I think I've mentioned before that my mom moved from the C-Juana to the Juana by the Sea. No Juana here. I am situated at the coffeehouse down the hill from my mom's house. The place is full of geriatrics and gently wrinkled mothers sporting large diamonds and sixty-ish long-haired earth mother types, the ones who have "arrived" but don't have the ticket stub to prove it. A few high school kids with laptops are absorbing the meagre number of outlets available.
There is a bookstore next door, a very useful, hoary one. Del Mar, like Northampton, suffers from a dearth of 30-year-olds. If you're thirty and can afford a house in this neighborhood, then novel-writing is probably not one of your endeavors. The book store has creaky wooden floors. Keep in mind that it's in a stucco strip mall with an artisanal cheese shop and a couple of Precious Decadence-type stores. The floors, their creakiness, was designed by a firm with an LLP designation that has a very high hourly rate. I must say that this coffeehouse has gelato, if that floats your boat.
It's strange how an age demographic can define a place. It seems that everyone in Austin is young, or at least does a good job acting young. The heat, the spirit, the real estate prices keep the very young hip vibe alive.
Even the Target is uppity. Everyone was white and if children were present, their carts were filled with the pink and blue plastic spoils of the spoiled. When I casually mentioned that my mom had moved up here from C-Juana, the cashier made this "uh!" noise, like, "uh! Your mom moved from the rat-infested diarrhea-strewn streets of Perdition, aka TIjuana." This from a dude in a red shirt making $10/hr. C-Juana has a bad rep here in North County.
The thing is, to say that you've moved from the C-Juana to Del Freakin' Mar is to make a statement about your assets. People move to C-Juana because it's one of the last bastions of affordability in San Diego. People move here to avoid the types of people that live in the C-Juana. That wasn't the greatest motivator for my mom, but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't part of it. I mean, the Target here is clean. Damn clean. Not as clean as the one in Holyoke, but clean enough.
Posted by Zerd at June 2, 2007 04:00 PM