"You Mess With Me, You Mess With the Whole Trailer Park."

Heh. As white trash proverbs go that's right up there with, "Let go of my ears, I know what I'm doing."

I have a hometown and I do not. I am Jamaican through and through, but I last lived there when I was 11. But it's where I'm from, and it's where my immediate family lives. I become less tense just stepping off the plane onto the hot tarmac.

But I've never tried living there as an adult. I refuse to drive there. We lived in Ottawa too, but that's not home. I was too young to attach to anything. London was great, but not home, although I have nostalgic feelings for some of the places, it wasn't the physical place that formed me so much as the culture which is different now.

Montreal's a kind of home town. This year is only the second year since 1993 that I haven't gone back. This makes me sad. But I go back, and I wander, and although things have changed it still feels like it's mine. I know which corners I can sit on and read, where to get the good sangria, how to duck the rain, where the malls join each other underground and you can walk and shop and eat and pray and watch movies without seeing the sun.

I love LA. Home it is, hometown it is not. But it rocks.

I love LA as well. It's taken me a little time to get to know her, but what a crafty and beautiful city she is. Her beauty is unconventional and quirky and has some scars, no doubt. But she sprawls languidly outward, dipping her fingers in the Pacific and resting her back against the mountains. She's bright darkly and as deep as she is superficial. She's a city of contradiction.

Pardon me while I wax cheesily poetic--I just didn't expect to love her when I moved here. It's been a constant surprise.

Drew and I put in a rental application for an absolutely gorgeous Pasadena bungalow this evening. I think my excitement about that potential move is making the whole city shiny.

Some author (Elizabeth Hand?) said that everyone has a first city, that everyone discovers a city that is theirs.

Mine is Los Angeles, I think. I get LA, even with all its yuckiness. It was my first city.

Istanbul may be my city too; I've loved it every time I've been there, but I don't think I've been there enough to say for sure.

So, in case you didn't know, Fay is a fantabulous individual.

And I can't believe we didn't get around to seeing the film. It was just half eight all of a sudden! And then chinese food had to be eaten!

Teppy, I hope your grandfather is calmer today, so you can go visit.

vw is possibly doomed! Whee!

Fay, I love my hometown (as I'm currently living in it), but there are days it does just the same thing to me and I start to consider moving west. Most days, it's a nicely liberal, upscale, chic, hip college town. Other days, I feel like Walmart is going to pave over the entire city and all the houses are going to spontaneously morph into trailer parks. The only reason Wisconsin ever ends up a blue state in elections is because of the cities of Madison and Milwaukee. Just enough of the entire state lives there to tip the difference.

I have seen PotC2. It was good. Can I have more, please?

I finished 11 student evaluations! I just have two left!

This means I can take a break, right?

do other people not have a hometown?

I have a related question about birthplaces. When I was in DC for Julianafest, I went to the Natl Portrait Gallery. On all the 20th-century portraits they had a version of "Born XTown, YState" after the person's name. If a form asks where I was born, I put Hartford, CT because that's where the hospital was, even though my family lived in MA at the time. But many of the places listed seemed very Smalltown USA. Do you think that the listings were probably hometowns? What do you all say when someone asks where you were "born"?

(Of course, the question gets even more confusing when you consider we moved again when I was 3 and I have no memory of the first town I lived in. So my hometown is the place I lived from 3 to 17, but it always feels somehow like I'm cheating when I call it such.)

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. So I'd say the greater Los Angeles area is my home town.

I was born in Lake Charles, LA, moved to Melbourne, FL before I was 1, and my hometown is Tupelo, MS, where I moved at the age of 3 (right before my sister was born.)

I have no guilt about that.