home sweet home – Page 4 – somebody else's paradise

blood

Michael joked about the fact that Leta told him he might as well move his practice to Washington street. He’s in town only one day a week, and today he was treating Leta, MarÃa and myself. In fact, he added, at this moment his Santa Cruz patients boiled down to two groups of friends, one of them concentrated around our house. His practice is currently in a room in one of the older buildings on the main street, Pacific Ave. The room is in a corridor that could figure in a film noir set in the 1930s; each door could lead you into the world of a detective reading his newspaper and smoking a sigaret, or that of the lawyer smoking a sigar in the green light of the bankers lamp on his desk, both of them waiting for the rich client with a briefcase of money to arrive. Did i mention that some of the rooms have no windows? And in those that have, the blinds keep day light out. The door to the room Michael uses one day a week opens into a different world all together; one that for some bizarre reason invokes Russian-Mongolian memories in me, although the room is merely about trying to create some sober kind of Chinese atmosphere i guess.

(and the corridor is decorated with old images of Santa Cruz like these…)

The session last Friday had been particularly heavenly relaxing, still in a celebration mood, as Michael didn’t miss out on having two of his patients on the same day with the same birthday. We continued bear conversations and i ended up telling him stories from the Trans-Siberian and Mongolian express – so it seems that the things that go through my mind in that room eventually find their way to our conversations. He talked about this travels and longer stays in China. Just when i got eager to tell him my story of the mad goat at the monastry near Ulan Ude, he wanted to know about religious freedom for Buddhists in Russia and Mongolia – a subject i’m slightly less enthousiastic about than the mad goat.

Today was different. The music today was particularly insisting monotonous Chinese – Tibetian – Mongolian something. When he asked me how i was doing, i didn’t do the “fine and it’s getting better” routine. I don’t really know why i do that – something about not really wanting to engage, remain on the surface, avoiding lectures, etc. It probably defeats the purpose of a medical visit. Although in a medical context i somehow prefer to think: okay, do your technical stuff on my body, but leave me out it. Don’t ask me too much, don’t expect me to open my mouth too much, let’s get it over and done with. Although that’s a bit of an understatement, with some doctors i tend to sabotage the technical part as well, like indeed not opening my mouth at the dentist (the number of times my mother had to beg to open my mouth when i was in the dentist seat; she still pratically kidnaps me for dentist appointments…). Anyway, i tell Michael: frankly, the muscles in my shoulders do NOT feel any better than last time, maybe even WORSE. (VoilÃ , there you go.) He was sweet actually. First giving me some Buddhist wisdom. These things are not linear, you know, many steps forward are followed by steps back. And don’t get upset with not being relaxed, that doesn’t help at all. At this point he made me smile; okay, today my muscles and i are just bad and that’s it and we’ll get treated. Then he started feeling and decided that from his perspective the muscles actually felt better. At least i can distinguish the actual muscles, he said, it’s not one block of tension. (I decided on the spot that i would not visualise myself as a turtle this time.) He does his massage and this time there are no (animal) stories, we don’t speak. Apart from one moment when he says: “You’re fighting me today.” What can i say, don’t take it personally.

At the end of this session which felt quite different from the other ones he scrutinizes me and asks some questions. Then comes the verdict: blood deficiency. And an advice to eat meat and take “Ba Zhag San Women’s Precious” pills. Still bugged when i got home, where i was met with sheer enthousiasm by Leta. “I can get you the pills for half the price, you might just get full advantage of living with a licensed acupunturist, me too i’m blood deficient or at least i was and it took three years for it to go away, and i still think of myself as semi-blood deficient because i have the tendency, it’s because we use our brain a lot (oh… is that the place blood goes?…), let’s sit down and talk about this…” Hm, sounds like we’ll be having a blood deficiency party in the house. And more than that: Leta looked at me with sparkling eyes and a knowing smile and said: “Yes, i feel it, this is what brought you to Santa Cruz, to discover your blood deficiency and get rid of it.” Quite a new insight about what i’m doing here. I wonder if i should mention it in my Marie Curie report. Coming to think of it, i’m sure Marie Curie was blood deficient as well.

