This letter is in response to Jonathan Morin’s article (“Beer Columnist, Don’t Write About Beer,” Daily Nexus, May 24). While Mr. Morin clearly states that he is fed up with Mr. Swaby’s weekly column, I find it my duty… no, my honor, to call attention to the great level of satisfaction and enjoyment that this column brings to my fellow students and me a measly four times a month. If anyone out there has the horrible luck to have class on Friday, during Spring Quarter, you know that the only thing that will ever get you through those monotone lectures and intense hangovers – from that awesome UCSB Thursday night – is the Daily Nexus’ Hot Line and, new this year, Sean Swaby’s column, 40 Oz. to Freedom.

As a graduating senior with a double major in law & society and sociology, I know the amount of stress this place can load on a student’s shoulders. Late nights at the RBR and crowded couches at Nicoletti’s during midterms definitely take their toll on the average student. Contrary to your article, Jon, some students choose to drink. To enjoy themselves, relieve stress or cry away some sorrows. Not all. The assumption that “we all drink” that you have chosen to cast upon college students at UCSB is highly hypocritical considering your outlandish comment where you assert that Mr. Swaby is “the kind of person who gives UCSB its name as being strictly a party school and nothing else.”

In addition to being a hypocrite, you appear to be misconstruing his articles as some sort of soapbox to discuss his past weekends and the amount of alcohol he was able to pour down his throat. Rather, Mr. Swaby’s articles take a much deeper look at how inebriation and fun can coexist. Strange concept. When I read your article, all I could picture was you sitting at your computer on Thefacebook clutching a bottle of cheap wine and crying yourself to sleep because you never shotgunned a beer or floated in a raft drinking a 30-pack of Bud yourself, let alone had the skill and precision to play a rousing game of beer pong.

To insist that the content of Mr. Swaby’s column need not “be discussed in excess” goes hand in hand with saying that the content of the Wednesday Hump, a UCSB tradition, should also be outlawed. I mean, according to your logic, sex falls in the same category as alcohol and one should assume that these sorts of things are “commonplace in any college atmosphere,” which bolsters Mr. Morin’s hypocrisy and further displays the party school image of UCSB.

With the amount of cracking down that has taken place everywhere from Isla Vista to Butterfly Beach in Montecito, it is reassuring to see that there still remain those few folks who can get in a good game of beer pong, chug a forty, and still be saddened when we see a blue-balled beer left out after a night of debauchery that we, as college students, have earned the right to enjoy.

Rick Haro is a senior sociology and law & society double major.