Going about your business, you glance at your phone and much to your dismay, you see a troubling email notification. Popped up as you’re about to like your friend’s cliché Instagram picture of them in a bathing suit at a beach, on a boat, or at a lake. It is Aug. 8, and whether you’ve been looking forward to getting back to school since the fourth of July, or you’d like nothing more than to never return to school again, you hate to see this email. It’s the same email every year, with the same subject line: “It’s time to talk about textbooks.”
You don’t want to think about buying your textbooks, and you sure as hell don’t want to buy the 17 grossly overpriced textbooks. It’s only Aug. 8, you tell yourself. You don’t need to buy your textbooks for school yet. Classes don’t start for a month. So, you ignore this first email imploring you to contemplate textbooks that range from too expensive to WAY TOO DAMN EXPENSIVE. You return to your Instagram and your bathing suit and your sunburned skin. Your incoming calculus class has entered your subconscious but with determined and diligent effort, you force this pesky thought of class out of your head.
As you browse your Instagram feed on Aug. 15, the anxiety sets in. This time more forcefully than before. Picture after picture of your friends sadly lamenting the grotesque end of summer. Sure, a few of the Instagram pictures show how the person just, “Can’t wait to be back with my besties,” but most continue to post about already missing summer. Then, as if the Skid Shop knows exactly how you feel at this critical juncture, another email notification pops up. You reluctantly begin reading the email with the subject line, “TEXTBOOKS, YOU NEED THEM!” You now stop kidding yourself- you are absolutely petrified, devastated, outraged, all at the same time because you know you may actually need to buy those 17 grossly overpriced textbooks, which despite being described as “lightly used,” will show up at the Skid Shop looking as if the previous owner had kept them in a war zone for five years before letting their Siberian Huskies use them as chew toys.
As if this onslaught hadn’t been enough for your already battered psyche, your mother comes home from work this day and harangues and harasses you about how you could be so foolish as to have not ordered your textbooks long ago, before going to that Fourth of July party that seems so distant now, you hardly remember it.
So you order those God-forsaken textbooks and force it all out of your mind. Time passes, and you finally arrive on campus, and are moved into your dark, gloomy, airless dorm room. The window is probably broken in some way, though there’s so little light in the room, you choose only to be impressed that you even noticed. It is Sept. 7, the day before classes begin and you realize you don’t have those textbooks. Upon arrival at the Skid Shop you see the industrial sized box that possesses all your books, which may be in fragments but are in “good to great condition” according to the description. As your spine and bones shatter, one after another, from the sheer weight of the box of books as you walk back to your dorm, there is only one thought that pervades your mind of mush.
At least I got these books from the Skid Shop.