L.A. Story

Some places, you immediately fall in love with.

The moment I arrived in Boston as a freshman in college, I was smitten. I fell head-over-heels for the city’s charm and history, the noble brownstones lining its crooked streets, the omnipresence of tricycle guy, whose incomprehensible bellows could guide you through the darkest of nights. When I left the summer after my senior year, it broke my heart. I cried all the way to the New York state line.

And then, like many an unemployed and directionless soul before me, I washed up on the shores of the Pacific. My relationship to Los Angeles could probably be best described as a creeping affection. Arriving in Southern California was like touching down on the face of an unknown planet—a planet of garishly colored Mediterranean architecture and incessantly blinding sunlight. It was intriguing, but it seemed too unreal of a place to imagine myself actually living here for any extended period of time.

Now, more than three years later as I’m preparing to become an official resident of Los Angeles, I find there are things about this foreign land that have started to feel like home. Things like late night Astroburger runs, Saturday afternoons at the West Hollywood Farmer’s Market and movies at the Arclight (where they have assigned seating and kindly allow you to bring your cocktail into the theater, which makes it totally worth the $14 price of admission). Searching for an actual home, however, has been a bit of an odyssey.

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve looked at apartments that are--in L.A. real estate speak--Culver City adjacent, West Hollywood adjacent and Beverly Hills adjacent ( and a couple that are actually in Beverly Hills—I know, aren’t we posh). Where some of these buildings were actually located, I’d be hard pressed to tell you. But I know exactly which desirable neighborhood they are within spitting distance from.

In L.A., you’re always adjacent to something. Adjacent to celebrity, to the ocean, to a Coffee Bean franchise. Which perhaps makes sense in a city where everybody is trying to be something else. It’s a philosophy based on the utter rejection of the idea that wherever you go, there you are. Because here, it’s not about where you are, but where you’re going.

Today, you may be a paid-by-the-day production assistant eeking out a meager existence in an unglamorous part of West L.A. But one turn of the screw and you’re a high powered producer with major square footage in Brentwood. Mobility here isn’t just upward, it can be stratospheric. So isn’t it more affirming to think of yourself as “Brentwood-adjacent?”

I think this is both the magic and the curse of Los Angeles. It can be painfully image-obsessed and as disingenuous as the non-native palm trees that define its topography. But, as corny as it sounds, it’s still a place that draws people with big dreams.

During the countless Friday night drives I’ve made from my bucolic suburban domicile to my boyfriend’s Santa Monica adjacent apartment, my favorite part of the drive always comes when I’m maneuvering around a twisty hill on the I-10. At one specific point, if the smog’s not too heavy, you get a glimpse of downtown L.A. rising up in the distance. From this particular vantage point, the city’s usually pitiful-looking skyline appears to be floating on a cloud above the earth—sort of like the first image of the Emerald City in "The Wizard of Oz.”

I guess this is kind of how I have affectionately come to think of my new home. A poorly conceived, sprawling, carcinogen-infested Land of Oz. Run by an actor pretending to be a wizard.