[a very writable city]

Santa Barbara takes me aback each time I come home. So many of its nuances and flavors are unique to this single town, a strip of land that holds the Pacific in one hand and quiet mountains in the other.

Take the little microcosm of Farmers' Market, for example. It tells stories about dreadlocked girls with tanned hands that arrange raspberries, of cancer survivors blowing into strange instruments, and of an older Mexican man eating halved avocados, squeezing them straight from the skin into his mouth.

I always forget about the disparity here too. How rich it is, how poor it is.  This is a place where even hippies shop at Whole Foods and drop real money on a few vegan meals. Santa Barbara's boroughs look quite different than those of a major city, but fine lines are still drawn. While I am too young and uninformed to be arrogant about the intricacies of money, it is nevertheless a small culture shock to move between frugal college living and this place.

It's a very writeable city, marked by art and discontinuity and beauty. The architecture. The division. The tourists. The fires. The people and gangs and churches and faces...
if I want to write about the way places shape people, how has Santa Barbara shaped us?