I love Los Angeles.

I love it because it’s home, naturally. I remember sitting around once with a couple of friends in graduate school, and we talked about the kind of place we envisioned ourselves settling down in when we got older. Without fail, all of us circled the towns and cities where we grew up. We were lucky of course: none of us had been raised in the middle of nowhere. We came from places with diversity and culture and growth and hope, where a return would not inherently be an indicator of our personal stagnation.

I do not deny there is something to the Dorothy-esque notion of no place being quite like home. It’s hard to detach any hometown from a person’s very identity, from their trove of memories, no matter how far removed and how infrequent the visits. There’s the strip mall with the Subway where I spent Saturdays playing video games, next to the store where my parents bought me my cub scout uniform. There’s the comic book store I visited every week, the burger place where I learned the proper way to say “gyro.” It’s all so romantic, and I am by all accounts a romantic idiot.

But Los Angeles is so much more than my hometown. Yes, people complain about LA constantly: there’s too much smog and traffic, it’s not a city, people seem fake, and so forth. They even made a movie that postulated we got into car accidents “just so we can feel something.” I think people want the country’s second biggest city to confine to their expectations of what a city should be, to have its various aspects fit neatly into an itinerary for a weekend getaway or a five-day vacation or whatever. They want a train to every single attraction; they want it to be contained, they want it to make sense.

The great thing about Los Angeles though is that it doesn’t have to make sense. It is and can be everything, and the fact that it is indeed “72 suburbs in search of a city” should not be considered a detriment but rather its greatest asset. One of my most vivid memories is driving on the I-5 during a Fourth of July and just seeing scattered fireworks from all sides for miles on end, each display originating from one of the 88 individual incorporated cities that make up Los Angeles. Each contains its own character, comprises its own community, even as they remain entirely open and accessible. Together, they define Los Angeles.

This dynamic seems difficult to grasp for people who are not from LA, people who have not spent extensive time in LA. And as they cannot accept the parameters of the city, they do not understand its inhabitants. Comments about the superficiality or narcissism of locals conflate the vast cross-sections of people who live and work real lives across the sprawl. They in effect apply the image of Bel Air or Beverly Hills or Malibu across the totality of Los Angeles in a manner unique to this city; those making judgment would never think to equate Wall Street bros or Soho socialites with all New Yorkers, for instance.

Of course there is something quintessential about Angelenos. There is a distinctive personality archetype if only in the broadest contours, the characteristic carefreeness and insularity that can make Los Angeles feel like a Neverland of sorts – in which too many seem too far detached and too unwilling to grow up. But the thing is, Los Angeles is comfortable. It is gorgeous. For outsiders to blame its inhabitants for the effects of its geographic location and weather patterns misses the point. For them to find fault essentially with the fact that its inhabitants lack chips on their shoulder is more revealing about them than it is about us.

With the less cynical perspective, even the apparent superficiality of the city is recast. The Hollywood elitist mentality, for instance, exists as something far more innocuous, linked to the industry’s role as the city’s economic backbone, and intertwined with its identity in an almost mundane manner. Los Angeles, after all, is where I learned of the existence of a tourist attraction (the Venice Canals) only after seeing it onscreen (in 2003’s Hollywood Homicide). It is where my mom – a blue-collar sushi chef at a local supermarket – knew Cody from Step by Step only as a regular customer. This is its charm.

There’s too much to say about the richness of the disparate communities that together make up Los Angeles; the fact that there exists a Little Tokyo and a Little Armenia and a Little Ethiopia and a Koreatown. That the Getty, one of the most beautiful museums in the world, sits on the West Side, and the Space Shuttle Endeavor downtown. And that if we stretch the boundaries of the city just a tad, the happiest place on Earth can be found to the south, and a decommissioned Air Force One in a presidential library to the northwest – an actor first, appropriately. That there exist mountains and lakes and forests all within driving distance, and of course, beaches and palm trees too.

My first memory of Los Angeles is fittingly of its overwhelming nature. I was six years old then and sitting in the back of my aunt’s station wagon, as my family had just landed in our new home, our new country. I recall looking out at the spaciousness of the lanes, the controlled chaos of cars in motion, the endlessness of freeway interchanges and overpasses. It’s been nearly three decades. I’m a lot bigger these days, and generally sit behind the driver’s seat. The roads seem more cramped, the cars are less in motion. But the vastness of Los Angeles is something that remains.

Indeed, the city is ever-changing, ever-growing. I read about new train lines, a sustained downtown boom, a major overhaul of the airport. We even have two football teams again. But for whatever transformative processes are taking place, whatever overhauls are yet to come before the Olympics return in another decade, the core of Los Angeles is ultimately what matters. And near as I can tell, it – as ever before – continues to be full of life and character and vibrancy and community. I can’t wait for my next visit.