b-day barbeque

So yesterday was my American b-day barbeque thing. I somehow got convinced that i should honor the tradition and have a bbq while i’m here. Confidence that shrinked a bit after the invitations had gone out, as Diana sweetly mentioned that “you also deserve credit for taking on the american bbq tradition!” (oops, am i actually up to this…) and Susan began to refer to the whole thing as “a historical event”. Ay, the weight of a tradition… Can one ever live up to them? And when is something a failure or an interesting innovation in the light of tradition? When David asked me if i needed some help, all i could respond was that i needed to know whether he had done one of these bbqs before (as i hadn’t). At least some kind of experience/knowledge to relate to. The response was reassuring: “Sarah: 234 times.”

Now i’m not really sure if we indeed had an american bbq. Meat is new thing for me so there wasn’t much of that around, but i made sure that there was corn, patatoes and mashmellows (to stick in the fire we can make in our garden, which seemed a disgusting idea to some of the non-american guests…). But the food that i indulged in was taboule, blue cheese, quinoa salad with marinated tempeh (thanks to mary), gratin aux lÃ©gumes (merci didier), pasta with homemade pesto, nice bread, humus, fennel-olive-orange salad, nice wine… and ah, the most amazing chocolate raspberry cake! (how did marÃa know…)

American or not, it turned out to be the sweetest thing of finding oneself in such good company. Lizards, biology, DNA and science. (the sparkle in her eyes, wide open with amazement, made it so clear that marÃa will be studying our new housemate ammon who is studying the mating patterns of lizards…) And puppets puppets puppets. (at some point everybody should hear Rebecca’s stories about teaching Emily Martin’s feminist deconstruction of the story of conception – ask your students to enact a different story with sock puppets…) And Feza’s voice on the phone all the way from Ankara (as he got up in the morning)… (a taste of what i’ll have to deal with as well? after all that time of complaining about santa cruz, actually missing some parts of it… Feza, how did that happen?)

Now Berna wants to come and live in our house for her last weeks in Santa Cruz, and David suggests we start a weekly salon. And i’m filled with so much joy with what this house can become. Remember, it’s all about tribes…

porch 1

breakfast on our porch

love in the house

Leta is a special one. It seems that she is also looking forward to the transformation of our house. As maria stopped by the house this evening before going home, and checked out once more her room to be, we ended up in Leta’s room (“I have great news for you, sarah. A friend of ours fell in love with a guy who speaks Flemish. We should meet up one of these days.” An american guy in Santa Cruz who speaks flemish, who would have thought… And Leta scored of course. Imagine her friend talking all about her new boyfriend, and at some point mentioning that he finds it such a pity that he cannot practise his flemish in Santa Cruz. And Leta being able to say: oh, just come to our house, flemish is spoken in our house…).

And we continued talking when Jenn, with whom Leta just broke up last week, left. About love, of course. And i was pleasantly struck by what she said: that it’s tough now to find another way of loving Jenn, since love-making was such an easy way to express love for friend. Maybe it’s good, she added, it forces me to be more creative. To write a poem, to write a song, to care in another way. We looked at each other in silence for a moment, before bursting out in laughter… let’s not be kidding, why should any of that exclude love-making…

dancing with happiness…

… yet again, and this time in Santa Cruz, who would have imagined, and what beautiful spirals we walk (or dance!) in. This house i’ve been resting in, and thinking about, is in transformation, you already know that part. Katie is also leaving, she needs a dog in her life and we can’t have pets in the house, so that leaves Leta and me. Been meeting and interviewing many people these days, most often contributing to my sense of disconnection.

Just one example: someone shared a practice of doing the dishes that worked in another shared house she lived in: small containers on the sink with names on, so everyone can put their dirty dishes in their own container and wash only their own dishes. When they answer to questions such as “So what you do understand by living together, by sharing a house?” would they also realise that they are respondents in my fieldwork on american individualism? And then there was that strong thought of last week, as i was thinking of the shared houses i lived in and in particular of the home with Rutvica in Utrecht: can’t do community on my own here, but it would only take another person to do the house differently. (And Leta, sweet Leta, she’d join that energy, i know it…)

And then there is Maria, just back from her Earth Activist Training, and beautiful, amazone-like (as she rides her cool black bike through the streets of Santa Cruz), radiant, transformed, in a spiral dance of her own. She had a dream of our house while she was at Ocean Song. And she comes back and finds that our house is looking for people… A dinner with Leta last night and a phonecall from Leta this morning, and Maria will be moving into Washington street in a short while. Quelle vie, imagine tout ce que cette maison peut devenir… what a gift.

