This is one of the two articles in the Arriving/Leaving LA series; read Jia Jia’s take, too.

I’d shaved my legs and bought some flip-flops. I’d started to wonder what I’d ever done with those enormous sunglasses, the ones with rhinestones on the frame. I’d watched my old color start to come back and begun to remember how concerned I used to be about tan lines.

You see, I used to live in Southern California. Where the girls cultivate their anorexia carefully, like something precious, and the boys in West Hollywood start getting botox at nineteen. Where brunch places have things like “Almond Energy Pancakes” and “Protein Scramble,” because everything’s a Capital-D “Diet,” and there are tanning parlors a five minute walk from the beach.

I wondered sometimes if it was a Matrix-esque deja vu, or if everyone really was blonde.

In college, girls traded tips about eating salad for dinner and drinking straight vodka, so you get drunk quicker without the calories. After all, you couldn’t get fat because the frat boys would sometimes make signs and rate the women walking by. Everyone has their favorite taco place and a story about how they almost drove through the ghetto. The rich learn broken Spanish from their housekeepers and make fun of mariachi, and everybody knows which side of the tracks belongs to whom.

If the whole world’s a stage, then L.A. is a beauty pageant that gives the crown to carbon copy queens year after year. So what do you do if the ball gowns don’t fall just right, or you don’t know one of the Talents, or the makeup doesn’t work for you?

Well, you can always work as one of the stage crew. Or try out your own side show. Or dye your hair and fake it. Or leave.

So, I haven’t spent much time in SoCal in recent years. Sitting in the sun by the beach, drinking Coronas and eating guacamole and chips, checking out passersby and someone hawking Marilyn Monroe pop art, I almost missed it.

And it’s this easy familiarity that made me so damn glad to be leaving. Barefoot, gas pedal all the way down, cranking up the Michael Jackson with my arm out the window, threading through fog and sun up Highway 1, leaving impeccably painted props of palm trees and white beaches for the manzanita-studded cliffs and cold Pacific breeze of the Northern coast.

Maybe Northern California is no less of a pageant, but we don’t have the same slick production. If it’s a show, at least up here it’s badly run.

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By Joy
Photograph by Jia Jia