Welcome Home: Manley Co-op, In-person Classes and Research

Manley Co-op

After spending January to June very lonely here in Santa Barbara, I decided to move into a housing co-op for my sophomore year. I moved in two days before school started and have loved every second of it. Manley Co-op is part of the Santa Barbara Student Housing Cooperative. This is a non-profit that owns 5 houses in Isla Vista, the student community next to the university. When you move in, you become a member-owner, which means you own a share of the house you live in. This means I don’t have to deal with a landlord of a rental apartment, and it also means that we can do whatever we want to with our house (within reason). This means that we can paint on the walls (the house is full of murals), grow a beautiful garden, and take responsibility for fixing things we break.

Slideshow of murals in the house.

17 people live here in total, and I share a room with an awesome girl named Catrina. After my awful roommate from last year, Catrina is everything I could ask for; we get along well and have similar preferences like leaving the window open and getting up early.

Catrina with chicken of the woods mushrooms and making peanut butter.

One of the best parts of living here is the division of labor. Anyone who has lived with other people will know that getting housemates to do chores is a very special kind of torture. In the co-op we have what is known as the 3 pillars of equity: fiscal equity (everybody pays room and board charges), social equity (everybody holds a position in the house), and sweat equity (everybody does chores). At the beginning of the week, we all sign up for an equal amount of chores on a google spreadsheet. This includes everything from cooking dinner to cleaning the bathrooms or fridges to watering the plants. Once you’ve done your chore, you have to verify it by posting a picture of it to our chore channel on slack (a messaging app) – this way, everyone can see that you’ve done the chores you signed up for. 5 nights a week 2 people cook dinner for everyone, and then we all eat dinner together. If you aren’t able to come at dinnertime, you can ask for a “late plate”, and a plate of food will be waiting for you when you get home. Living here means I never have to go grocery shopping for myself – we have a kitchen manager whose job it is to go shopping for the house, and my “rent” covers all my food. One of my housemates also works at the farmers market and brings home locally grown vegetables several times a week. This means I have everything I need in the kitchen and never need to worry about going shopping. We also buy a lot of food in bulk, because feeding 17 people is no small job. Much of our food is kept in 5-gallon buckets in our kitchen, and we have 4 fridges.

Picture 1: 2 of our 4 fridges. Picture 2: pantry and clothepins with our names on them, to be put on dishes if you're unable to do them right away. Picture 3: some bulk food bins. Picture 4: I made 16 dozen cookies and they lasted a total of 72 hours.

Now about house positions: we each have to hold a position within the house, and have house meetings every 2 weeks where officers give updates and we talk about what is going on in the house and what could be done better. Positions include house president, secretary, treasurer, maintenance manager, kitchen manager, chore manager, garden manager, social manager, and more. I decided to become garden manager, and have been working on turning our garden into a beautiful and productive space. I am growing lettuce, kale, snap peas, carrots, beets, and various beans. I’ve also trimmed back our giant passionfruit vine and worked with others to clean up and trim back various native and non-native plants in our garden. I’ve also made sure our whole yard has woodchips, which helps preserve soil moisture, and am working on planting native plants like sticky monkeyflower, hummingbird sage, and lemonadeberry.

Although living with this many people brings its own challenges and people don’t always get along due to different values or simply clashing personalities, I genuinely enjoy the company of everyone in the house. I’m never lonely – if I ever want to talk to people, I just go sit in the kitchen and there will be someone there to talk to. If I ever want to go to an event or do something like go on a hike, there will probably be someone in the house who will go with me. I love having instant friends in this way, but it also means that I haven’t made many close friends outside of the co-op, which is something I’m working on. However, making friends takes time and effort and it is always just so much easier to hang out with someone from the house.

Slideshow of pictures with housemates.

UCSB is known as a party school, and our house is not exempt from that: we threw four amazing parties in the past quarter. I would’ve never thought that I would enjoy parties because of the loud music and large crowd of people. However, with the help of earplugs and alcohol, I have had a lot of fun at the parties at our house. Having them at our house means that if I ever need a break I can just go hang out in my room for a little bit, and I don’t need to worry about walking home intoxicated. We also bounce at our parties, meaning that someone stands at the door and makes sure that everyone who comes in is vaccinated and knows someone in the house. This makes our parties a safe space without creepy guys, which is a significant improvement on many of the other parties in Isla Vista. Living at Manley has expanded my comfort zone and my social abilities and has exposed me to lots of different kinds of people.

Party pictures!

I also turned 21 in November, and these are my first legal drinks!

Last year, the apartment I lived in never felt like home, it was always just “the apartment”, and I did my best to spend as little time there as possible. Manley, however, has felt like home from the first day I moved in. I miss it already as I write this blog post on the train ride to Davis for winter break. I can see myself living here for the rest of college, which feels like a strange thing to say, because I haven’t lived in a place for more than 6 months since May 2019. I’ve become used to the lifestyle of starting over with new people every few months since then – being able to reinvent myself so frequently is a little bit addicting. After about 2 months in a place, I start to get restless, and look forward to leaving, even if I love the place. This is not a sustainable lifestyle, however, and Manley is giving me a chance to overcome that and have more continuity in my life. The garden has been the best part of this process for me: you can’t grow a beautiful garden in two months, and I am looking forward to seeing the garden grow and change with my help over the years.

Some pictures of Santa Barbara sunsets.

Classes

Fall quarter schedule.

