I lived on Capitol Hill for five years, splitting my time between the Lincoln Park area of SE and the Union Station area of NE. I only moved away a few years ago, but the change in the local culture has been extraordinary. Maybe I just didn’t notice it before, but there’s an off-putting aura of pretense and pomposity that permeates the air, especially around Eastern Market. It’s like all the fashion-chasing trendsters who were too poor to buy a place in Dupont or Adams Morgan suddenly decided to migrate their herd to the Hill. I asked my friends who still live in the region if they noticed a change and they all agreed that the community was becoming a monochromatic melange of like-mindedness.

Everything changes, there’s no stopping that. And I’ll admit that nostalgia often edits my memory of the past. That said, I still I hate to think that my old neighborhood, a once-unique and diverse community, has become just another yuppie enclave where every household is the same and all the people look and think alike.

If you were running from the law and didn’t want to be found, you could easily hide in the new Eastern Market community. You’d just have to don some black leather shoes, artificially roughed-up designer jeans, a gray, wool sweater overlapped by an intentionally unkempt shirt collar, and black-rimmed glasses. No one would be able to pick you out of a lineup of your peers. You’d be hidden in plain sight, free to enjoy your mochachocofrappaccino, lightly roasted in a carbon-neutral oven, frothed with organic soy milk and served in a recycled paper cup, all while conspicuously perusing the latest piece by David Sedaris in this month’s issue of The New Yorker.

If you wanted to double-down, you could also listen to a podcast of This American Life with your white ear buds. That way the cord would stand out in stark contrast from your dark sweater and people’s eyes would be drawn down the bright, slender wire to your table, where your new iPod Touch rests next to your congressional ID badge and Che Guevara key chain. You’d blend in so well that no one walking by would recognize your face. They wouldn’t recognize the contradiction on the table either.