you're supposed to cooperate in a co-op...
08/27/02 ~ 10:12 a.m.
i'm on an imac at school. i always screw up on them, cuz i'm a pc person. so just bear with me.
my previous class, geography, i was totally falling asleep. i think it can be definately blamed on david. hee. i even had a white mocha in hopes of caffinating myself. no luck.
we got up kinad early this morning (well, i got up way after him) cuz he had a meeting for his co-op. now's where i try to explain his living situation.
see, davis is a sort of "hippie town". but it's also a college town, a family town, and a city. it's kinda schizto. the hippie part comes in to play with the multitudes of co-op living arrangements around town. even the girl i tutor lives in one. the concept of a co-op is that everyone living there pitches in with the cooking, cleaning, etc., and share common items so that life is cheaper. good plan, right?
in theory, yes. many of them work very well. my tutee's entire street works together, they share everything, cook together all the time, etc. david's co-op is not quite as functional.
first off, he does not live in a house. nor does he live in an apartment. the only way to describe his place is "dorm". there are 3 separate buildings, and each one has 3 floors and houses 27 people (i think). there is once kitchen for all of them. each floor has a few toilets and showers, and a little common area. people rent either single or double rooms. it fails as a co-op for a couple of reasons.
1 -- the board of directors who oversee the place don't even live there! that's hypocritical of the entire co-op idea.
2 -- many of the students living there are only there for the low rent, and don't participate in the co-op lifestyle. this ranges from not having the community dinners, to not socializing with the neighbors, to not cleaning up after themselves. seriously, the place can get pretty nasty.
so this year, david got hired on as manager of his building. he gets paid very little, but it does help with the rent. yet he is already realizing that he works far too much, they expect too much and he has too much responisibilty for what they pay him.
for one, they have been expecting him to be there all the time. while this may have been the case with him before he started dating me, it's still ridiculous. i mean, people need social lives. two, if a fire alarm goes off or someone locks themselves out, he gets a call. he even got a cell phone cuz he knows he's not going to be home as much as he used to be. i can't wait for them to call his cell at 3 am and he'll have to leave my place.
they're also not treating him with much respect. he got basically yelled at because a fire alarm went off this weekend and he wasn't home. he was in lake tahoe! there are other managers who could have done something about it. but the organization of the co-op is a mess, and no one even knew who to call. so he gets blamed for it. but david is not the kind of guy to get walked all over. he'll handle his shit. which is good.
i feel bad for him. he doesn't even really want to be living there anymore, and he's regretting taking the position as manager. i remember back in the spring when we were at school, he was kinda thinking about getting a roommate or two and moving, but ended up not doing it, even after me telling him how much cooler it is. he just didn't want to get into a roommate situation with people he didn't know and end up having a mess. which is understandable.
but i seem to have lucked out again. even with the tension near the end, heather was always a good roomie. we didn't have any major problems. and jeannine is already kicking ass. she's more laid back than heather, but still neat and clean in the kitchen and living room. she plays her music, lights incense, and chills. she loves that i got erotic magnetic poetry for our fridge and that i want to put up van gogh paintings in the living room. she doesn't mind david being there, in fact, she likes him and his guitar playing. she sings along!
alright, tired of my rambling yet? cuz i sure am! catch ya on the flip side,
~holly~
back 
forth
* check the cast page for details about this person!
