Mission Viejo
Dec. 24th, 2005 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nibotI ate lunch on the patio, by the pool. Thai style chicken over steamed rice with green beans, made by my mother. Maybe I've been feeling the Winter more this year in Rochester, but Southern California seems ever more Southern Californian. There are palm trees swaying in the breeze outside of Terminal 1 at LAX. There are palm trees on this street too. And bougainvillea, too.
This house is bustling as always, most recently with a french exchange student who was living here, and my brother's girlfriend and her baby Marcus have moved in too. My brother Eric (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
frickeec), now back from Iraq, seems to split his time between here and staying on base at the nearby USMC Camp Pendleton. My other brother, Kris (emosnail) is here too, down from UC Davis for the holidays.
Mission Viejo is largely a bedroom community, generally what I would call "suburban hell," a place without any center and with little sense of history, though the climate and terrain certainly are nice enough. It is always enjoyable to find interesting independent businesses, or anything to give the place a soul.
Today I did find a hole-in-the-wall used book shop. Their literature section was limited to the greats—Hemmingway, Twain, Fitzgerald, etc—but that's a start. More enjoyable was the Mexican grocery next door, where I pawed through all the exotic wares, bought a new kind of hot chocolate beverage. Wishing the proprietor feliz navidad, the place pulled at my mexico-bound wanderlust. It is 87 miles from here to the Mexican border.
In the afternoon I went with my brother Eric in his new truck to Borders, and on the way he demoed his freight-train horns, three shiny trumpets mounted on the undercarriage of his monster truck, to the utter confusion and general terror of other drivers. Eric, who in the Marines works in "airframe maintenance" patching up Hueys and Cobras and other helicopters after they get shot up or otherwise in disrepair, was on his way to Toys R Us to purchase a Batman Helicopter toy for the kid Marcus.
Borders is as soulless a place as they come, and I feel bad going there but rationalize it by purchasing nothing. Except, in this case, a pleasantly-caffeinated cappucino from the built-in Seattle's Best franchise, which made my head hurt a lot less and generally put me at ease again in the world. I pawed through a copy of OC Weekly looking for some novel entertainment but was unsurprised to find all the goings-on to be in far-away (slightly older, slightly more urban, much less yuppy, possibly hipper, not as rich) North County, that part of the county that retained the 714 area code.
Walking the isles of a well-stocked bookstore is a therapeutic ritual for me. At some place like Borders it loses some appeal, but running my fingers along the spines of the volumes at Black Oak or Moe's—it's like taking stock of human knowledge again, reorganizing my thoughts and reconsidering my interests. Aside from being a big-box monstrosity and only stocking new wares, Borders is a good bookstore. Separating the wheat from the chaff as the cappucino massaged my brain, what remained as objects of my fancy were:
Tensor Analysis on Manifolds by Bishop and Goldberg
How the Universe got its Spots by Janna Levin
Statistical Mechanics: A Set of Lectures by R. P. Feynman
The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon
and various works by Joan Didion.
When someone took my spot at that table (my piles of books scattered about on it, a mess I felt twinges of guilt leaving for some corporate employee to reshelf) I decided to make my egress.
Through a confluence of local politics (the small fights of greedy fiefdoms), the only way into this particular big-box shopping center is via a long arching bridge that is by no means the shortest path between there and my parents' house. Instead I jumped a fence, casting, as always, a scofflaw glance at the Railroad's warnings about tresspassing and all that and walked home under the interstate, along the railroad, and through my old high school, carrying nothing but my little notebook and that copy of the OC weekly.
This house is bustling as always, most recently with a french exchange student who was living here, and my brother's girlfriend and her baby Marcus have moved in too. My brother Eric (
frickeec), now back from Iraq, seems to split his time between here and staying on base at the nearby USMC Camp Pendleton. My other brother, Kris (emosnail) is here too, down from UC Davis for the holidays.Mission Viejo is largely a bedroom community, generally what I would call "suburban hell," a place without any center and with little sense of history, though the climate and terrain certainly are nice enough. It is always enjoyable to find interesting independent businesses, or anything to give the place a soul.
Today I did find a hole-in-the-wall used book shop. Their literature section was limited to the greats—Hemmingway, Twain, Fitzgerald, etc—but that's a start. More enjoyable was the Mexican grocery next door, where I pawed through all the exotic wares, bought a new kind of hot chocolate beverage. Wishing the proprietor feliz navidad, the place pulled at my mexico-bound wanderlust. It is 87 miles from here to the Mexican border.
In the afternoon I went with my brother Eric in his new truck to Borders, and on the way he demoed his freight-train horns, three shiny trumpets mounted on the undercarriage of his monster truck, to the utter confusion and general terror of other drivers. Eric, who in the Marines works in "airframe maintenance" patching up Hueys and Cobras and other helicopters after they get shot up or otherwise in disrepair, was on his way to Toys R Us to purchase a Batman Helicopter toy for the kid Marcus.
Borders is as soulless a place as they come, and I feel bad going there but rationalize it by purchasing nothing. Except, in this case, a pleasantly-caffeinated cappucino from the built-in Seattle's Best franchise, which made my head hurt a lot less and generally put me at ease again in the world. I pawed through a copy of OC Weekly looking for some novel entertainment but was unsurprised to find all the goings-on to be in far-away (slightly older, slightly more urban, much less yuppy, possibly hipper, not as rich) North County, that part of the county that retained the 714 area code.
Walking the isles of a well-stocked bookstore is a therapeutic ritual for me. At some place like Borders it loses some appeal, but running my fingers along the spines of the volumes at Black Oak or Moe's—it's like taking stock of human knowledge again, reorganizing my thoughts and reconsidering my interests. Aside from being a big-box monstrosity and only stocking new wares, Borders is a good bookstore. Separating the wheat from the chaff as the cappucino massaged my brain, what remained as objects of my fancy were:
Tensor Analysis on Manifolds by Bishop and Goldberg
How the Universe got its Spots by Janna Levin
Statistical Mechanics: A Set of Lectures by R. P. Feynman
The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon
and various works by Joan Didion.
When someone took my spot at that table (my piles of books scattered about on it, a mess I felt twinges of guilt leaving for some corporate employee to reshelf) I decided to make my egress.
Through a confluence of local politics (the small fights of greedy fiefdoms), the only way into this particular big-box shopping center is via a long arching bridge that is by no means the shortest path between there and my parents' house. Instead I jumped a fence, casting, as always, a scofflaw glance at the Railroad's warnings about tresspassing and all that and walked home under the interstate, along the railroad, and through my old high school, carrying nothing but my little notebook and that copy of the OC weekly.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-24 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-26 07:42 am (UTC)Oh, and for something to do, try the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary (http://www.tuckerwildlife.org) (on the off chance you haven't at some point already). Alternately, I've just discovered the abundance of geocaches in this area.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 03:00 am (UTC)that's hilarous.