Manhattan: because I'd never make it as a farmer

-New Brooklyn continues to represent aspirational farming by non-ethnic white people. On that front, we have Swedish Brooklyn obsession, and the expansion of already-suburban New Brooklyn to actual suburbs. (Brooklyn, in case you were concerned, has yet to reach Princeton. Although we are getting a farm-to-table restaurant, and already have a cheerily Park Slope-ish coffee shop.)

-Yesterday, in the tragically non-hip borough of Manhattan, a really long-standing wanty was achieved: galaxy-print leggings. These, I believe, so $20, and the price had thus far been the obstacle. The price I paid, however, was that these leggings were being sold in a store on lower Broadway that I'd have never entered had I not seen them in the window. A store for tween girls and/or club kids, the overlap's substantial. The overlap with what I wear, not so substantial, and limited, I suspect, to these particular leggings. In any case, there were several dressing rooms, each of which contained a clown-car's worth of the popular girls at that age, accompanied by a really enthusiastic mom of one or more of them, who kept bringing her daughter/all the girls more stuff to try on, seemingly unsolicited. It appeared they'd come into the city for this, and had unofficially rented the store for a coming-of-age celebration of some kind. I couldn't decide if the problem was that they were taking forever or if it was that I was shopping at a store whose shopping bag bears the slogan, "Girls Only." But the leggings themselves (to be worn as tights, thank-you-very-much) are spectacular.

-Soba-ya continues to be the center of the universe. Not only because for $14, you can get a "mini" lunch special that's a sashimi bowl, a bowl of handmade-soba-noodle soup (neither "mini"), and various extras (or, for less $, a more sensible amount of food), and it will be all of it amazing, two of the best lunches you've ever eaten, and for the price of a hamburger in Princeton, but also because there, eating alone at the counter with book-and-phone, as I sometimes would to treat myself after an especially long week, was a punk legend/literary sensation.