So Happy Together

My life had little meaning before I moved into a co-operative. Co-ops, as they are known and despised by the "cleaner" parts of campus, are so named because they assemble a group of diverse individuals who must work together, providing sustenance and love. We work five hours a week, but it is basically the kind of work a mother expends on behalf of her favorite child. There's never an occasion to be bored once you start living with 65 slightly deranged and brilliant people, who crowd every nook and cranny of the house spewing philosophy, sexploits and politics.

Apartment life, though desirable in respect to privacy, hygiene, and those moments when you've gotten lucky at a bar and need a quiet bedroom, really doesn't compare to the perpetual stimulation of a co-op. Before moving into my glorious Ridge Street house, my living arrangements had been a funky 2-bedroom South Berkeley/Oakland bachelor pad in the style and lighting of the Wonder Years, and then a cramped 1-bedroom street-level multiplex unit, with the only redeeming feature being its proximity to campus. It was even closer to homeless women who kept their beauty products behind a bush beneath my window sill.

I remember waking up (my pillow was next the window), opening my eyes to the sight of nappy hair and a crooked smile. I also remember the faux-hoops contest these gals would play, throwing their tampon boxes at my window while I was writing a paper, trying to land their stuff behind the bush. The only factors making Southside delinquency bearable were my more-than-perfect roommates.

I moved into a University Students Cooperative Association co-op almost by accident and very late in life-halfway through junior year. My previous experiences with the institution were not very sweet: stepping barefoot onto chicken breasts while trying to find a bathroom, watching two guys high on nitrous caking a television in mashed potatoes during a Bush speech, hesitantly lowering myself into a strictly naked hot-tub with others watching, and fighting off a handicapped person for the last enchilada at dinner. But after a week of living the actual lifestyle, I acquired a new sense of community, tear, and belonging, tear.

As an only child with nobody to share my parents' love and wealth, I could not conceive of any personal dynamics beyond the three-unit family. Over the course of a semester, in which I underwent personal upheaval and strenuous academics, I always returned to my co-op as one would a hearth, an amniotic environment that restored well-being and faith in other people.

A makeshift therapist could always be found among the transients dwelling about, willing to absorb my problems and distill them in an evacuative witch-water. I slowly became dependent on the co-op as a surrogate motherly substance, kind of like the ocean of planet Solaris, which bends and shifts to accommodate personal needs. When I had to leave for an internship last summer, I felt the first pangs of sadness dedicated to someone other than my immediate family. Imagine having to say adieu to 20 people you love all at once, never to see them again; it's more poignant than "America's Top Model."

In delirious celebration and invention, we unraveled a black tarp meant for garden use, broke out an old mattress plus a garden hose and constructed an urban Slip 'n' Slide on the concrete sidewalk. The farewell fun was amplified because Ridge Street has an exciting slope.

Sure we got scraped up and bloody, some of us botched our run-ups to the mattress and ended up in the gutter, but all of it was drowned out by sun and glee. I proudly showed my parents a scar stretching from nipple to pelvis that I earned from a nail that happened to be under the tarp. That day was a figment of paradise and immortalized college the way I had looked forward to in high school.

You may make fun of our yellowing "I (heart) my co-op" buttons in lecture, but it's probably because you don't come from a loving household. You may dismiss us as substance-abusing, armpit-neglecting slackers, but our average GPA is probably higher than yours. All that's really left for you to do, after dismissing all reservations, is move in and embrace Co-Op as your personal lord and savior.

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