So you want to be a co-oper, eh? Well it’s not as easy as donning a pair of Birkenstocks, getting yourself a stray dog and walking around bare-foot. No, being a co-oper takes more than simply learning a really good hummus recipe, and how to make a bong out of an old anti-corporate protest sign. It takes Laziness, Sloth, and good old-fashioned Apathy. How do I know? I don’t. I’ve never taken the time to verify this. That’s why I’m the king of the co-ops.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you Berkeley freshmen go out and just stop caring. That could be dangerous, and it’s also just a bit too ambitious to be truly apathetic. Ease into it at your dorm. Start using Latin abbreviations and parentheses to avoid having to organize your thoughts in any meaningful way, etc. Next time someone mentions Great Expectations, simply disregard the urge to make a point of the fact that Dickens got paid by the word. If you must say something, shrug and claim that you never learned to read, then call the person by the wrong name while falling asleep in midsentence. It may be hard at first but soon you’ll be–well, you won’t be doing much of anything at all, really. And that’s exactly the point.
Let’s review what we’ve learned thus far: Wrong! If you didn’t immediately skip this paragraph, you still have a lot of work (i.e. loafing, sleeping, skipping unnecessary parenthetical statements etc.) ahead of you.
This brings me to the subject of fulfilling the draconian five-hour-a-week quota the co-ops force on King and pauper alike. Five hours is a long time to spend doing something you don’t care about (which should be everything). The answer to this dilemma can be summed up in two words: “Cook” and “ing.” I don’t think anyone in the co-ops has actually sat down and drawn up a graph of work input vs. quality output for cooking for 40 people, but if they did, they would waste a bunch of time. I certainly haven’t drawn such a graph, or even stopped to learn what the word “graph” means, but if I cared to guess (which of course I would do if I had time but I’ve been really busy lately, doing something … okay, not really) I would say that it almost didn’t matter how little effort you put into cooking tofu. Once you learn how to chop onions while thinking about boobs, you almost forget what the beginning of this sentence was even talking about doing what I don’t know what this sentence is boobs.
When I was in eighth grade, our teacher made us do book reports on each week’s reading. Although the minimum number of sentences was 8, some students still found this limit too high and had to pad out their reports with useless sentences that had nothing to do with the actual subject. After some haggling, our teacher finally agreed to allow us one vacuous sentence at the end of each report: “I liked this book.” I know this sounds like a second grade assignment but I was in eighth grade. My school was not very challenging.
