Now that we live in a co-op, we can't have nice things
February 2020
I want to relate a conversation that I overheard today. It went like this: “Bro did you pee on the toilet seat again?” “Nah bro don’t worry about it I peed in the shower.”
I want to pee in the shower just as much as the next person, but I don’t, because until I own my own house (and even then) I would never want to subject somebody else to that, even if they were my siblings. I think it takes a certain type to be able to admit to this practice, let alone bear it as a defense against other discourteous bathroom habits, and I don’t want to say that this type exists in the co-ops more than it does other places, but maybe it does.
For the uninitiated, the Berkeley Student Cooperative system was founded during the Great Depression as a way of providing affordable housing to students, especially students vulnerable to housing and work discrimination. Rent is supposed to be lower (and while technically it is below market rate, it’s definitely not the cheapest place I’ve lived) because you work in your house to keep things clean and make food for your fellow co-opers. The BSC is one of the largest and oldest cooperative systems in the US, so if you’re into historical stuff like I am, look it up. Naturally, it attracts a lot of very smart people who are also interested in living like hippies, because that is much of the legacy of the BSC.
In practice, living in a co-op can feel more or less like living in a frat, and depending on your house (@Casa Zimbabwe) the main draw is often uninhibited partying. That is not the case with my house, though. I live in Cloyne, formerly Cloyne Court Hotel, a building on the National Historic Building Registrar built around 1903 as a luxury hotel. I think about this sometimes as I hang my towel from a rusty nail in my closet. Cloyne has a substance-free “academic” theme, which means that people are very considerate when it comes to observing silent hours at 10 pm. It’s a quiet place to live, as much as living with 140 people can be quiet.
I was assigned the job of “storage closet organize/inventory” as my cooperative workshift, which I was vying for. It basically entails filling up bottles of Windex once a week, restocking paper towels, and making sure that nobody is storing a support animal in one of the four supply closets. I like it because I’m not tied to working at any particular time, which is important to me right now since I’m trying to balance 24 units and studying for my GRE. I get two hours of workshift for it but it usually doesn’t take more than 45 minutes.
My other job is “Garden Crewmember #5”, which is also flexible. I used to make $0.75 a week pulling weeds for two hours every Saturday morning in Seattle rain as a kid, so I guess you could say I’ve been training for this my entire life. I like weeding though--I like turning on an episode of 99% Invisible and sorting the lupine and nasturtiums from the clover. Some parts of the garden are overrun with mimosa pudica, which I think is a very cute plant, and so I let it be. Though the garden has a bit of an overgrown feel, you can also tell that decades of students have planted and tended to the herbs and fruit trees. Some people working in the garden have encyclopedic knowledge of the herbs and flowers that are growing, and I’ve always made it a point to be friends with people like that.
One of the perks of the cooperative system is that somebody makes you dinner every night, presumably somebody whose job it isn’t to work in the garden. I did everything I could to avoid being assigned a cooking workshift, and I’m happy to report that I succeeded. Depending on the day of the week and who is in charge, dinner can be quite good, as some of the people who live here are exceptional cooks. Dinner’s always made from scratch and there's an impressive variety in order to accommodate everybody’s dietary needs. Generally I can count on there being good flavors--especially impressive considering how many people there are to feed in Cloyne--and lots of healthy options. One thing you can’t count on though is there being enough dishes, and sometimes if you don’t get there on time before you know it you find yourself eating cereal with a fork, or chicken with a spoon off of a tupperware lid.
75% of the time the food is good, but sometimes you get people cooking who have no idea what they’re doing and they’ll serve spaghetti with onions. Other times the BSC will give Cloyne a giant box of turnips as one of the vegetables for the day (I think they also get their produce through a co-op and just have to take what they can get) and no matter how good a cook you are, there’s not much you can do about that.
People take being a part of BSC pretty seriously. “That’s not very cooperative of you,” someone who called herself Possum accused someone else, in response to them probably doing something like flipping over the foosball table as a shelter in their Nerf battle. I’ve heard people using “not very cooperative” as a burn before, and I can never tell the irony with which it is deployed. I want to tell the person who’s supposed to be cleaning my bathroom that they’re not being very cooperative, because our soap dispenser is broken and until it’s fixed we’re supposed to be using what looks like a block of yellow and gray lard, and touching that is where I draw the line.
The first two weeks were kind of chaotic since nobody was assigned permanent shifts and stuff just wasn’t getting done. Piles of leaves somehow accumulated in the kitchen. Somebody temporarily in charge of Tuesday dinners decided that spaghetti with onions was a good idea. Chairs appeared in places that they shouldn’t have appeared in. I heard rumors that a sauna I wasn’t aware of was somehow leaking.
When I was assigned my room, the previous tennents hadn’t moved out yet despite it being well-advertised that then was move-in day. It was miserable watching them scramble to pull their things together while I waited with my stuff in the hall. They’d produced a prolific amount of trash despite only being there for a week. The most notable items that they left behind were a chicken bone (I’d earlier helped them toss some of their leftover fried chicken) and 23 q-tips.
I pretended that the floor was lava that night and might have cried myself to sleep. I'd somehow forgotten my comforter so I slept under a towel and a blanket that wasn't big enough, trying to avoid a wet spot that smelled like Clorox. The next day my roommate, Shannon (who is one of the best parts about living in Cloyne), and I decided to vacuum, but the regular vacuums were broken and so we had to use an industrial one from the woodshop that ended up vacuuming parts of the carpet right off the ground.
Things are better now--stuff is being cleaned and better people are in charge of cooking. My mom brought me my comforter so that I didn’t need to sleep under a rug. We got some new, normal vacuums and put back all the carpet. It feels about as clean as a summer camp lodge does, with well-intentioned but sometimes less scrupulous people in charge of keeping things tidy; messy but organized where it counts. It’s liveable but temporary-feeling. And if you’re like me and traffic in absurdity, there’s plenty to write about.
But, going to Berkeley, I’ve always taken a certain amount of pride in the scruffiness of my environment. It’s quite a contrast to make the six-minute walk from Cloyne to the Haas School of Business, which is the least-scruffy part of campus. There is always space to study there, even if you’re the kind of person who likes studying for UGBA 103 while running on a treadmill. This person isn’t me in either respect, but I’ve seen them in the Haas-exclusive gym-library. Anyways, I like being able to escape from one environment to the other.
Earlier I brought up the accusation of being “cooperative” as a burn, but people take being a part of BSC very seriously and I think that’s cool. There’s definitely a sense of shared responsibility and democracy that I haven’t felt anywhere else that I’ve lived in Berkeley. It’s the most diverse group of people I’ve ever been a part of, and I think that it means something that so many types of people feel welcome here. People attend non-mandatory council meetings because they care about making it a better place. I also think back to that David Sedaris quote about how when you're in your 20s you can live in an actual dump and it wouldn't matter since you're the most beautiful you're ever gonna get and your joints are all still rubbery.
As for my room, we vacuum once a week and it’s nice. My plants made it and so did all my art. The space is big and it feels like a dorm and it fills with the sun in the mornings. It’s not the worst. Come visit sometime.
P.s. I got my notary commission and am all set to go if anybody needs anything notarized!!! Standard rate is $15 a signature, but for you my friends I will do it for $12.
