Two

You went to a state school that wasn’t Cal, or a second-tier liberal-arts school — when you mention your alma mater’s name, people generally scratch their heads and ask, “Where’s that again?” Its most famous alumni include one of the foremost gender theorists, a screenwriter for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and an eccentric biologist who invented the green anti-bacterial coating on public-toilet handles.

The woman who invented this went to your alma mater. Photo: Sloan

You have $58,000 in student debt from a number of different loan companies. You have been paying it for eight years, but the principal is still the same. You think student loans are probably a financial ruse and believe that some day Anonymous will hack Sallie Mae and delete everyone’s debt.

At one point, you thought you would someday live in the city, but now you feel horrified at how it’s changed since your youth. You think people who still live in San Francisco are all rich techies, and after walking through the Marina, you feel the need to shower.

Your new housemates include a Hatha yoga teacher, a sociology PhD student, an abortion counselor and a freelance body worker. You are not sure you know what body work is, but you pretend like you do.

You have been living in a co-op in North Berkeley for the past two years, paying $950/month, which was just a little more than you could afford; you shopped at Grocery Outlet (which you call “Gross-Out” for short) instead of Berkeley Bowl to save money. When your house’s landlord — a white, 55-year-old libertarian intactivist—loses his IT job and has to move in with you, you feel irked that you can no longer walk around semi-nude. Everyone else in the house is between 25 and 34 and queer and/or vegan, and voted for Bernie Sanders. You decide it’s time to move.

Moving is a vicious process and takes three to six months. The last time you moved, you had to cycle through three sublets in Richmond, Oakland and Albany. You join every affordable-housing and queer-housing Facebook group you can find and scour them for several hours each day. Finally, you find a shared house in West Oakland with a room opening for $775/month. You beat out 27 other applicants to get it. Your new housemates include a Hatha yoga teacher, a sociology PhD student, an abortion counselor and a freelance body worker. You are not sure you know what body work is, but you pretend like you do.

When they call you to let you know you got the room, you are ecstatic. You suspect that the housemates were won over by your frank discussion of deep ecologist Derrick Jensen’s troubling transphobia and the gluten-free carrot cake you brought to the third interview.

All your friends are teachers, social workers or some kind of nonprofit employee. The younger ones are bike messengers or baristas. The older ones are art therapists.

You feel vaguely uncomfortable about being a gentrifier, but this place in West Oakland is all you can afford. To make up for your guilt, you join several housing-activist groups on Facebook. Two weeks after moving into your new home, your car window gets smashed, though nothing is stolen. You find a guy in East Oakland who can fix it for $175, which is a lot of money but not devastating.

All your friends are teachers, social workers or some kind of nonprofit employee. The younger ones are bike messengers or baristas. The older ones are art therapists. You have acquaintances who work in tech, but you don’t really ever see them and can’t relate to their lives. You are not in a labor union, but you have strong, positive feelings about them. Everyone you know is an artist of some sort. When you meet someone new, the first thing you ask them is what they’d ideally like to be doing.

You don’t have any magazine subscriptions, but you read a lot of Jezebel, ThinkProgress and McSweeney’s. You leech off your parents’ Netflix, HBO GO and New York Times subscriptions.

You had a savings account, but when you moved, you depleted most of it. You take solace in the fact that you could always sell your car — a 2003 Honda Civic — in the event of an emergency. Despite worrying about money constantly, you’ve never actually gone bankrupt, and you know you could always crash with your parents if you had to.

And speaking of parents: Your parents are middle-income, one a public servant and the other a lactation consultant. They inherited $20,000 from a deceased relative when you were three, which enabled them to buy a house in Sacramento, where you grew up. Your parents specifically picked that neighborhood for its good public schools and because they were charmed by the feral chickens that roamed the streets freely.

You will live with housemates until you are 37, at which point you will move, with your partner and your rescue pitbull, to Seattle, Portland or Pittsburgh.

When you hear the word “gentrification,” you feel guilt and anger at once.