I now live in west LA again
We moved back across the city to be on the west side, so that we can be closer to the construction at our place. I'm now living in the Westwood area, where I haven't lived since 2010.
I lived there in the summer of 2010 while I interned at my first videogames job. I was subletting a room in an apartment of UCLA students, and had an internship at a Japanese free-to-play MMO company in El Segundo.
It was a very peculiar time in my life. I didn't know very many people locally. My roommates were all resentful and gossipy about the ex-roommate I'd replaced... who ended up getting my email address. She and I actually secretly became friends?? One of my roommates saw me playing Minecraft all day every day on the table in the dining room, and kept trying to bait me into debates about how games were destroying the lives of young men. I was working as a marketing intern, and swiftly discovering that I didn't like marketing very much, actually - I was bad at my work and couldn't figure out whether it was having any impact on the world at all. Halfway through my time in Westwood, I learned that I was walking distance from a great-grand-relative's grave in the Westwood Cemetery. I commuted every day on the 405 in a car I rented from Rent-A-Wreck. I worked half-days and spent a lot of time sitting in a Noah's Bagels in El Segundo, playing Chrono Trigger on my DS. This was all my first introduction to LA!
Now that I have a lot more independence and money, I plan to actually enjoy Westwood a bit. (Well... sort of... because I am laid off... if you pay me I'll have proper money, so consider that!!) The biggest way I plan to enjoy it is by biking into the mountains a lot. But it's been very interesting to return to this place where I had my first job in the games industry and think, "Wow, shit is so different now. This my life is both nothing like what I imagined when I was 20, and way the fuck better than what I'd hoped."
If I'd known back then that I would ever come back to live in LA, ever enjoy it, or ever be able to work on indie games, I would have been dumbfounded!