Post-Target irony

An amusing article in the Washington Post tells about a Target and other icons of suburbia moving into a cool, hipster neighborhood. At first the cool people would go to these places in order to be ironic. Then they start liking them, which makes them feel guilty. They, as is the danger with other drugs, they get addicted. Excerpts from Columbia Heights Hipsters Stumble Into Target Territory :

“I’m 30,” says Ana Marin, a bartender with a nose piercing and cool square glasses. On a Thursday evening, she shops at Target. “I [freaking] want matching sheets. The fact that Target came at the same time that I stopped wanting to use a T-shirt as a pillowcase . . .” Well, she’s not sure if one affected the other.

“The proximity definitely accelerates” my behavior, sighs Lauren Cameron, 26, who is drifting around Target on a recent evening, carrying a twiggy wreath covered in yellow flowers. She plans to put the wreath on her door. She did not used to be the type of person who would think about buying seasonal wreaths, not Before Target. After Target, things have changed.

This is all fine and good, but the problem with a Target is that it can lead to other nefarious pursuits. It’s a gateway drug to other suburban activities.

A tattled confession: “The other day Bob went to Ruby Tuesday’s.” Bob Arkedis’s friends, clustered around an outdoor table at the Wonderland for a recent happy hour, take great delight in ratting him out.

“It was kind of a joke,” Arkedis explains to the group. This one time just happened because there was a group of people, and they were all hungry, and they wanted something fast, and they’d just finished doing some activity, so everyone was hungry, so . . . “It’s actually not that bad,” Arkedis tells his friends defensively. But as a one-time deal. “I won’t go back again.”

So he says now.

Claibourne Reppert, a tattooed hairstylist who lives on Euclid, has recently begun spending her Mondays off at Ruby Tuesday, which is across from the Target complex. “I don’t know how we ended up there” the first time, she says. But once they did, “We all thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of ironic and stupid.’ ” So they all stayed, and ordered ironic and stupid sangria and appetizers. Then they came back the next week and did it again. The Thai Phoon Shrimp is so cheesy and lame that they have to keep ordering it.

But at what point, someone asks Reppert, will the Thai Phoon Shrimp stop being cheesy and just start being tasty? At what point will suburban stop being ironic and just start being . . . life?

“I think,” Reppert says, “I have gotten to that point.”

It’s called growing up, Claibourne. Before long, you won’t even care about being cool.