I'm feeling more and more like Los Angeles isn't the place I want to be. Which is crazy. And stupid. I'm closer to my family. I can call them and talk to them, and even see them if I really needed to. It's pretty much the opposite of London in that respect.
And in others too. LA is a much newer city than London. And I kind of have a thing about cities.
I don't like them.
That's pretty much it.
I like a sense of community. And I don't feel that in cities. But I did in London. Even though it's the largest city in Europe, I still felt like there was a sense of community there. Even though I got way more up close and personal with people on the Tube whose names I will probably never know, I still felt like I was a part of it, I wasn't just some new kid who would never really fit in. And that's how I feel about LA. That I can live here forever, but I'll never be a part of it.
I also think that an older city has had so much time to get things wrong. And they have an amazing ability to get things right. Eventually. Like the guys who clean up the streets of London. It creates jobs and keeps the city looking great. Also, the carts they have seem the best way to do what they do. And I love that. Like transportation. I realize that putting a lot of underground tubing throughout the city of Los Angeles might be a bit hazardous (due to small things like earthquakes, and the number of fault lines there are out here), but transportation here is legen-wait for it-dary-ily AWFUL! I can now verify that. It really is horrible. It can take 30 minutes to get 3 miles. It's so bad it's painful. There have been more instances than I care to think where I have either wanted to, or actually started hitting my head on my steering wheel while I'm stuck in some of the worst (read the WORST. EVER.) traffic I've ever seen. Even on weekends. Which stuns me.
I think I thought LA would be different. But I don't know what I thought it would be different from. Maybe from other cities. I've never really been a big fan of big cities. And maybe because it was in California, it wouldn't feel like a big city. On that, I was most painfully wrong. It's like a big city, but spread out - Cali-style. Which makes it even worse. It's just a city. A big, spread out, ugly city with a smog problem.
Maybe from where I've lived. Where I live in NorCal, and before that, Texas, and even in upstate New York, they're all small cities. Like REALLY SMALL. And in that, I guess I was right.
I think mostly I thought that what would be different was... me. And how I would feel about all of it. But I'm not. I'm exactly who I thought I was. I'm a girl who feels out of place in a big city, just the same as I do in town in the middle of nowhere. And I'm just trying to find the place where I don't.
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