[2003-11-18] But what did I expect, really? I asked some fellow transplants this same question. My fiancée, Lauren, was told by many East Coasters that she would have to dye her hair blond or she would stick out like a sore thumb, and so she naturally assumed that upon arriving in Los Angeles she would encounter a city of flaxen-haired nymphs. Like Stockholm or Oslo. Instead, of course, she found that she blended right in with everyone. Not that everyone here is a tall brown-haired (and stunning) architect. She fits in because she is, like everyone else in this city, different. Preconceptions about Los Angeles tend to be a lot like the ones that Lauren heard: they rely heavily on stereotypes that are only partly true, or, to put it another way, they both entirely true and entirely false at the same time. The blondes are there all right, but they're not the only ones there. For the first six months that I lived in Los Angeles, I couldn't shake the odd feeling that the city gave me. For lack of a better image, it felt as though I was dreaming all the time. At the time, everything felt ambiguously foreign, but looking back, I think that the new L.A. feeling was brought on by the smell of the place. It must have started somewhere outside of Las Vegas, but I didn't get a real good lungful of it until we stopped at our friend's place in Pomona. It was a low-slung one story affair of the type that blanket Los Angeles from its very heart to its outermost reaches, with a swimming pool in the back, an avocado tree in the front. The smell, as best as I can remember it, is of heat and dust and pavement mingled with sweetness of flowers that bloom year round and the thick competing aromas of ethnic foods that hover in clouds around each ethnic enclave. It's the smell of an oasis; it's the smell of civilization battling the desert. At the time, though, I knew none of this. I didn't even know that there was a smell. I just knew that Los Angeles felt different from anywhere I had ever been, very different.

Of course, Los Angeles doesn't make me feel this way any more. After more than three years, I can barely smell the city any more. Sometimes, I'll walk by an old apartment building and catch a whiff of Los Angeles coming from the lobby. Or I'll get a bunch of ones back in change at a taco stand and the wad of bills will reek of Los Angeles, somehow saturated with the desert city smell. But usually I can't smell the city anymore. I'm used to it. In fact I probably smell like the city now, and when I go home to Maryland people cough in bewilderment at my otherworldly smell. Meanwhile, against my will, I've become nostalgic for the feeling the city used to give me, but I'm unable to remember quite what that feeling was.

Before I came to Los Angeles, I, too, had expectations: of a beach city, of a fairly homogenous population. I know now that these things exist, but they are only subsections of subsections of a massive city. I had expectations of easy passage into and out of jobs in the entertainment industry. I had the idea that I could dabble in this or that and throw together a film related project with a group of like-minded friends if we felt so inclined. This turns out to also be sort of true, but it turned out that I was unaware of the grueling nature of the "industry," the tens of thousands of jobs that amount to moving things from one side of the city to the other for fourteen hours a day. I didn't realize that since there is a never-ending stream of people whose dream it is to make it in Hollywood, the pay is not so great, and there's always someone at the door who's willing to work for less than you, all the way down to nothing so they can get that foot in the door. Byzantine unions, meanwhile, protect only those who have toiled in the trenches for years. Still, the creative spirit of the place is pervasive. Everyone's got a side project and a day job to pay the bills. People don't climb the corporate ladder in LA, they strike out on their own.

But even this broad treatment of Los Angeles only covers a small percentage. Lauren, whose fears of a blond city proved unfounded, told me that she was surprised at the number of ethnic enclaves that are tucked into this giant city. I, too, was surprised by this. Nobody I ever talked to about Los Angeles mentioned the huge Armenian population in Hollywood; nobody mentioned that there are more Iranians in Los Angeles than anywhere in the world save Iran or that the same is true of Vietnamese and Koreans and many others. Sure, there are lots of blondes here, but what about everyone else? Lauren and I, separately and together, have lived in neighborhoods with signs and billboards in Thai, Japanese, and Spanish. We have lived among Armenians, Central Americans, and Russians. None of these ethnic pockets are assimilated, and they are a very long way from being tourist attractions. Like the rest of this very young city, these neighborhoods are in flux, the borders shift and melt away, and you can walk for blocks without hearing or seeing a word in English.

Derek, my old friend and sometime roommate said that he was told to expect many things about Los Angeles, and that every single one, no matter how outrageous, has proven true. For my part, I still like the things that nobody told me to expect: great hamburgers, great radio, the way I can see for hundreds of miles when it rains. I like the lemon tree in the front yard, and the peach tree, the fig tree, and especially the plum tree in the back.

a-diction.com