I've never been the kind of person who falls in love with a place. I love the people and the memories from the places that I go, but the soil itself isn't the important thing. Plus, my parents sold my childhood home two weeks before I started college, and I've been something of a nomad ever since. For the past two years, I haven't really lived anywhere for more than four months (dorm rooms excepted, and no one really feels at home there).
So when people ask me if I love LA, if I want to come back, I usually just say I'm neutral. It's a pleasant place to live most of the time, mostly due to the weather, but it also seems gentle because my housing, car and employment were mostly taken care of before I even landed at LAX. As I learned last summer with my Brooklyn sublet and unpaid internship, cities take on a whole different tenor when you're broke and struggling. But if your life is already set up and there are a handful of people around that you like spending time with, it's not hard to live just about anywhere.
Could I see myself coming back to LA for a more open-ended stay? Sure I could. To my mild surprise, LA hasn't really offended me in any way, despite the large grains of truth in the stereotypes about traffic, dieting, struggling actors and Ugg boots. One of my reasons for going "abroad" was to see if I hated LA so much that I couldn't live here later, but my experience has been positive overall.
As a city and as a place to live, LA is generally OK. As a place to look for a job in entertainment, it's extremely stressful and competitive, but it's also the one city in America (and maybe the world) that offers such a huge potential for growth and personal impact on the industry. It's an even trade. So when I say I'm neutral about LA, I'm talking about these things: the practicality of living and working and generally being a grown-up.
These are not the things that make me so profoundly sad to leave.
LA is one of the few places I've ever been where my business and my hobby are one and the same. I've talked about TV so much in the last four months that I'm pretty sure ratings analysis is coming out of my ears. In a single Monday, I spend 10 hours in a TV production office, then head home for a two hour class on the business of TV, then rush to West Hollywood in order to watch TV with friends. I don't think I've talked about anything else for months.
Where else could you be eating outside on the Fox lot, minding your own business, talking about the "Terminator" franchise with two studio assistants when Summer Glau (who played a Terminator on "The Sarah Connor Chronicles," 2008-2009) walks by, as if conjured by magic?
Where else could your supervisor ask you to dig through some files in a boring cabinet in which you find the studio draft of the pilot script of "Arrested Development" (2003-2006) right there, begging for you to read it?
Where else could you be reading an online interview with Joss Whedon about "Dollhouse" when the phone rings, and it's the "Dollhouse" writers' office? And they're wondering if Neil Patrick Harris is there because they want to drop off something? And when the guy comes by with a nondescript manila envelope, he says, "This is from Joss?"
You can talk about and watch and interact with television from almost anywhere in the world. But you can only interact with it, be a spectator of it, love it, live it and be it here, in Los Angeles.
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Rebecca Goldberg is a junior majoring in American studies. She can be reached at Rebecca.Goldberg@tufts.edu.
