On Life in PB: You never wanna be the old girl at the club

Not my observation, Chris Rock's actually. But it's a pretty accurate one, even though with the whole Sex and the City revolution (yes, it was a revolution) it's kind of hard to be the OLD girl at the club, because those girls are always gonna be older (and wearing way more expensive shoes).

People pick on PB (that's Pacific Beach for those not familiar) because it's like one big club that once you reach the ripe old age of say, oh I don't know, 27, you start to look around and feel like the old person at the club. There are young people everywhere, on the street, in the restaurants, sitting in the windows of the Bar and Grill, getting pizza, shopping for cheap clothing, finding parking, checking themselves out in the store windows, checking each other out as they walk by. It's a young place, for young people, to be young (and drink a lot). Heck, when the Real World was being filmed in San Diego, the one place those "real" people kept coming to was right there in PB (that would be the PB Bar and Grill, which I've been to once, New Years Eve, there was a Reggae Band there and despite my better judgment, I had fun).

People pick on PB because it's so easy to pick on, what with the girls in short skirts and the guys with their overly indulgent oogling of said short skirts. You don't have the hippy-ness of OB nor the hipness of Hillcrest or Golden Hill nor the hipster of say Kensington. You don't even have the money of La Jolla or the loudness of the College Area. Instead you have a beach town, covered in girls who think they are cute and lots (and lots) of places to drink.

Before I left San Diego I was a PB girl (a north PB girl, which FYI north PB'ers really like to separate themselves from "every other PB-er). I'd found my place, and my place was tourmaline beach and coffee houses and The Turquoise and Froggy's Bar and Grill and Rafaela's and OCCASIONALLY a visit to Garnet Street.

And then I moved away.

Coming on back to PB I noticed a few things that I hadn't before. First, there aren't a lot of babies in PB. Wait, let me change that, there aren't a lot of homosapiens younger than 15 in PB and in turn there aren't a lot of homosapiens who are older than 27. At least not in the places that I wanted to visit.

That, and there aren't really a lot of places to eat that don't somehow involve a bar.

So there I was with my Baby Girl and my friends and we're trying to find a place to eat and we keep shouting out names "how about here, or here, or here" and we keep hearing (from my friend's boyfriend) "I think that's a bar. That's actually a bar too. That one too." This was a hard reality to face, perhaps my PB life would be very, very different now (what with the baby and the husband) and perhaps I would have to learn it all over again.

Even going to the grocery store where normally you see at least one other mother, and that mother smiles her knowing smile. Or there are at least gaggles of people who do a quick "oh cute, look at that cute little baby" or a nice "what a cute baby" or even "wow, she's so well behaved." Not in PB, oh no, they mostly stick to their own agendas, maybe throw a glance here and there at the little homosapien that is grabbing for things off the shelf. And there we were in line behind, what can only be described as that guy I would have told my best friend about had it been, you know, the old PB, nice smile, dark eyes, strong jaw... and my baby girl starts smiling at him (when she had spent the whole time staring down everyone else) and making giggly noises. And the PB guy, smiles back.

She's already learning...