And also this morning i found an email from Nicolas announcing that the blog about politics in Flanders that Nadia and i wanted (needed) so much to begin, is ready. We’ll be waiting a little while or so to make it public, but here, while we are trying together to find our voice, is a first impression for friends: het verdriet van vlaanderen (le chagrin des flamands). Yet another gift. Oh, could it be the same thing, if there are two, if there is a bunch of us, that we could make this sad Flanders differently? I think we could, and i know there is no other option than trying.

companer@s

For those of you whom i was lucky enough to meet somewhere along this beautiful and intense journey from New York to all those places in Europe, this story is not new. It is no doubt the story that caused most unbelief and laughter. It is time to tell you more about my house.

I’m not in a shared house by accident or only because the rent is cheaper (indeed, Santa Cruz rents are outrageous), there was a conscious decision to look for a communal house. Contrary to the image one might have about Santa Cruz, there are actually not so many cooperative houses in town. Rebecca, who did part of her undergraduate degree here and came back this year as a visiting fellow, could compare: while she used to live in a coop here many years ago, she found it impossible to find one now. Yes, there are the two student coops, Chavez House and Zami, and i went through the getting-to-know-each-other and interviewing procedure with Chavez House. They wanted me to come and live with them, and i did like the place. But there seemed quite gap between my desire to create a home and the prospective of living together with 21 mostly undergrads. Already during the interview, which was very entertaining and pleasant, there was a bit of an “auntie” dynamic, the role i feared i might end up playing in the house. I considered, but didn’t jump. At 615 Washington Street, where i moved in on the 1st of March, the atmosphere was different: more quiet and less political, and the emphasis on creating a home together, supporting each other’s life-styles, and even something about family.

What does living in a Santa Cruz “supporting each other live-styles” and “creating home” shared house mean? “We’re all about food,” one of the girls (ah, our boys are moving out…) keeps on saying to candidates who come to visit the house these days. We do food together. They even say that we eat together, but i find that stretching it just a bit. There are five of us in the house, and everybody cooks one evening in the week, which means the house provides (organic, wholesome, vegetarian…) food for all throughout the week. You’re not expected to be here for dinner every evening – everybody has different and busy life-styles, you see – but you can count on food being kept for you.

Translated into practice this means: after cooking the meal, people put food in tuperware containers with everybody’s name on it, and when people come home they take their tuperware dinner out of the fridge and put it in the micro-wave. Up till today i haven’t shared one meal with my house-mates. Sometimes there is not even a cook whom you could try to join – on several occassions the person responsible for cooking made the food earlier that day, or put something in the oven and ran off to an appointment, phoning another housemate asking to take the dish out the oven on time. When i first did my cooking shift, the girls came in when i was almost done, which made me happy. We could eat together. But they were just passing by. A small spoon to taste the risotto followed by: “Hm, that tastes great. I need to run off to my work-out now, i’m looking forward to eat it when i get back tonight.” It seems to me that there is a certain point when risotto has that right texture and consistency which the micro-wave is pretty much unable to reproduce. Anyway, if something tastes great, why would you need to run to a work-out? I don’t quite understand this kind of being “all about food”.

The situation in my house is not abnormal nor isolated around here. When i talked about the tuperware eating arrangement with other people, they immediately recognised our house as a “semi-coop”. More convenient and more freedom than a coop, someone added. When i talked with Rutvica on the phone about my house, she laughed and called it very Dutch. Although i’m mixing up things now – we elaboratedly talked about houses before i actually made the decision, and little did i know about the tuperware practice back then. But i knew what the “Dutch” referred to: carefully designated territories, and all the mechanisms to keep that in place. It also reminded me how little it took to change the dynamic in the house: just two of us were able to create a home in that place. Mind you, i don’t mean to say that my house-mates are not nice, they really are. On the first evening i moved in, “bienvenue” was written on my tuperware container in the fridge.

