Sometimes, I look up and see the stars, and I say to myself, “David, that sure is pretty.”
Sometimes, I look up and see the sun, and I say to myself, “David, that seems pretty bright; you might consider avoiding looking at that again.”
Sometimes, when I am driving south on Gayley Avenue after leaving UCLA on a hot Friday afternoon desperately hoping to avoid the joy of 405 travel, I look up at precisely the right moment, see a sign that reads “You would have, if you could have” illustrated with a photo of Matt Leinart and a Web address for some USC fan site I won’t even bother linking, and I say to myself, “David, that is &!*!ing bull*@&#.” (Don’t bother asking how I manage to make the sound of an asterisk.)
Seriously?
Maybe I’m misreading it. Maybe it’s merely implying that if I could have impregnated a girl and then been a deadbeat dad while making millions in the NFL, I would have. Still not exactly kosher, we’ll say, but I could live with that.
But I’ll be honest. When I read that, I read that as, “If you could have attended USC, you would have, you silly UCLA student.”
First, we could have.
Second, we didn’t.
In my junior or senior year of high school, USC sent me a letter offering me a certain amount of money more than the per-annum fees at UCLA, with the likelihood of getting full tuition, if I were to attend. UCLA sent me nothing.
I ended up applying to one of those schools.
I’m an extreme case though. I realize many of you applied to USC. I realize many of you wanted the safety net of a second-tier school like USC to fall back on should you not have gotten into UCLA or Berkeley or Cal State Long Beach or CSU Stanislaus (or if El Camino barred its doors to you). That’s perfectly reasonable. We all have to go somewhere, of course.
But the kind of warped thinking that would lead anyone to believe that there are people who actually would have preferred to go there is beyond my ability to understand.
It is an interesting aspect of this situation that, likely, more USC students will see this billboard than UCLA students, because on an average day, there are more USC students hanging out in Westwood than those from UCLA.
Not even casting aspersions on the outside area, USC is a hole. It is a place seemingly erected entirely from concrete, is located in the armpit of two freeways, and has a statue of a soldier from the losing side in an idiotic war at the center of its campus.
I can understand why the Trojan student body relocates to Westwood every night, and I can certainly understand why their student base would gladly switch positions with ours on a more permanent basis.
But I just don’t get why they think we’d be down to switch with them.
I mean, there are decisions I regret in life. I regret the time I tried to leap frog a parking meter. I regret once making my high school English teacher cry. I regret not growing six to eight more inches, becoming considerably more athletic, and fulfilling my goal of playing in the NBA.
But I don’t regret not attending USC.
I do, however, regret that double negative.
Email Woods at dwoods@media.ucla.edu if you also have a friend – who is now dead to you – who actually did chose USC over UCLA.