No plastic here. The LA I grew up knowing and loving (1970-something).
I hear the same reasons over and over why people don’t like Los Angeles. In fact, it seems like lots of LA people here the same things. The reasons usually follow along these lines:
Reasons? The traffic, the smog, the $60/one hour cab ride from the airport, the plastic people, mindless conversations about long work commutes, oddball posers on the street, the pretense…and did I mention the traffic?
The guy who wrote that doesn’t live in LA. I suppose if you did you’d know better than to take a cab from LAX and would have a friend or family member come pick you up. Despite that, he doesn’t bring any intelligent arguments to the case against LA. Yeah, this city and the region are not perfect. We know there are smog problems (hello, smog days), that traffic sucks and that our public transportation is far from being what this city needs. Still… the complaint that LA is full of “plastic people” and there is some kind of “pretense” are exaggerated, and in my opinion utterly false.
I’ve lived in LA since I was 17. Before that I lived just east of the city yet still in the county. The only LA I knew most of my life was East LA. There were no fake, shallow or plastic people in the neighborhoods where my grandparents and tíos and tías lived. Pretense? None of that either. Instead, I saw hardworking families, immigrants like my own parents, people who came to LA for something else besides “the industry.”
I started hearing all these arguments after I left Hacienda Heights and got to UCLA. Most of the complaints didn’t even come from Bay Area transplants (who love to hate on LA). I heard these things from people who had only visited LA and never spent a significant amount of time here. I just dismissed them, but the same stereotypes kept coming up over and over. It’s as if all these people watched was “Melrose Place” and only spent time in West Hollywood, not even in the city of LA, on the Sunset Strip without bothering to venture into other areas of LA.
Come on now, if you’re going to dislike this city, at least do so for a well-informed reason.
With all that said, below is a list I wrote about two years ago on why I love this city. I did it at a time when I had been admitted to all my graduate schools of choice. I was 23 and had been working and going to school at UCLA since 1998 and really wanted a change. It didn’t look like there would be a change since UCLA was and still is the best place for me to study in my field. So yeah, I was feeling a bit resentful that I wouldn’t get to live in a different part of the country for a short time.
I’m going to make a list about all that I like about Los Angeles so I don’t feel so bad when and if I decide to stay here for another X amount of years.
I’ll start with the simple things:
- My family is here
- Most of my best friends are here, minus the ones in school somewhere else
- The weather
- Lots of Mexicans and Central Americans
- I know my way around
- There’s always something going on
- The beach is close by
- So are the mountains
- The diversity, you can meet people from all over the world
- I feel at home
I’m sure I can add more…
If you’re wondering, not one of those reasons has changed since then and I don’t ever regret passing up on offers from east coast and midwest schools for grad school.
Note: this was all inspired by 5000!’s response to the “I hate LA guy” I linked above and other people who make the same complaints. Losanjealous and Hexodus also wrote similar posts about the real LA a while back.
