Try Newark next time
I’ve seldom read anything more wounding. A Guardian autobiographical tale of a UK teenager who longed to go west:
I applied to US colleges I had heard of in films. I studied SAT books and got a good enough score to attempt the admissions process. Things started to happen. I bunked off sixth form to attend interviews. In films these are huge moments of plot development…
The campus was eerily pristine; if there was a leaf on the ground it would be swept up almost immediately. No wonder, because the campus was literally a film set. This was where Buffy the Vampire Slayer went to college and Elle Woods checked into Harvard in Legally Blonde. Hip-hop dancers had dance-offs in car parks and the marching band practised on the athletics field.
Sounds hellish, doesn’t it. It sort of was, but she sort of missed it. But the wounding bit is…
Coming home, I refused to sleep in my teenage bedroom. I was afraid that I would wake up and feel as if the past few years had been a dream. I missed my friends, professors and the sunny California disposition, but I felt incredibly relieved to be back among irreverent and witty Britons.
Hey! Hey now! We can do irreverent! We can do witty! We can even do cloudy dispositions.
As a native of Los Angeles county who currently lives in Los Angeles, I really kinda hate stories about people who go to somewhere on the west side, hang for a while around rich kids, and then think they know what Los Angeles is like.
Fuck’s sake, kid. There’s more to the city than that.
A lot of the time, “witty” people are merely being tolerated.
I say this with my British nephew and niece in mind.
Sort of like the journalists who get off a plane, go to a coffee shop in Omaha, Nebraska, talk to the people there, get back on the plane and write a long op-ed about how people in the Midwest really think and we should quit acting like they really believe in Trump World. Those of us who live here know that Omaha (or name your larger midwest city of note) is not reflective of what the rest of Nebraska thinks, let alone the rest of the midwest. A random coffee shop is not the way to figure out what people really think. Tryin going to the bar…and not in Omaha. Go to a rural area and select the beaten down bar, the busy bar. Leave the coffee shops and art bars, where you find people who think what you do, and head for where Nebraska (or the midwest) really happens. And don’t lecture people who live in an area about what the area is really like unless you’ve been there long enough, and in a role to meet enough people, to actually know something.