What do the Eiffel Tower and the OC have in common?

The first shaped my teenage fantasies of a Utopia freedom, creativity and sexual pleasure. The second, the television show shapes the fantasies of teenage Utopia for our sixteen year old houseguest from a small town in Northern Europe.

Just as no one could have convinced me that Paris was filled with conservative Catholic families and Mao-idolizing poseurs, no one could convince our houseguest that the OC was not heaven on earth. Anything labelled Newport Beach, even the street sign was extra special to her. And she asserted the indestructibility of her fantasy to me by demonstrating that she though Laguna superior to Venice, Newport to Irvine, that she had already internalized the financial pecking order of the Orange Coast.

I finally realized that the OC represented effortless resolution of all problems facilitated by the abstraction of lucre, of which she was not lacking, but which was nevertheless, not enough to satisfy all of her shopping desires.