingly lugging them to the checkout.
If sticker shock could kill, college bookstores would be horrific places.
After three years in college, I find myself with the most ridiculous assortment of scholarly texts known to man. Books on Canadian studies share shelf space with lurid 17th century libertine literature, bulky art history tomes, and philosophy books that I gave up trying to understand long ago.
It will be a proud day later this semester when I can add “The Complete David Bowie” to this rag-tag collection, rounding out the ridiculous, unfocused nature of my chosen liberal arts education.
It was during one of my bi-annual pilgrimages to the bookstore that I started to get frustrated with the whole system. It seems that for years I’d been parting with my hard-earned cash for a pile of books, which while useful for test prep, rarely got more than a few hours of frantic use in the days and hours before my finals. In the interest of graduating on time, and not drawing the ire of our school fine English department, I will say that I do not apply the same flippant, wallet-weary attitude to my upper-level English courses.
Wandering through the aisle, the prices were already adding up in my head, and in a move bound to distract, I started thinking about everything else I could be spending my money on.
I spotted one of my assigned philosophy books and couldn’t help but think, for $52, I could get my poor, long-suffering bicycle fixed.
In fact, adding up the total cost of one classes worth of books alone, I could have easily afforded an iPod Touch, or Xbox 360, both of which, I had to convince myself, would not be more rewarding or valuable than my education.
Just when I was starting to come to terms with the inevitability of these purchases, an idea floated into my head that makes me seriously doubt weather my mind has any regard for my GPA.
With just over a $100 left in book money, I started thinking homebrew.
I tried to fight this urge, subvert the mental image of a tall, golden pint glass filled with my own concoction of hoppy goodness. Unfortunately, in a problem dating back to the dawn of alcoholic spirits, my poor 21-year-old mind was always going to side with the beer.
What followed might have just looked, to the average observer, like a confused student overwhelmed by the textbook buying process in the middle of the bookstore. In reality it was one simple question. Sure books have changed lives, started violent protests, converted whole cultures and explored every nuance of the human condition – but has a book ever got anyone drunk?
Well, maybe it’s about a little more than that. A big fan of the do-it-yourself lifestyle, the idea of creating a delicious beer that was all my own intrigued me just as much as any of the classes I had signed up for months ago.
Justifying the whole exercise as an educational experience made it easier. It’s during these four years in higher education that we are encouraged to develop a passion, an interest, and a goal, and I was hardly going to treat this educational opportunity any different.
“Homebrew 101” is now in session. If my decision to shirk books for brew doesn’t pan out, I will name my first concoction after those left-behind books, so be on the lookout for Dodge’s Philosophy Pale Ale.
Thanks for reading,
Matt Dodge