Spring time in Davis

Davis, April 20, 2014

Spencer comes to town

March 22, 11pm. Spencer lands on Sacramento airport. A moment long anticipated, with mixed feelings. I was excited to have him back, my best friend and lover, someone who is always available to talk to, to give and receive the warmest love, and brings out the best in me. But I knew that his arrival would mean the end of the life as I’d known it here. The fluid, fanatical, undivided attention I had for my life in the co-ops would now have to be partly diverted to him. The easy, carefree life I’d been leading in a world in which I’d grown only young, shallow roots, would be penetrated by a representative of the old life: someone who, be it lovingly and happily on my part, bound me in so many ways. It had been so wonderful to myopically follow all my whims, flutter erratically to every scene and object that caught my eye, have no-one to rely on but myself. Now it was time to come back to earth, expand my consideration to include the wants and needs of another person once again, and re-open up to someone to share my full vulnerability. I was scared of it. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to merge two of such big worlds of mine. How I was going to divide my attention, when really I wanted to give my full attention to both. How I was going to hold on to the strong, independent self that had come to such fruition here in a world on its own. It was good that Spencer came on the first day of Spring Break. With that, I had a chance to give my private life, just me and the co-ops, closure as a completed and very successful Part I. I could be proud of myself. I had succeeded, with flying colors, in what I had wanted to come here for on my own: proving that I had the autonomy, the sure and firm self-awareness, and the positive disposition necessary to craft a whole new life, beautiful and worthwhile, with my own bare hands.

$pRiNg BrEaK!!!

Spring Break was spent catching up and recalibrating, while exploring the uncharted lands of central California. In our rented car, we drove up to Clearlake, a quiet water with rickety jetties reaching into the mists, on through an hour long windy rollercoaster road through Jackson State Park’s redwoods and spruces, until we reached the final frontier in Fort Bragg, and I got my first up-close glimpse of the Great Pacific! From Fort Bragg, we spent two days driving all the way down along the famous Highway 1, all along the coast, down to San Francisco. The scenery was breathtaking, wild untamed and rugged. It reminded me of Scotland. The truest rolling hills I’ve ever seen, so round they couldn’t be real, small wooden ocean towns, and rough cliffs and giant rocks protruding from the surf, guarding the coast of the Golden State. I love California. We rolled into the Bay City across the Golden Gate bridge, spent the day in Golden Gate Park, and met up for dinner with my dearest friends Lili and Ashley, our separate spring break wanderings crossing for the evening in a café in Berkeley Spencer used to frequent in his time. That night, once again, we hadn’t arranged for a place to sleep, so we found our way to Lothlorien, one of our sister co-ops in Berkeley, to see if we could crash there. What a trip that turned out to be! We got there in the dark, with rain pouring down so hard rivers were flowing down the steep streets. We climbed the hidden stairs to a giant mansion, little windows lit five stories tall, and met two figures on the porch. We shared their smoke until we’d befriended them enough so they would let us in, and opened the doors to a madhouse of murals,  extravagant characters, a red velvet dress and some dilated pupils, countless corridors and enormous living rooms. We were led up to one of their spare rooms, a narrow lair underneath a slanted roof, with nothing but a mattress and some cozy twinkly lights, scribbles and quotes from past guests covering the walls, and a bulging fish-eye window that gave us a watery view of the thousands of lights that lit up the nightly Bay Area. The end of the corridor that our room led on to took a sharp turn and continued across a small bridge a dizzying seventy feet above the ground out of the attic and into a circular tree house hugging a giant redwood that neighbored the house. I couldn’t believe where we’d ended up. I stared my eyes out, this was awesome! Back in Berkeley, home to the largest student cooperative in the country, 12 houses like these altogether, and no doubt of the craziest ones at that.

