The Berkeley files
Recently posted to the East Bay Craigslist housing offerings:
We are offering a free room for a woman who is willing to provide breast milk for consumption to the household. We are an otherwise vegan house but have recently read A.O. Wilson’s study of the benefits of human breast milk to all human beings of any age. This is not sexual. Neither appearance nor sexual preference are of any concern to us.
We are willing to accept one child into the house as well. We do not want to take breast milk away from a nursing child however. We also don’t need gallons of breast milk but whatever you can muster; it is a nutritional supplement for members of the house who want to partake.
The room is 10’x 15′ in a sunny house in Berkeley. There are 7 other people in the house and we live largely communally – shared food and house supplies. You must still pay for food, only rent is free. Reply to this posting and we will set up a time. Contact Dana.
Berkeley is a soul-crushing place for a satirist, I’ll tell you, because reality is constantly climbing up on the shoulders of satire and pounding it into the ground. You might be thinking that this item is somehow special or unprecedented, but there you’d be wrong. When I arrived in Berkeley four and a half years ago, I was given to understand—on good authority—that there was a group of women in town who made a daily practice of drinking their own urine. But only the first urine that they passed each day, you see, because the later emissions did not have the same life, youth, and health preserving properties.
I mean, it’s like…dude! Everybody knows that, dude. It’s, like, a proven scientific fact.
Then there was the housemate, greatly loathed (at least by me), who tried to convince everyone else in our house that what we really needed to live a long, healthy life were thrice-daily coffee enemas. When my friend Joe countered hopefully, “But couldn’t we just drink the coffee and get the same effects?”, she said, without a hint of irony, “Oh no, the enemas achieve entirely different results!”
No one, frankly, doubted that.
Now when I lived in Berkeley, I actually tried to make sense of these various aberrant behaviors. I tried to keep an open mind. I even listened momentarily when various nut-jobs free spirits suggested that I was rigid, closed-off, anti-communitarian, fascist, pro-war, and “part of the problem” because I refused to drink my own pee, shoot coffee up my *ss, or consider human breast milk a legitimate “dietary supplement” for an adult.
But today, I have only one thought, one plea: please, God, if you have any love for Your Faithful Servant, please, please, don’t ever make me live in Berkeley again.
February 22nd, 2007 at 11:35 am
My boyfriend, a California native, went to Berkeley thinking that he was “quite liberal” and “left-leaning”. He realized quickly, however, that he perhaps should compare himself to others in his community before taking on that label. In Berkeley, he’s a moderate.
February 22nd, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Three words: Oh My Lord.
February 22nd, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Oh my goodness. I thought I could get over the breastmilk (having accidentally tasted mine when nursing my daughter), but first morning urines and coffee enemas? gack! Coffee is rather acidic – wouldn’t that be harmful to your innards?
February 22nd, 2007 at 2:36 pm
I’m so surprised that these things don’t surprise me anymore. It is just amazing what people will do.
February 22nd, 2007 at 3:17 pm
And to think, you’ve probably only scratched the surface of weird.
February 22nd, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Oh, god, I know what you mean about Berkeley being a soul-crushing place for a satirist. A friend forwarded me a link to a website he’d been working on, something about “LASIK At Home”, for just $29.95 you too can correct your vision with lasers in the privacy of your own home! And I honestly couldn’t figure out if it was a joke or not. It was, of course, and he was confused that I couldn’t tell the difference, and then I explained to him, I’ve been in Berkeley for almost seven years. I have heard the most weird-ass things proposed in absolute earnestness. I’ve lost my ability to see the difference.
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Oh my. That has to be the most …. umm… disturbing thing I’ve read ALL day. And I’ve read some strange things today. But really, breast milk for the communal household?! WHAT?! That is beyond strange, beyond weird, just plain crazy.
And then you MUST ask, Who the *ell would take them up on this offer?
February 23rd, 2007 at 12:20 am
I’m quite sure that I wouldn’t fit in Berkeley for long. They’d probably ride me out of town on a rail!
February 23rd, 2007 at 1:47 am
helpless giggling.
February 23rd, 2007 at 3:20 am
So, a couple of things. First of all, did your housemate give herself 3 coffee enemas a day? Or, was it a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation? I am horribly offended that coffee would be used in this blasphemous fashion.
Now to the breast milk. So, how do these people propose to get the breast milk while not taking away from a nursing child? I mean, doesn’t there have to be a nursing child for the mother to be producing milk? And, if there’s a child, isn’t he or she entitled to the milk? Are you telling me that in addition to being satire-impervious, Berkelyites are also incapable of simple logic? Just sayin’
February 23rd, 2007 at 3:21 am
Oh, and one other thing – what prompts you to read East Bay Craigslist? Is it possible that you’re a bit nostalgic??