This quarter was my first quarter of in-person college learning. I love the feeling of biking to class and the campus being full of life. In an effort not to overload myself I took 3 classes, which I enjoyed to varying degrees. I took a linguistics class about the relationship between language and power, which was a very interesting class that was quite a bit of work.

My second class was an environmental economics class, which was an introductory economics class taught from an environmental point of view. This meant that instead of comparing marginal benefits for each new pair of shoes, we compared the marginal cost and benefit of saving California Condors. This class gave me a lot of great information on environmental economic policies, and the professor was awesome. However, I still cannot say that I enjoy economics as a discipline, and I’m pretty glad to have that class, which is required for my major, finished.

My last class was a world music class, which I took for my music minor. In and of itself, the material was pretty interesting, if a bit shallow. Every week, we surveyed a music from a different part of the world, so I was exposed to lots of new music. However, I really disliked the professor for this class – the way he talked about different cultures felt not exactly directly disrespectful but irreverent and insensitive. He would make comments that would cause me to leave class smoking out the ears – according to him, our generation had no knowledge of history or culture. One day he asked the class, “do you guys know what 9/11 is?”. He was also a Deadhead (a fan of the band "The Grateful Dead"), and he would not let us forget it – he would find a way to bring the band up almost every class. At the end of the quarter, he asked us, “do you guys know who the Grateful Dead are?” Evidently, we had no memory either. The best part of this class was the guest lectures. One day, the professor for Indian music gave a guest lecture and musical demonstration with the sitar and tabla, a stringed instrument and drum. At the end of the class, he told us that he would be teaching a beginning sitar class next quarter. This is one of the most unique opportunities I have been presented with here, and I decided to sign up, so I will be learning how to play the sitar next quarter.

Research

Last spring, I started working in a lab on campus. This fall, I took on an independent research project in the lab. I have been fascinated with mushrooms for some time now, and this project allows me to dive into that interest headfirst, with the guidance of a wonderful post-doc advisor named Laura. I was also hired as an employee of the lab, which means I am getting paid $16 an hour to do work I would quite honestly do for free. It feels good to have my time valued in this way, and it is nice to know I am supporting myself through the work I do.

Some background for the project: many trees depend on mushrooms in the soil to help them access nutrients and water that would be difficult for them to extract on their own. They form a ectomycorrhizal relationships with certain kinds of fungi and trade sugars from photosynthesis in exchange for nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. This symbiotic relationship benefits both the tree and the fungus.

Different fungal communities made up of different species of fungi live in different places: some are better adapted to life in wet (mesic) conditions, like near a river; others are adapted to dry (arid) conditions where water is scarce.

For my project, we are looking at how fungal communities from arid and mesic conditions affect valley oak trees under drought stress. In other words, we’ve planted valley oak seedlings in soils from dry or wet places, and we will withhold water from all the seedlings and see which ones do better. Our hypothesis is that the fungi from the arid soil will help the oak tree seedlings more in a drought, because they are adapted to those conditions.

This quarter, I conducted a pilot drought experiment on a couple trees. In January we will begin the drought treatment for all the trees, measuring the trees every week to see how they are reacting to the drought. Once its over, we will harvest the trees to determine their biomass, and also sequence the fungal DNA from the roots of the trees to determine what species of fungi the trees have formed relationships with.

Another large part of this quarter was applying for funding for the project. There is an organization called the Coastal Fund at UCSB, which receives funding from student tuition. A panel of undergraduate students, graduate students, and advisors are tasked with distributing that funding to various initiatives and projects on campus. I applied for a major grant, which is more than $10,000. This was my first experience writing a grant application for a project, and Laura helped me put together an extensive proposal. I also had to give a presentation over zoom to the Coastal Fund Board. The whole process taught me so much about grant proposal writing and presentations and was probably the best thing I could have done at the beginning of this project because it solidified my knowledge of the project and helped me develop my science communication skills immensely.

The Coastal Fund decided to give me $10,315 to fund the DNA extraction and analysis, pay me for the hours I work on the project, and help with costs of presenting my project at the Ecological Society of America conference in August. This was obviously a huge step for me, not just because it means I have the funding to carry out the project but because it is real, tangible proof that my work interesting and important to others besides myself. Strangers believe in me and the work I am doing. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities and people who have helped me get here, to the point where I can be doing work that is worth funding in this way.

My trees in the greenhouse and some soil samples.

Capoeira

I also joined a new capoeira group this quarter. Mestre Mariano Silva leads the Santa Barbara capoeira group, and I signed up for the class he taught through the university. He realized that I was not new to capoeira as soon as I introduced myself with my capoeira name and started moving. The style is different from what I’m used to, and often I find myself missing the capoeira group in Flagstaff, because the capoeira there feels like its higher quality. Often classes here feel like we are just drilling kicks like you might in a more traditional martial art. Nevertheless, it’s great to be doing capoeira again, no matter the form. A couple weeks into the quarter I joined the studio and started going to classes there. It’s expensive and it’s always a struggle to drag myself there, because its 20 minutes away by bike or bus. It’s worth it, however, because I always leave class feeling energized and strong.

Next Quarter

Next quarter I am taking 4 classes and working in the lab. Along with the sitar class I will be taking environmental chemistry, statistics, and an English class about Native American stories. Both the chemistry and the statistics class are relevant to my work in the lab, and I am very excited about taking them, which is a good sign because without the lab I would probably be dreading them. My interest in indigenous land management also prompted me to declare a second minor: American Indian and Indigenous Studies. The Native American stories class is one of the prerequisites for the minor, and I am really looking forward to that class too.

Winter quarter class schedule - busy during the week but free on Fridays!