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.