May 17, 2007
I Love L.A.
Home isn't just where my stuff is, or the place I've paid money to stay at (apartment, hotel room). In that sense, it's a mutable word, because "home" is a place to which I look forward to arriving.
And so, despite having been gone for several months now, I still think of L.A. as home. It's not just because it's where many close friends are; I honestly like the city. Yes, the traffic's terrible, housing's expensive, and some of the people are fake. But I've lived nowhere else where so much is so close to you: food, culture, outdoor adventure, indoor playgrounds, big thinkers (UCLA, USC, JPL — which is technically in Pasadena, not L.A., but it's close enough), serious poverty, architectural marvels and mistakes, and more movies than you can shake a stick at.
On the one hand, this may mean I need to live in more and different cities to see that Los Angeles is not unique. Then again, what does it matter if I think L.A. is one of a kind?
It's good to be home.