February 23rd, 2007 at 8:31 am
Oh no. Nostalgia is no part of this story. Actually, a friend of mine alerted me to this notice. It appeared a couple of days ago, without any real commentary, on a blog she ran across.
I don’t believe that that blogger actually lives in (or lived in) Berkeley. Or he would have had more to say about this than just, “Huh. Weird.”
Also, as to WHO would do this: well, someone very, very desperate who really needed the free living space. So as well as being repellent, this is actually exploitative, though it flies under the flag of healthful, wholesome, and progressive. Double, nay, triple ugh.
February 23rd, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Not even just a little nostalgia? 🙂
So, so far we see that this type of Berkeleyite is impervious to humor, incapable of simple logic AND comfortable with exploitation as long as their motives are cloaked in the concepts of communal living and near-veganism (because perish the thought they should exploit an animal).
I’m very impressed that they are willing to accept one child into the house. Cuz, they might have suggested that the woman should live there to be there milch-cow, but insist the pesky child live offsite somewhere, so as not to unbalance the chakras. Or dirty the auras. Or whatever.
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Either because of the grad student in me, or because the rest is too horrifying to contemplate for more than a few seconds, I am left marvelling at how thoroughly the breast-milk people must have exhausted the options for bucking convention. It’s quite something, to resort to annointing EO Wilson the patron saint of a _left_-wing cause…
February 24th, 2007 at 12:34 am
Just for the record, I know the difference between “there” and “their.” Whoops.
Ah, so it’s E.O. Wilson, not A.O. Wilson. I was wondering who A.O. is – internet searches for A.O. Wilson turn up a wholesale purveyor of foods – with no indication that he/she is branching out into breast milk.
Kate – LOL
February 24th, 2007 at 2:06 am
You know, I realized – I never did get an answer about the coffee enemas. Are you holding off out of respect for your readers’ delicate sensibilities? (Hint, I have none.)
February 24th, 2007 at 5:09 am
I have always considered myself open-minded… Now I consider myself “open to common sense” minded. Thanks for warning us about Berkley! 😉
=:8
February 24th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Jennifer, sorry about letting that one fall through the cracks.
Yes, my evil housemate did give herself the three-a-day enemas (I think) for a while, although I have to admit that my answer is purely from deduction: she NEVER drank coffee and in fact would give lectures to anyone who would listen about how EVIL coffee is, but then once she began preaching the gospel of the coffee enema, she started bringing home bags of ground beans from Peet’s. So I kind of put that one together.
Shelley, bless her little canine heart, later stole an entire bag of the evil housemate’s coffee and hid it in a remote area of the back yard. You go, little dog! I found it on a random patrol of the yard late one afternoon–which I was in the habit of doing once in a while both to clean up and to recover various dog toys–and I have to admit to you, my heart filled with love for this sensible, stand-up dog. What a great animal!
Shelley also once nabbed some pairs of this housemate’s dirty underwear from the clothes hamper and festooned them around the yard. The housemate was VERY, VERY angry, but I found it absolutely delightful.
February 25th, 2007 at 12:37 am
Of course we’ll never know if that coffee took its trip in liquid or bean form, although I suppose her use of the word enema gives us a hint.
Shelley is obviously the smartest dog in the world.
February 25th, 2007 at 7:04 am
I just wonder sometimes why really odd behaviors kinda clump up in particular areas. The water maybe? Alien microwaves? Weird emanations from the tin foil? Some kind of scary migration? lol, I don’t know whether to laugh or panic.
February 27th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
*snort* That is just too funny!
March 19th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
[…] What I didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, foresee was what the effect of those conditions would be over a sustained period. For instance, I failed to realize that I would be essentially unable to make any friends my own age, unless they were also graduate students, because I would no longer be able to afford the opera, the theater, the ballet, the restaurants, the wine, the lift tickets, the airfare…all the things that people my age, particularly those with careers and no children, would be buying and doing with their free time. This might have been different had I stayed in New York, where people knew me from my “previous life” and were already invested in me as a friend and would have had patience with, say, endless perambulations around Central Park (100% free!). But I was not in New York. I was in Berkeley, the Land of Milk and Organic Honey. […]
April 19th, 2007 at 11:38 am
[…] And I’ve just, like, moved into a commune where all the members, like, drink human breast milk! Plus I have, like, an appointment this afternoon to get my aura washed and then I’m going to my Bikram yoga class. […]