Food is only symptomatic. It’s also the house-phone that nobody uses (i had to ask three house-mates before somebody could tell me what the arrangement is for using the phone) cause everybody has cell phones, of course, but some even have land-lines installed in their room. (Can you imagine a communal house with no negotiations or arguments about who needs the phone when and for how long? It’s like a cafe without beer, as the Belgian saying goes…) It’s the sense of their individual rooms being the actual place where they live. I came to notice how i use space in the house so differently from my house-mates: it doesn’t feel as if my actual space in the house is my room, not at all, i’m using the whole house. (House-mates i say, they tend so say room-mates. But we are not sharing a room, no need to feel that threatened, we’re only sharing a house, and even that remains questionable to my feeling.) Common or collective space, it seems, is a negative function. It is void, neutral, meant to function as a buffer between well-protected selves. It barely has a quality of its own – there is no transcendence here. These fortified bodies and selves and life-styles, this suburbian architecture of subjectivity… My fortress, myself. So you can get the house out of the suburb, but mabe you can’t get the suburb out of the house? It goes way beyond Dutchness, Dutch arrangements actually look quite cute in comparison. And then there is the layer of friendliness, the point not being how thin or solid this layer is. The point is that the pleasant quotidian friendliness is constructed upon fear, upon the ever-present threat of the other, who might take away or undermine that cherished illusion of independence of the self.

Ay ay ay… no chance of a home for me in such a landscape, here we are doing fieldwork again. (And damn it, there is nothing more exhausting than doing fieldwork when you’re looking for some kind of home, even a tiny temporary one.) Sigh. Under the motto “research what you can’t defeat, or what bothers you, what eats you away,” i’ll have to start studying American individualism, and while we’re at it, liberalism.

Meanwhile in the house… for the moment we are (officially) not really “doing food together”. The house is officially “in transition” these days. Not only Chris is leaving, but also Figs. Katie and Figs had a big fight last weekend, in which Figs accused Katie of all the sins of the world. It all started with some dirt in the bath tub, but obviously it was not about dirt in the bath tub. Leta filled me in that Katie had a crush on Figs from the very start, from the interview (aha!! more of the falling in love with house-mates than she admitted before! although she probably wouldn’t call it falling in love i guess…), and that they never managed to deal with it. It has an impact on the house and so Leta thinks Figs should go (remember, the common space, the space of social interaction, should be void…). What pisses me off is the reason invoked: that he doesn’t participate much to the shared house. Using the collective, so terribly absent, as an excuse because they’re unwilling to talk about or deal with the crush?

What can i say – we might be all about food, but there are no companeros, companeras around here. You know, the ones you share your bread, your meals with. Hey, will you guys come here for a while? Like many of you? Like a whole tribe? And we’d squat all over the common space, and cook together all of the time, and make lots of noise and music, and keep the doors of the rooms open, and go to bed late, and strategize about politics, and use the bathroom with a bunch of us together, and sleep in till noon… it might be healthy for my poor Californian house-mates and their life-styles.

home sweet home…

As the Greyhound bus drove into Santa Cruz this morning, i didn’t exactely feel light, and it wasn’t due to the small home (and mobile office) that i’ve been carrying on my back, turtle-style (in the good company of the new animal in my life, Chaim!), all these weeks. As i was telling travelling stories to my house mates Leta and Katie and we got stuck again in metric conversions, i realised there was another way to give them an idea of how much i had been carrying around: more or less half of my body weight. How light (well… almost) this had felt during other pieces of the journey. But i’ve arrived in Santa Cruz again, a move that fundamentally works against my laws of gravity, so it seems.

But finding my house again was good. Peace and quiet (i’ll probably enjoy a week of that before it gets on my nerves…), bathing in sunlight, trees and flowers in bloom everywhere around us. And a sweet message from Berna, welcome back and if we could see each other soon and if we could celebrate her birthday together this week and that she had wanted to write before with the excitement and pictures from the May Day “A Day without an Immigrant” march in Santa Cruz. Also in Santa Cruz (some thousands of) people took to the streets, the biggest demo in quite some years it seems, and it made Berna and Feza so very happy.

