If you live in Southern California but frequently deal with those who don’t, you’ll find that there is a certain degree of confusion that comes with explaining what exactly you do with your life. At the superficial level, most easterners don’t really grasp city life without tall buildings; and at the professional level, they don’t get a media economy that’s basically the world’s last white collar apprentice system.

In short, most people seem to expect that your life is spent either (1) re-enacting Beach Boys songs; or (2) doing cocaine with Lindsay Lohan. When these expectations aren’t met, confusion sets in.

Never fear. As was stated years ago in Stuff White People Like, “if you ask a white person about where to travel, you will get a lot of responses. But if you ask them about New York, white people will go nuts. They love the city universally and all either live there, have lived there, will live there or want to live there.”

This observation gets to the heart of today’s essay: If you can characterize Southern California as if it were New York, most of your privileged friends will at least pretend to know what you’re talking about.

So with that in mind, here’s a conversion table to characterize your LA experience in New York terms; or better put, to describe these things in New York Standard Units (NYSU).

New York	Los Angeles
Having brunch in SoHo	Getting drinks in WeHo
Assiduously Avoiding Times Square	Judging people at Hollywood & Highland
Thinking Williamsburg is over	Thinking Eagle Rock is the shit
Having a place in the Hamptons	Having a house in Malibu
Latenight pizza	Drunk tacos
Anchioves for toppings	Lengua for meat
“Buy side or sell side?”	“Agency or studio?”
“He’s got his own hedgefund”	“She has a show on air.”
A rent controlled apartment in the Village	A leased BMW 3-series
Custom shirts	Custom headrests
Brother Jimmy’s	Surly Goat
Guido Guys	Valley girls
Being from Greenwich	Being from Newport
Being an MD	Being a producer
Happy hour	Drinks
Uptown	The Hills
Brooklyn	The East Side
West Chester	Pasadena
New Jersey	The Valley
“Have you seen Molly?”	“Let’s go to Vegas.”
The subway from the Lower East Side	The freeway from Venice
The growing food scene in Queens	The growing tech scene in Playa
Drinking with your underage cousin on 2nd Ave	Drinking with your underage cousin on Santa Monica Blvd
Bruce Springsteen on the Jersey Turnpike	Tom Petty on Mulholland Dr
Billy Idol’s sexuality	Stevie Nix’s spirituality
The Godfather	Pulp Fiction
Katz’s Deli in When Harry Met Sally	Rodeo Drive in Pretty Woman
The fact that Sinatra music is oddly fresh	The fact that grunge rock didn’t go out of style
Refusing to eat Italian food in the Midwest	Judging people who put cheese on their tacos
Flower stands	Fruit carts
Shake Shack	In-N-Out
Jaime Dimon	Bob Iger
David Einhorn	Aaron Kaplan
MF Global	Resolution
Reservations at PDT	Skipping the line at Bungalow
Convincing yourself that Murray Hill is cool	Telling yourself that Culver City is on the West Side
Having a conceptual understanding of New Jersey	Visiting the Wikipedia page for San Bernadino
Dressing your kids in J. Crew	Thinking that Lululemon is business casual
The smell of garbage in the summer	The smell of marijuana on the weekend
Your taxi driver’s presumed treachery	Your Lyft driver’s annoying small talk
Snitty Ivy League intellectual superiority	Smug Left Coast moral superiority
That time Steven Cohen went to court	That time Mel Gibson went to rehab
Missing the easy money and harmless drugs of the ’80s	Missing the easy money and harmless drugs of the ’80s