[speeder]

I don't think that anywhere is perfect, or "utopia", but where I live is perfect for me and a lot of other people I know. I've actually gone full circle from hating L.A., (even moving away and vowing never to return many years ago), to completely loving it again. I never fell out of love with the state, though. It's the greatest state by any rational measure and by an extremely wide margin. I just can't imagine being stuck next to someone on an airplane that hates the state of California, that would be some miserable, pathetic and clueless twat.

There was a time, many years ago when I first moved to L.A., when I found fault with everything here and constantly compared it to the place I was from. The place I was from became perfect as soon as I left it, completely ignoring the reasons I left of course. When I finally accepted this place as it is and looked for the good instead of the bad, everything changed. It's the same as being in an adult relationship with a person, you accept them as they are and focus on the positive or leave them and move along. In CA., and in L.A. IMO, there is an enormous amount of positive to focus on.

If you are not a good city person and creative at least in terms of living a good life, you will not like it here. Big cities chew people up and spit them out who are not suited to them. L.A. does it a lot slower than NYC because of the weather and terrain. But it's still expensive and competitive in a way that smaller places are not. The opportunities here are so much greater, though. The doors that open are so much larger, generally speaking.

There's an old saying that when someone is telling you that their city has an opera, you know you're in a small place. The great cities of the world have treasures and and resources that run incredibly deep plus a volume of wealth that is staggering. It's hard for some people to comprehend how much goes on here.