I live in the Hawthorne area of Portland, which is not really a neighborhood at all but a so-called shopping district. It's also frequently referred to as a shopping mecca or destination, as if those other areas with shops in them are by rule only frequented by neighborhood inhabitants, you are forbidden to go there from outside for any commercial or entertainment reason, whereas destination zones like Hawthorne are fair game for one and all. I actually live in the Sunnyside neighborhood, which is jampacked with women who self-identify as "hip mamas," presumably because they push baby strollers but would prefer you didn't think of them as "mothers" in the vaguely pejorative way they are certain you mean that term. They are always putting ads in Craigslist looking for other "hip mamas" to get together with, perhaps with the intention of linking their individual smugnesses into larger more formidable smugness battalions to patrol the side streets sneering at childless people who actually wouldn't trade places with the "hip mamas" if you paid them enormous sums of cash money and lied about how great it is. The Sunnyside neighborhood (where people live) more or less abuts the Hawthorne shopping and entertainment district, where people go to buy shoes and get drunk. It's crammed with so-called boutiques, which apparently means storefronts full of worthless gewgaws for decorating the apartments of young women, most of whom if pressed would declare themselves "spiritual but not traditionally religious," brave independent minds that they are. Women go to Hawthorne to accessorize, accessorize, accessorize, and to buy scented soaps and ugly thrift store tops and "edgy" vinylwear at the kinds of places I think of as "Spencer Gifts Ten Years Later." Hilariously, city guidebooks usually refer to the area as "funky" and "bohemian." I avoid Hawthorne except to go to the ATM and the useful Powell's satellite and Jackpot Records. I especially avoid walking by the dreadful Goddess Gallery and Clogs-N-More.