 Rolling hills in California's Central Valley

Our lair in Lothlorien

The next day we continued our journey down through Stanford until we reached our final destination, Santa Cruz, where we spent the last four days hanging out with my friends from Davis. We stayed at my good friend Miles’ double house, atop two small twin hills in the forests outside Santa Cruz, a welcoming home cluttered with dozens of unfinished home jobs and fix ups, telling the story of the family life lived here over the past decades. His brothers were home too, and the three of them were the sweetest, closest band of brothers I’ve ever met. Their mom cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for us, complete with turkey and appreciations. The head of the family, their big bearded father, fell in love with Spencer’s sharp mind. Miles took us and three other friends into the woods. That’s where I met my first old growth red wood, an ancient woody giant towering high over our little heads, charred up inside but still going strong, his rough spiraling bark an exhibit to the force with which he’d shot up out of the earth over the centuries. The rest of our Santa Cruz time was spent strolling through downtown, tidepooling and hanging out on the beach, going to an awesome awesome show (the Polish Ambassador & Saqi), climbing trees (my rediscovered passion, one of my favorite things to do now, together with biking and dancing), and driving, because that’s how you get around here. I’m so glad we got to get out of Davis for a week, got to see more of my gorgeous second homeland, and got to spend time together and with some of my best friends who have come to mean a lot to me over the course of my stay here. Perhaps it is the Californian zest, or perhaps the co-op community in Davis is a really biased sample, but the people that have become my friends here are so wonderful, so stoked about life, so open and loving. And Spencer only adds to that, and makes life here a little more real.

That's what I mean 

The gang in Santa Cruz

Painting is a process

Back in Davis, Part II started with my first official week in Pierce, the co-op next door. I had moved out of DSC two weeks before Spring Break already, because of issues with my lease, and since then my stuff had been all over the place, spread out across two houses. I never knew where anything was, and was constantly repacking and moving my toothbrush around. I loved it, that chaos fit my fluid self well, but after three weeks of that I was really ready to settle down again. But it wasn’t time for that yet, since I’d taken up the big project of painting my entire room.  Over the first weekend of spring quarter, I hid out in my room and painted and cleaned and taped and scrubbed for hours and hours for four days straight. Everything I did outside of my room, eating, peeing, partying, sleeping, felt like a painting break. I felt like I hardly saw anyone, and mostly I felt extremely liminal, the fourth week of chaos, of no homebase, and this time in a new house. I hadn’t expected to feel so homeless those first days in Pierce. I was moving in, after all, because I was friends with most of the guys there, and was super stoked to get to know all of the Piercians (14 in all) better. Yet having them as housemates was different. And then I remembered the other reason why I had moved into Pierce: because I’d caught myself settling down, and getting too comfortable in DSC. I had wanted to pull myself out of my comfort zone, put myself on the edge again, so I could keep exploring, and growing, and branching out. But I had just forgot about it, and not expected that moving in with the Piercians would place me that far out of my comfort zone at first. But that’s good. Not only was that move in line with my philosophy of what this life here is to me: one of fluidity, diversity, and novelty. It also meant answering to a call deep within me that’s been there for as long as I can remember. One Friday morning, outside on the grass over breakfast, a friend here asked me: “Are you a drifter? You seem friends with everybody, not really stuck in any cliques…” I thought about that for a while after. Yes, I guess I am a drifter. As long as I can remember, I have spent my social life drifting from friend group to friend group, never sticking around for longer than a year and a half at best. I feel like I’m always searching for ‘my people’ – I wrote about that earlier, and I remember talking about this with my therapist at the tender age of 11. Yet each time, after a while, I’ll find that the new group of friends I’ve landed in isn’t my social kin after all. Each time, I’ll retain one or two really good friends from that time and take off again. It’s taken me a long time to realize that this is not a bad thing, not just a movement out of lacking. Many times I’m happy as a drifter. I’m so happy I put so much effort into establishing myself here in the co-ops and in the larger community, that I kept exploring and found friends in many different places, instead of putting all my eggs in one basket. I’m happiest, as I wrote before, rolling from social scene into the next, doing my rounds, journeying from room to room, or party to party, over the span of an evening. I love that people know my name, and that I can get on my bike and think of five different places to go to see people I want to see. I love putting myself out there in the world, and it’s not just because I’m looking for family, it’s also because I simply love being out there.

