Color Me Classless

I have a love affair with beer.

It's a careful love affair as I am a bit of a calorie counter and in those regards, beer is nobody's friend.  However, I love the variety of flavors and the endless potential for finding just the right balance.  I am a big fan of micro breweries and my husband and I have what some may call a "nano brewery" which is simply home brewing as frequently as possible and in increasing batch sizes.

Beer is a timeless beverage for bringing people together.  Yes, it can certainly bring out the ugly side in some when consumed in copious amounts, but when beer is cherished and not abused, it is a wonderful thing.

I have heard it said that beer is a classless beverage.  The urban professionals have their martinis and cosmopolitans while the rural wealthy collect pricey bottles of wine, but the rest of middle to lower America drinks beer.  Well, color me classless.  In fact, I prefer it.

When I used to live in the ever charismatic city of New Bedford, everyone always regarded my humble apartment as a "stepping stone" to the next stage in life.  As in, "oh, you live there now, but it's just temporary".  Essentially, it was the pervasive underlying suggestion that I shouldn't want to stay living in New Bedford.

I didn't stay in NB, but for many various reasons that had nothing to do with the urban climate or the people living there.  We moved to the country where everything is beautiful, the ocean is a stones throw away, and the air feels fresher.  However, the "simple country folk"/ multimillionaires here are a bit... snobby shall we say?

In NB there was always something going on.  If you weren't stuck up people were always open to talk to you about their lives or tell you some crazy, cool story.  This made living in NB an adventure and mind opening experience.  However, in an area where people are upper class, I've found a lack of minds that are open to even polite conversation.  Despite the incredibly low crime rate of where I live, there is still far more distrust in your neighbors here than there was in NB.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I'll stick to beer.  If classlessness is what is required to have an open mind and make a connection with our fellow human beings out there, than I think we all need to be a bit more classless.