Co-op day-ze....

(Summer 2003, Ridge House)

It's been a little over 2 months since I've left the Berkeley Student Cooperative system (formerly the USCA), that was my Berkeley home for over 5 years (with one gap year in between).

Now living as an urban nomad (aka subletter) I'm coming to terms with how much the co-op system did to help me feel at home in the Bay Area. As a nervous college student leaving my parents SoCal ranch for the "great hippie joint" to the North, I wasn't very prepared for adjusting to Bay Area life. Nobody in my immediate family or friend circle had ever moved away from home to go to college (...of those few who had gone to college). Dorm-life wasn't an experience that my mother could explain to me, and 12-years of "taking care of animals before school work" had definitely left me ill-prepared for the academic feeding frenzy known as U.C. Berkeley.

The best I could do was take some fashion advice from my model/suburbanite best friend Kellie, and hope to god that 2-years of community college and vocational upbringing had some useful relevance in the Bay Area.

I hit a lot of speed bumps, both academically and socially, those first few years at Cal. Mercifully, in my very first semester, I fell into a co-op household of people who were as kind as they were forgiving for my shortcomings (aka Ridge House). After that first semester at Ridge, I knew that as long as I was a student at Cal, I would remain in the co-op's. It was my main way of making friends and picking up the "outside-of-class" information you need to know to survive college-- and Cal in particular (for example: I couldn't afford to travel up for formal first-year orientation, so my Ridge housemates showed me how to use the college email/library accounts...which I would've never figured out without them).

Of course, not every co-op I lived in turned out to be as great as Ridge (namely the graduate co-op, the Convent, was my most negative co-op experience). However, I did take away something from each co-op I tried (and in total, I tried 3 houses and 2 apartments). I also picked up management roles towards the end (including Board Rep, Waste Mgr, and Secretary).

The co-op's and their residents taught me more then I could possibly express in a brief blog. It was Cal and the promise of an elite education that made my journey to the Bay Area necessary, however it was the co-op's that made the stay in the Bay Area worthwhile and rewarding.

For all you did, BSC: Thank you.

New Dawn, New Blog

NYC, August 6, 2006.


It was time.

I've had blogs in the past, which I'll keep active just for the sake of memories and old friends, but...I needed something new. Google-new.

To be honest, I haven't been keeping up with blogging in about...3 years? Roughly around the time I started grad school. In the past, my blogs were usually humorous (in my own mind) rants and worried soliloquies about being a student and my never-ending field work. My blogging adolescence. Fresh with uncomfortable grammar errors and acne scars. Not terribly proud of that stage, but it had to be lived.

This blog is wearing it's big-girl Google pampers though. It's going to talk about the geospatial technologies I'm working on (or hoping to work on), my freelance writing career (or lack thereof), some field and outback adventures, my efforts and reflections on recovering from a very chilling graduate school experience (at last, I have completed my master's), and my on-going work with the Oakland students and their pollution crusade.

I'll have my official website up soon, so I won't waste time on the background news. Suffice to say, each of these projects are in their seperate jars, bobbing blithely to different destinations.

In closing, a remembrance to christen the effort and honor the ominpresent vacancy of one beloved grandfather.

Aftermath

9 pm,
and the shoes are still warm,
of flesh and sun,
by the porch which has lost all it's moorings.
Above our heads: the cracks of little tile earthquakes,
and I'm still awake,
unsettled on wanting a cup of coffee.

The chimes are still dialing at their best,
to the sound of the world:
a dial tone, disconnected.
The casualties of erupting silence,
have put the burning mountains on hold.

Everywhere something to pick up,
A button thread, a root, a place.
But the sun itself has set too low,
and the stars have been lying to the compass.

Here: the last structure stands,
a passage of time erected.
And, yes yes yes,
we shall all live on:
in hour long minutes
waiting for the calls
of birds, long lost in the wind.