Bobos

According to urbandictionary.com:

A bobo is:

1. Bourgeois Bohemian.
Yuppie types who pretend not to be... by decorating with Indian motifs, wearing turquoise jewelry, taking yoga classes, talking about their chakras, etc.

2. Bourgeois Bohême, in French.
Yuppies or dinks who live as if they weren't, love to differentiate themselves by visiting foreign countries before the herd of ordinary tourists flock after them (Croatia a few years ago, now the Baltic states), eat alternative/fair trade/organic food such as "bio fair trade Miso soup". They tend to live in mixed neighbourhoods to be near the poor, but they send their children to private schools to avoid too close a contact with the natives and they price all the poor out of the neighbourhoods they gentrify. Of course they concentrate in some parts of Paris and never could live in "la province". They often vote for the Communists or the Greens but take the fullest advantage of the tax gifts offered by right-wing governments.

I am squarely in the yuppie category (although I'm not so young anymore, so does that just me an uppie?). I recently took up yoga (although I don't talk about chakras). I do like to visit "undiscovered" places. I don't normally obsess over fair trade or organic foods but recently had lunch at a raw vegan restaurant where my food was all organic, all vegan and all uncooked...and I liked it. I live in SoMa, which is definitely a mixed neighborhood that is slowly becoming gentrified (but I don't plan to send my kids to private school....just move to a neighborhood with good public schools...maybe the same difference). And although I am rooting for Obama, I rant when tax season rolls around about the unfairness of the amount of taxes I pay.

Crap. Am I a bobo? I prefer to say I'm just San Franciscan, which means you can be two (or more) seemingly contradictory things - and that doesn't make you a hypocrite or a lunatic, it makes you a more whole, well-rounded person. You can be a hippie AND a yuppie. You can be an ocean-lover AND a mountain-lover. You can love a 5-course meal at Gary Danko as much as you love a $4 burrito at El Farolito. You can be a tree-hugging, bottled water-shunning environmentalist and still justify renting a gas-guzzling SUV to drive up to Tahoe. You can work in the FiDi and still do yoga. Who says you can only be bohemian if you are poor? Or rather, who says only bohemians care about taking care of themselves physically and spiritually, their environment, their community, etc. Shouldn't everyone strive to be both fiscally responsible and a free spirit?