In my quest to become the most hated person on the UCSD campus, I spent this summer in Berkeley. Yep, my home for the summer was that crusty hippie- and hobo-infested haven for the finest fruits and nuts America has to offer.

Not only that, but I didn’t live in an apartment, dorm or house like a normal, sane person. I lived in a co-op. “A commune?” my friends would invariably ask, giggling, whenever I informed them of this. “No!” I would answer, the bile rising in my throat. “A co-op! A cooperative! They’re …”

Well, let me give you the full definition. Co-ops are big houses where hordes of scrubby college students live together so when our personal belongings get ripped off when we’re out, we have 20, 50 or even 100 housemates to commiserate with.

We don’t have co-ops here at UCSD (except the kind that sell cheap bagels and interpret “cooperate” as “fight to stay on campus”). Co-op housing is all about communal living, so rent stays low and people pool their labor so the house remains clean, standing and stocked with toilet paper. Except this was Berkeley, and these were college students, so the house is never clean, and it lacked toilet paper more often than not. It came with the territory, really.

The cleanliness of my particular co-op was so neglected that we had an extra tenant in the house — a rat, nicknamed Splinter, who had made a cameo appearance during a house meeting a few days before I moved in. I know what happened because the screams of the girls who spotted the rat were still echoing throughout the house three days later when I lugged my duffel bag up the stairs to my room, wondering if I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life.

My bedroom wasn’t even worth talking about, so in classic Indecent Exposure fashion, I’m going to dwell on it at length.

Outside of the hobos roaming People’s Park, my room was the ugliest thing I’ve seen — ever — in my whole entire life. Someone had literally slapped paint on the walls — paint in the shade of Technicolor Hospital Blue. I like blue, I love blue, blue is in fact my favorite color, but this blue made me go green in the gills. Inwardly, I referred to my room as “the blue room,” outwardly I’d introduce the space to friends from outside the house with, “This is my room. No need to tell me it sucks, I know it does.”

You know how on MTV’s “Cribs,” everyone always has to introduce the bedroom with the wink-wink nudge-nudge boast of “This is where all the magic happens?” Well, my room was so utterly bereft of magic, it actually made people cry upon seeing it. That’s just how bad it was.

With the Technicolor Bruise walls imposing so much, though, the other nasty features of the room were less noticeable. The mattress sagged even when no weight was upon it, the room was lit (or, more often, not lit) by one dim fluorescent light that worked only on occasion, a tiny recess in the wall functioned as a closet, and the one small window framed a screen hanging on by a thread of masking tape.

Needless to say, I spent as little time there as possible. I kept myself busy enough so that when I came home to crash in the wee hours of the morning, I wouldn’t notice or at least wouldn’t care, that I could feel the wood platform of my bed frame through my mattress.

Of course, after living in a commune — er, co-op — all summer, moving back down here was a bit of a shock. I now have only five roommates instead of seventeen, and instead of having an elusive rat crawling around in the floorboards, we have two very friendly, very clean cats. We actually do dishes and clean the floor more than once a month, and I don’t have to worry about some unnamed person stealing all my food from the fridge. And, most importantly, my room doesn’t look like shit.

So, yes, if you’re one of those people who hates Berkeley on principle, you could use my experience as an affirmation that all the nasty stereotypes about it are true. It’s stinky, dirty and dangerous. The ocean is cold, the hills are steep and the weed is abundant.

It is, in short, an acquired taste. It’s not in-your-face beautiful and sunny and bouncy like choice parts of Southern California — but some people are simply not in-your-face beautiful and sunny and bouncy. And by “some people,” I mean me.