I want to begin telling you more about the house. It has changed while i was gone – Chris is moving out. Leta wrote me an email last week, apologizing that i had to find out like this, but: Chris fell in love. The “natural” implication of this, it seems, is that he is moving out. The concepts and order of things don’t cease to bewilder me. So first they were “dating”, then he “had a girlfriend”, and now he is “in love” and so “of course” he is moving out (and moving in with her). What happened to first being friends, or housemates for that matter, and then in love? Or first falling in love and then becoming friends/companions? As Katie suggested on another occassion: Nice idea, old-fashionedly beautiful, but profoundly time inefficient… Natascha (who has done more fieldwork on the matter 🙂 and i were talking about that very strange world of sex, love and relationships in America just this weekend – a wedding as the prefect opportunity to do so – and she filled me in on her project to write a funny “cultural” guide to L.A./California for Europeans… And i figured that one of these days i should write up some of my strange encounters with “dating”…

But i keep on drifting away from the house… which is looking for new people again, and so once more there’s an ad about the house on Craig’s list – and i take the opportunity to copy it below. True enough, the house is amazing. The discourse about family and living together, all the things “we” do, remains fascinating science-fiction to me. For those of you whom i didn’t have a chance to tell the stories in real life, tomorrow i’ll fill you in on how we “eat together”. In style.

———————————————————————————
Come Live in Style with 4 thirty-somethings in downtown Santa Cruz!

Looking for a â€œfamilyâ€ atmosphere with responsible, motivated, and fun-loving people?

We have an opening for one really special person in a room that is $650/mo. starting June 1st

â€¢ Live in a quiet & beautiful house built in 1910, craftsman style
â€¢ In a room with two large windows & great hard wood floors
â€¢ With fruit trees, orange, tangerine, guava, and lemon
â€¢ A beautiful dance/yoga/martial arts/meditation room
â€¢ A possible darkroom for photographers
â€¢ Several private study/work spaces & DSL Internet
â€¢ Two attics furnished as guest rooms
â€¢ A bicycle shed and a driveway
â€¢ A 3 minute walk to the Laurel bus line
â€¢ A huge kitchen & organic produce delivered to our house
â€¢ In a quiet, friendly neighborhood.
â€¢ Hot tub, piano, vegetable/herb garden among other extraâ€™s
â€¢ Soon to have a video projector surround sound movie theater

We are three professionals and a grad student.

Currently we have two males and three females, which we feel works best.
One of our male housemates fell in love and is moving out to be with his girlfriend. We are hoping to find another male.

We are looking for someone who is mature/responsible and excited about participating in all that we do to maintain a supportive and caring home.

Together we cook dinners and eat together; make decisions by consensus; share chores and house responsibilities; support one another; plan festive gatherings and most of all enjoy life!

We strive to be open and available to each other in order to learn from, have fun with, and support each otherâ€™s lifestyles and needs.

Email us and share about who you are and what you are looking for.
We look forward in hearing from you!

615 washington street

Some first impressions from my new house. I’m still waiting for Leta to send me the house description as i found it on craigs’ list, it’s quite impressive, at least it impressed me. But at this moment Leta has other things on her mind: she is leaving for Sacramento, the capital, tomorrow early morning, to take her qualifying exams after 10 years of study of Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Once i get the description i’ll include it here, so come back to this entry if you want to read it.

And then i should slowly begin to get my head around these cooperative living arrangements here in Santa Cruz. I did interviews in two places: Chavez House, which is one of the two student co-ops (part of NASCO, www.nasco.coop) in town, and then the “30 something” semi-coop where i’m now. The reflections of course already started with the decision to look for a collective living situation, and then the need to chose between them (or still decide to go for another living arrangement…), as they both wanted to have me. And for sure i’ll be reflecting more on this as i’m now part of the house on Washington street.

But for now, i’m enjoying the beauty of this craftsmanship house, and my veranda room (6 windows!) next to the kitchen. And Rutvica’s poetry card that was awaiting me here, Summer. Steeped in flowers. Yes, they say that nature blooms amazingly here in spring and summer…