By the time I was 20 years old, I felt I already paid my dues.
I spent the summer after high school and the summer after my freshman year working at a suburban Detroit newspaper, cranking out stories about various eccentricities, oddities, lawsuits and, of course, bloodshed.
I had a publishing internship the summer following my sophomore year, which taught me the sorry politics of corporate workplaces and the art of appearing productive while actually not focusing my eyesight once during my workday.
When I was a 20-year-old junior, I found myself sluggishly searching for another internship. I certainly would not endure another summer of sitting in traffic in Detroit’s sweltering sprawl. I paid my dues. I wanted something different.
I decided to live in a co-operative house that summer, like the summer before, when I lived in Ann Arbor and was a publishing-industry zombie.
Co-ops are houses usually suited for college students, often in university towns. They are usually cheap, interesting places to live, especially when the houses are dedicated to cooperative values.
I decided to get a stress-free, minimum-wage job in another university town somewhere on the continent, live in a co-op and just soak up the ambiance.
I thought the loose, activist-rich Berkeley, Calif., would be the best place for me, considering I had my first pang of liberal guilt at 10 years old.
My boyfriend and I decided to move to Le Chateau, a co-op for University of California at Berkeley students we researched on the Internet.
In May 2000, we strapped our lowrider bikes on the back of my Neon and trekked to Le Chateau, arriving three days later at 3 a.m.
California smelled perfumed with oranges. Our home seethed with activity, even at those hours. We immediately made friends with the kids, who ranged from snotty punks to holed-up intellectuals.
Besides the requisite housework that is essential to co-op living, I did not work a single hour for the duration of my stay at Le Chateau.
But I didn’t just cop out. It was a different, more personal summer challenge. That is, how to make meager funds last months while living in an area where life is so tasty that the appetite can never be quenched.
We lived with 80 people in Le Chateau, which is a three-house compound that swallows up a quarter of a block.
It came complete with a pool and a billiards hall, a sprawling garden, territorial cats, a few hulking palm trees, several alcoholic Henry Miller wannabes, a cool-ass chica who did homemade tattoos, a huge library mostly from area Dumpsters and, of course, 80 housemates and their smattering of friends.
The experience was far too valuable to me as a writer to waste any time on a minimum-wage job.
Instead, I helped spearhead a cooperative food-purchasing plan. Everyone paid $75 for three months’ worth of food. We pooled the money and bought seasonal fruits and vegetables from a local market, bulk milk, cheeses and breads and fully equipped the kitchen for any type of baking or cooking.
Sharing a cheap, single room with my boyfriend and always making our own food in our massive industrial kitchen allowed us to skimp through our summer.
If we were bored, we could cozy around the hookah and smoke tobacco with our honky-tonk Israeli friend or climb the Berkeley hills and get lost in fog.
Though I would often lament my laziness, the experience fortified me as a journalist and a writer as much as my three internships. The personalities, the anecdotes, even my dreams while I was a Berkeleyite have provided me a cache of material that I will probably mind as a scribe for the rest of my life.
I met countless people who unabashedly tramped around our huge household naked. I met experts in Brazilian martial arts, sexy chubby women brimming with confidence and even a black skinhead.
And the whole summer, it rained only once.
If Berkeley taught me anything, it was to make work feel like a vacation. That philosophy is far more invigorating to a résumé than a slew of summers under the corporate lockdown.
Erica Saelens can be reached at saelense@msu.edu.
