(Interlude)

By the time I graduated from college, I needed a break. I had decided to go to law school and focus on international law and human rights, but applying right away felt like too much. And because I had always been young for my grade, if I took a year off, I would still start law school at 22. That sounded good to me, so I made plans to spend my gap year in the Bay Area.

I spent a couple months staying with my grandmother in Oakland, applying for jobs and studying for the LSAT. Then I found a room in an apartment in Berkeley within walking distance of my job at Tupper & Reed, a music store and Berkeley institution.

Berkeley was like Santa Cruz with the intensity dialed way up. Weed was a way of life in Santa Cruz—it was considered good manners to pass a bong to someone as they walked in the door—but these Berkeley kids were serious about getting high. We would pool our money for rolling paper and one of them bought the Vicodin I had left over from getting my wisdom teeth out.

One day, my grandmother decided to have a serious talk with me about drugs. She asked, “If you wanted to get marijuana, do you think you could?”

I thought about the pot truffles in my bag, made with care by some friends at a clothing-optional co-op. “Yes, grandmother. I think I could.”

The nudity was more intense, too. There were plenty of naked people at Santa Cruz, but they tended to wander around wearing feather boas or sleeping in meadows. In Berkeley, they were a little more aggressive.

When I hung out at my friend’s co-op (the one where I got the truffles), her boyfriend liked to jump out into the hall, wagging his penis at us. It was more funny than anything else. There was also a lot of naked hot-tubbing until my boyfriend at the time begged me to stop being naked in front of other people (I reluctantly agreed).

Strangely, all of that was exactly what I needed. I spent my days selling pianos, violins, and guitar strings with pretty serious musicians (the type that would gig for Google in the evenings) and my evenings with hipsters and hippies. When my coworkers and I went out for beers at the bar next door, one asked how many of us had been to band camp. Everyone raised their hand.

My roommate was getting a Ph.D. at Berkeley and she scoffed at law school. “They never seem like they’re working,” she said about the Berkeley law students. I thought that was unlikely, but it sounded good to me.