Most UCLA students don’t have a lot of options or devote a
lot of thought to which city they are going to live in.
For the first one or two years of school they grace the halls of
the dorms, plow down grilled cheese sandwiches and jello in the
dining halls, and benefit from having a lot of people their age
around them. After that, they move off campus into a Westwood
apartment; it’s a pretty standard cycle.
The problem with the cycle is that the city where you live can
have a considerable impact on the quality of your life. It
influences the things you do and determines the people who surround
you. A city can be the difference between stressed out and
stress-free or even happy and unhappy.
Some cities are great places to live but unfortunately for UCLA
students, Westwood isn’t one of them. To be blunt, Westwood
sucks.
The first problem with Westwood is the sheer quantity of money
needed to secure a roof over your head. One bedroom apartments
usually reside in the $1000-$1400 range and two bedroom apartments
cost from $1800-$2500. What does this mean to the average student?
For starters it means that they can’t afford an apartment on
their own and likely need between two and four roommates ““
roommates who they might not know, like or want to live with.
I’ve heard of people on non-speaking terms with their
roommates or people who had to move out during the middle of the
year just because they couldn’t stand the people they lived
with. Bad times, my friends, bad times.
And even if students’ roommates are their best friends or
people they get along with, having between two and four roommates
can cause stress. Roommates can be noisy and disrupt your sleep
schedule. They can dominate the phone line having pointless
conversations with their significant others. They can hog the TV,
eat your food, mess up your kitchen, or in the case of my roommate,
turn off the alarm clock before you hear it on the day of your
English 10B final, causing you to run pajama-clad to write for
three hours about what libertine writers thought about man’s
true nature ““ which by the way is to exceed what man believes
to be his true nature.
Think about it ““ have you ever met students, I mean
anybody, who really like their living situations in Westwood
apartments?
Another problem with Westwood is the well documented difficulty
for anyone with an automobile ““ parking. In the world of
suburbia, going to visit a friend or driving to school is never
vetoed out of fear of being unable to find a parking spot, but in
Westwood people actually have to structure their lives around
parking their cars.
They may have to wake up early and move them from one zone to
another. They may have to park their cars in buildings where they
don’t even live, or in extreme cases, like mine, their whacko
roommates may actually threaten to kill them over a parking spot. I
even got into a serious argument with a friend because I
wouldn’t take ten minutes out of my day to save a parking
spot for him. Yikes.
Although those reasons to dislike Westwood are good, my favorite
is the general pretentiousness that emanates from many of the
college students and other fashionable, hip, zen, Gap-going,
California Pizza Kitchen-eating, “I’m better than you
because I go to the Farmer’s Market” thinking, Diesel
jean-wearing residents.
Their attitudes were embodied perfectly when I was interviewing
a homeless man outside Eurochow and people looked at the homeless
man and myself with an expression they would have when holding up a
dirty diaper with the tips of their fingers. They seemed to be
thinking either, “Oh my, why would that young man want to sit
on a bench next to that vagabond” or “Shouldn’t
somebody do something about them?”
I can hardly walk past the window at Coffee Bean without wanting
to walk in and yell “Excuse me, would anyone wearing earth
tones, drinking a four dollar latte, and writing a screenplay that
makes “Dude Where’s My Car?” look like a thought
provoking movie please go meet someone, be honest with that person,
and learn something about yourself?” Seriously, there’s
no such thing as earth tones people: they are called green and
brown.
Despite all of Westwood’s flaws I haven’t taken the
initiative to live anywhere else for the last three years. And it
hasn’t been a bad experience by any means, but I know there
are some other places I might have liked living instead. So
although it may be too late to move somewhere this year, next year
it might be wise to consider two words that happen to title one of
my favorite songs ““ Santa Monica.