Tonight a friend working on his masters was complaining about the cost of books and how much more significant it seems when it is coming out of his personal budget and not his parent's checking account. Everybody then reminisced on the end of semester ritual where you would sell books back to the university and how those monies never seemed to make it back into ma and pa's checking account. One girl sitting quietly to the side said in an almost whisper how she would buy books for classes she wasn't even taking so she could get extra money back at the end of the semester. The room fell silent and then erupted in overwhelming acceptance and disbelief that no one else had thought of that. I love the simple variations of life and the people who invent them.