Guest Essay: The California Roll and Bay Area culture

By Guest Columnist Michael Lee, 11

The California roll is the act of “[rolling] through a stop sign without making a complete stop.” If you’ve lived in CA for at least two weeks, you’ve probably seen the California roll in its natural habitat: from your parents, neighbors, or friends. At around 10 meters before a stop sign, the driver slows down a little as if to convince any nearby cops or onlookers — perhaps even themselves — that they will actually come to a full stop this time. At around five meters away, the driver slows to a crawl — yet they never let their speedometer reach zero. The instant their front bumper passes the stop sign, they quickly floor the gas pedal and speed off to wherever they have to go. 

My best friend is from the East Coast — in other words, he’s someone who grew up influenced by people with much better driving etiquette than what Californians exhibit. Consequently, every time he drives by a stop sign with me in the car, he points out how everyone else in CA would roll right past it. On the East Coast, people always come to a complete stop at every sign. “On the East Coast, you never see people do California rolls,” he often tells me. “People in Maryland are much more respectful than these crazy Californian drivers. They come to a full stop at stop signs! You know, doing a California roll increases the risk of hitting someone who’s crossing.”  Not only that, but he’d also follow up by commenting on how people there are nicer than people here off the road too. “Where I grew up, people wave to one another from their cars to allow them to pass, and drivers actually play nice with one another on the road. You would never see that in California … ” Even though it’s annoying to hear the same comment about California rolls repeated every time my friend drives me somewhere, my friend’s stories of Massachusetts have certainly impacted the way I view Californian culture.

Ever since my friend started bragging about how much better-behaved drivers are in Maryland compared to the cut-throat, ruthless drivers in CA (especially on I-880), I have started noticing some of the other unorthodox habits we California residents have beyond just rolling past stop signs. For instance, why do so few people around make the effort to have small talk with cashiers or waiters? Why does everyone stay on their phone or hide behind blank stares while walking from period to period at school or out in public? My friend tells me that strangers would greet other strangers on the East Coast, so why can’t we be like them?

It might be because it’s simply more efficient to not even try. People roll past stop signs to get to where they want to go faster. Californians order food without passing along “how’s-your-day”s or “thank you”s because doing so increases the amount of time you have to stand in front of the ordering desk. We stare at our phones while walking since nodding or smiling at people uses up valuable energy and effort. And why should we expect anything else from Californians, and more specifically, people in the Bay Area? High schoolers, college students, and young adults of the Bay Area are constantly tripping over themselves trying to keep up with the latest in technology, AI, entrepreneurship, new ventures, and so on. Similarly, for those of us who go to MSJ, our minds are constantly occupied by anxieties over grades, homework, or extracurriculars. MSJ is admittedly a terrifying experience: constant pressure is applied to us, slowly cooking us every week until we leave school each Friday exhausted and gasping for sleep. With all these worries crammed into our heads, we often have very little mental energy left in our brains to give thought to those we pass by on the street or walkway. 

Because I’m also equally as affected by the highly pressurized atmosphere at MSJ, I don’t have any grounds to tell you to start greeting everyone you see or start saying hi to cashiers. Besides, the last thing you would want to get out of a newspaper column is another set of impossible tasks to put on your already-lengthy to-do list, right?

What I wish to do is to reframe what it means to fully live life. How people on the East Coast treat each other — stopping for others and nodding and waving to strangers on the road and on sidewalks — reveals something about living that we in the Bay Area could be missing. 

It is indeed important to cultivate good grades, pursue success, and work for a career for yourself and for those in your family who could also benefit from your hard work. Yet, if you made that your sole objective and meaning as a student here at MSJ, you’d be missing out on a large portion of what the Bay (and life) has to offer. Consider the Bay Area: it’s not only a region of academic and economic prosperity, but it is also one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse regions in the world. Every person you come across has a certain set of ambitions, fears, traditions, and stories that are just as complex as your own. Everyone knows something you don’t. I want to be opportunistic not only regarding the academic opportunities in the Bay, but also in using these four years at MSJ to engage as much as I can with the people that share the Bay Area with me. I want to be able to stop thinking about homework during passing periods and simply smile or wave to strangers. I want to fully appreciate all the people who cross paths with me while I travel through life instead of just rolling past them.