Hah, resident speaking. They're the worst!

But for real, tons of cultures here. What surprises me more than anything is that the region has some kind of widespread reputation, I had always figured we were as boring a place as it comes.

I live in a town by the SD county/Riverside county line. It's an interesting slice, since SD county and Riverside county are pretty different places. I can drive 20 minutes north and have people who think I'm a spoiled rich kid, I can drive 20 minutes south and have people think I'm poor.

I've met all varieties of people here. Valley girls and rednecks (though I guess you'd say a redneck in socal is more of a 'bro') and those strange guns-and-camo dudes you can meet just about anywhere. Socal seems like it is somewhere if you're anywhere else, but it's not anything to talk about if you live here. I guess maybe I don't know the pain of living in an area bands don't come through, things like that, but I never came under the impression this place was the shit.

I'm gonna come out on a risky limb to mention something I don't hear talked about a lot, though. Huge amounts of experiences with racist asians in my life. No clue why, but I've been on the receiving end of shitloads of it. It's generally pretty colorblind around here but ffs the filipenos in my town all had their own shirts with filipeno flags that said "we run the [area code]" on them. I'm not at all implying that asians in general are racist (would be racist of me to say) but that something subculturally in this area has made me encounter a lot of it.

I guess you'd say I've met a lot of entitled airheads but that's more an economic thing than anything else, and socal runs the whole gauntlet between rich and poor. In general I don't view southern californians as being hugely different than people anywhere else, you have to choose to internalize the 'cali lyfe' for it to really mean anything.