the greatest blessing of my life was being born in los angeles, california! i love this humongous, ridiculous city with all my heart! every single time i leave my house, i am struck with my immense affection for everything here. i love the environment and nature that manages to flourish among the urban sprawl. i love the beach and the mountains and the chaparral and the oak savannas and the coastal marshes. i love the active lifestyles that such beautiful surroundings encourage. i love the energy, frantic and relaxed all at once. i love the people, angelenos are not the stereotype you are thinking of, the majority of people are hard workers who really want to make their dreams come true, whatever they might be. i love the incredible mix of cultures and languages that immigrants have brought with them and shared with the rest of us. i love all the little neighborhoods and individual cities that make up the quilt of greater los angeles. i love that there's still so many i haven't seen! i love the architecture, the different eras from the 1920s until now stacked up against each other, all of our iconic movements, and the graffiti scrawled on everything. i love the colorful little post-war bungalows that blanket the valley in neat grids. i love the glitz and glamour of the rich areas, it doesn't feel like real life over there but it sure is pretty. i love celeb culture and knowing people in the industry and practically every local having a story of running into someone famous somewhere mundane. i saw dave franco (ew) at pizzeria mozza once. i love our signature shopping malls, from the sprawling corporate complexes to the shitty strips on every street full of mom n pops. i love the access to every kind of food you could possibly imagine, including extra fresh produce from surrounding counties, and a never ending list of things to do and see. i love that i could visit a different major cultural attraction every day for a month and still have some on the list. i love seeing tourists everywhere. i love how we embrace our sports teams and their stars with joy and giant murals, even when they suck, but especially when they're good. go dodgers! i love that we always show up for each other when tragedy or natural disaster strikes. i love the sense of sonder i feel when looking out upon the sprawl and thinking about the millions of lives going on out there, and what a breathtaking place it must have been before the spanish came. i love seeing everything in the city on foot and by bus, there is something interesting in every little nook and cranny that you'd never see from the freeways. i love staring up at the skyscrapers even though it gives me vertigo. y'know what, i love the nasty downtown smell of weed and old piss and gas fumes. of course the city has plenty of problems, i wish that we took better care of our most vulnerable neighbors and it was more affordable to stay here and we had less car dependency and i wish the peoples native to this land had more of a legal stake in governing and stewarding it, but nothing can deter my adoration. i have left home, i have seen other cities and states and a little bit of canada too, and i know this is the only place for me. my only goal in life is to never move away from los angeles again! i love la!!!