My new room

“You’re a Piercian now”

That said, I also really value having a home, and the first week in Pierce, the last week in liminality, was lived in delicious and restless anticipation, getting ready for the next big torrent. I’m so, so happy I moved into Pierce. Three weeks into the quarter I can feel how I’m slowly, in between those smallest of moments and interactions, in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the bathroom, carving out this new home space for myself. Pierce is a glorious home. It is a happy place. It is one filled with laughter and loudness. It’s dirty, it’s cluttered, and every other weekend we have to move all the stuff out of the living room, all our couches out on to the lawn, because we’re hosting another party. The boys are big and introverted, teaching me how to be affectionate friends without all the words, while the girls are loud and jubilant, keeping track of their periods on a fertility chart over the stairs and busting into the bathroom with comments like, “Who’s in there? Cole, is that you?!” “…” “Are you taking a shit Cole?” “…” “Okay, rock on dude!” Sure things are a little uncomfortable in the beginning, but what a wonderful group of people, welcoming me into their midst with an initiation ritual in my first house meeting, and comments like “You live here now! It’s so awesome!”, “Stef, you’re a Piercian now”, “Stephanie, we’re glad you moved in”, and “Welcome to the family”. My wonderful roommate, Tucker, waited patiently with all his possessions in piles of chaos on the landing for a week, complimenting me all the while on all my hard painting work, with comments like “This is my favorite color!” Oh man. And he mentioned me during Appreciations at the end of house meeting, saying “I appreciate Stephanie, because her punishment when she saw how I had turned our room into Bed Land (he barely managed to squeeze his queen-sized bedframe in there) was that she’s going to paint a mural in our room.”

Yes, moving into Pierce was an absolute master move. The dominant emotion now is hunger. Really only moving in a week after the quarter started, and having to divide my attention between Spencer and the co-ops now, I’m so hungry to bite into this life. A single second flash of lightning that has only just started to light up, is all this moment here in Pierce, and in the co-ops, and in Davis, will ever be. One second to live this experience and a lifetime to remember it. I’ll have to live it in slow motion, soak it up, gulp it down greedily, be here, with it.

Birthweek

The first week of the quarter was also half of my birthweek. A birthday was not enough to fit all my excitement into, and a single party not enough for all the celebration that needed to be done here. On my birthday itself I purposefully didn’t plan anything. That way every moment was a great surprise. And it was beautiful to see how, surrendering my birthday to friendship, Spencer, Lili, and Ashley filled it in for me. They kept finding me, throughout the day, for another little celebration. Lili and Ashley waking me up, a birthday breakfast on bed from Spencer, a picnic with Lili’s homemade ‘boterkoek’, singing for me over house dinner, and gathering some my favorite boys (my only +21 friends here) for a birthday shot and a drink in town. That Saturday a birthday party in Pierce, where my party buddy Gordon played a DJ set with “all of his Dutch songs” for me and Spencer, the last ones standing. Throughout the week I wore my green paper necklace so that every time I’d look down I’d be reminded that I was celebrating, and the people in the co-ops and Spencer knew that I was celebrating for a week, so every morning there’d be someone to recongratulate me. Good times.

Surrendering my birthday to friendship 

Spencer's BACK!

The rest of these first spring days were: running around campus bursting with excitement with a new friend looking for the best rooftop to watch a full lunar eclipse at midnight; new awesome courses (from hapkido to a Mexican muraling workshop and from learning about organic crop production on the Student Farm to Sociology of Social Movements); field trips to see murals in the Mission in San Francisco and to the juvenile detention center where we’ll be painting ours (intense, mindblowing experience, a whole story in itself); staring at my beautiful new painted room; wonderful moments of reconnection and rediscovery with Spencer; two to five person sleepovers in the tall wet grass under a hazy full moon in the field behind the Domes, another ‘intentional living community’ in our larger community of awesome radicals and a Hobbitland on the edge of campus that looks like you stepped straight into a fairytale; and, as always, the gazillion little moments and interactions that make this life here so full and vibrant, so dizzyingly acutely here, and make you fall in love with life so hard.