bsat blog

Moving into college can be an overwhelming experience. You might be leaving home for the first time, there’s never enough room for your stuff, your parents are probably taking a million pictures and wearing something made by Lands End. It’s tough stuff. And that’s before you have to meet the other kids. You’ve spent at least four, or maybe even twelve, years at home building up street cred. Hanging with the right people, looking down upon others, all in the name of carving yourself out a place in the rigid social oligarchy that is high school. Plus, you’ve probably (correctly) heard that the kids you meet on your freshman hall will probably be your best friends at college, and maybe even (gulp) for the rest of your life. So…don’t fuck it up.

We at the BSAT would like to take a little pressure off the whole experience for you by introducing you to a few kids you’ll definitely meet on your freshman hall even before you get there. You know, ‘cause we’re nice like that. Today, it’s “The Kid from LA.”

There will invariably be one kid from Los Angeles—or just outside Los Angeles, or somewhere in southern California that he feels isn’t recognizable enough so he just says Los Angeles (let's hypothetically refer to this place as "San Diego"). And if you don’t know he’s from Los Angeles, he’ll remind you. Every. Fucking. Second. Even in comments that couldn’t possibly contain even a hint of geographical bias, he’ll throw in some modifier that makes it sound like being from LA is like being from the future (“Well, I’m from LA, and out there we have these, like, traffic jams”), like not having gone to high school (“I mean I’m from LA, so I don’t know if this is relevant, but didn’t George Washington Carver invent peanut butter?”) or like having some kind of terrible disease (“Before you put that in your mouth, baby, I should probably tell you, I’m from LA”).

It’s enough to make you wonder what kids in LA talk about when they’re, you know, actually in LA. Is every comment simply prefaced by a mumbling “we’re currently in LA” like Kevin Nealon doing Mr. Subliminal? Still, if you’re getting a little annoyed by them constantly bringing up the city of angels, just start freaking them out by talking about things you have at your school that they don’t have at home—like breathable air or winter.