Half Moon Bay. Pleasant small town. Crunchy yuppie stuff and child rearing scenes. Katie's friend Stephanie grew up here, living on a boat.

Picked up, to my surprise, a used copy of Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, in the used book store here. Marked up only in the first chapter.

Excellent, strong coffee available every ten yards. Why did the culture of strong coffee never develop in the East? Must be the French/Italian take on eating, which involves taking time to enjoy one's food, never happened in the East, esp. New York City, where food is quickly shoveled into one's mouth as you earn money or race toward the next marker. That, or eating is an excuse to be seen in a status-generating/reinforcing room, where one waits to enter, and is then rushed out like an item in a factory.

NYC has a dispiriting, corporate-dork Starbucks every two blocks, but does not have anything like the coffee culture of the west coast. The East Village has many small coffee shops that survive, not one of which has coffee one tenth as good as an average place the Bay Area. Not exactly about coffee. It is about whether there is an expectation that one is ever suppose to feel that they are abiding within their own duration, even for a small stretch. In the culture of NYC this feeling would be taken as a sign of weakness.