Have you ever noticed that everything in Cambridge is just a little bit off?

Hailing as I do from New York, the Capital of the Weird, this is saying a lot. The reassuring thing about New York, though, is that for the most part, you know what to expect. Hawkers in the park, Bible-spouting evangelists on the subway, disgruntled and tattooed psychics in the Village—a whole army of the strange and outrageous.

Cambridge is disarmingly bizarre. On the surface, there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about it—except if you count the Barnes & Noble masquerading as the Coop, or the Dunkin Donuts that doubles as the Eliot Street Café, or the Warburton’s Café that’s really Au Bon Pain. The odd thing about Cambridge is how subtle its oddness really is. Start with the employees at the Coop. I once had a cashier who performed the entire check-out process in complete silence while staring straight at me, examined my Coop card for five minutes and read the back jacket of each of the books I bought. Add the fact that he looked exactly like John Malkovitch, and it could’ve been a scene right out of the Twilight Zone. What is ‘off’ is not conventional strangeness of the mohawk-and-nose-ring variety, but a subtle, subliminal sense of unease. Where words like ‘kooky,’ ‘wacko’ and ‘lunatic’ are essential parts of a New York vocabulary, it’s much harder to define the elusive spirit of eccentricity that pervades Cambridge. Where New Yorkers freely flaunt their weirdness, Cantabridgians are Sphinx-like, vaguely strange, yet indecipherable.

Bob Slate is a perfect example. Essentially, it is a bunch of extremely nice, WASPy-looking, middle-aged men selling overpriced stationery. Does this strike anyone else as being slightly peculiar? I go in, spend one minute picking up a $6.95 green-tinted, college-ruled notebook because I’m too lazy to walk to Staples, and inevitably spend five exchanging interminable pleasantries with Mike, the overzealous cashier. It’s like trying to get off the phone with your grandmother. Do I want a bag with that? No? Need a receipt? No? Crazy weather we’re having, don’t you think? You sure you don’t want a bag?

One day I’d like to interview all these characters that give Cambridge its distinctive personality—the homeless woman on Mass Ave, the saleswomen in Mudo, the Spare Change man in front of Au Bon Pain, the guy at the smoothie stand in the T. I have always wondered who they are, how long they’ve been around and, perhaps most baffling of all, where they come from?

Another unsettling thing about Cambridge (or rather, Harvard Square and environs) is how nothing completely fits together. The men of Bob Slate would be less strange, probably, were they not a few hundred feet from the piercings and Grateful Dead T-shirts of the Toscanini’s posse. And that hearty artifact from The Era of Male Harvard, Stonestreet, would not seem so conspicuous were it not for the mecca of grunge hip, Urban Outfitters, just around the corner. Nor would the surburban gauntlet of Bruegger’s Bagels, Starbucks and the Tennis Shop seem particularly anything if the unapologetically sketchy 7-11, with outspoken panhandlers in tow, was not immediately adjacent. Harvard Square is like a melting pot with the heat turned off, the Great Strip Mall of the Ivy League.

As I am writing this, it has suddenly occurred to me that Cambridge is a perfect microcosm of Harvard. From the Pit to Sandrine’s, Cambridge runs the gamut. One part Abercrombie & Fitch + two parts Jasmine Sola + three quarters Cardullos = well rounded college town. Each store in the square seems to fill a particular quota, and is self-conscious of its role. You, dress the frat boys; you there, feed the yuppies; and you, exist for the sole purpose of peddling to tweed-jacket clad alums come Reunion Week. Ever notice how some stores seem to stick around for no imaginable reason? Who really shops at Serendipity, anyway? Unless, of course, it’s for the linen-wearing, Birkenstock-shod, trust-fund-enabled sector of the population. No wonder Harvard Square sometimes feels like the inside of one of those sno-globes: everything is deliberate, planned, sanitized. What we get with a place that seemingly caters to everyone is an artificial Disneyland that is useful to none. And perhaps it is from this that the unsettling strangeness arises. Cambridge is like a bizarre Pleasantville—safely generic, abercrombifiedly bland, and disconcertingly eerie.

Sue Meng ’03 is a history and literature concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.