I walk out of my apartment, down a broad avenue lined with short, meek, mangled trees while trying to act nonchalant toward the gazes of men that walk by, Latino gentlemen who try and catch my eye to let me know that they appreciate my beauty — my fleeting, bursting youth.

I turn the corner, not towards 24th Street Bart where it becomes bustling and transitory, but the other way, away from Mission Street, to where the sun beats down on the colorfully adorned shop windows. I recognize the sun, it’s the afternoon sun of Europe. It’s the old, threadbare, generous sun of Paris and Madrid. The old-world sun isn’t cruel but caressing.

24th Street is lined with tall, lush trees that draw a leafy layer on the quaint street decorated with fragile red, white, and green paper flags strewn up billowing in the wind. There are old record stores, incomprehensibly obsolete magazine companies with store fronts, delis with their grates still drawn at two in the afternoon. Colorful, defaced murals and the sun bleaching them tell us stories of street artists who once stood there painting walls alongside Michelangelo.

I pass by the bar where my Mission friends hang out. I hear that the owner of the bar recently got his front door defaced by the spray-painted hateful word, “Techie.” He acted annoyed but couldn’t hide the self-assured grin of having assimilated, of having achieved a life-style that the have-nots attribute to selling out.

Cholos ride high and low on their trucks blasting bass. Young moms and young dads wait for the bus with babies on their chests as they sit on kind makeshift benches and abandoned stools on the corner.

Professionals, aspiring acts, coders coding their lives sit in a streamlined cafe drinking designer coffee, dominating the sparsely spaced tables and chairs that are in antithesis to the old, dusty, windy window treatments of mexican variety stores.

A shirtless man tries to come in. His skin isn’t sun-kissed but raw like jerky. He is given water in a paper cup and is promptly, deftly turned away. Skate-boarders growl by, overweight middle-aged white men on expensive Harley’s roar by yearning for a nod from strangers.

In this neighborhood are several Mexican bakeries with splotchily painted windows. Stacks upon stacks of giant, sugar and sprinkle-coated cookies and pastries are on display. The enormous size and their obscene abundance is perhaps distinctly American, and is ingenuous, sweetly naive. The unabashed excess, the sculptural edifice of pastries both awes and repulses, like a full-figured teenage girl in a little girl’s bikini, her glorious bulges brimming over, wasted on unappreciative gazes. Walking past these bakeries almost makes me feel like a child when sugar used to taste like love and forgiveness and excitement and later on guilt all wrapped into one.

I don’t have the courage or the willpower to go inside lest I let myself buy something. Looking is better than eating. Choosing is better than consuming. It is better than committing to your choice and living out its consequences, swallowing its meaning.