Over the weekend, I went to NYC and Brooklyn to celebrate the birthday of a friend of my husband, RJ's, and mine. I hadn't been there in a while, though for almost five years I lived in New York and assumed it would be my home for longer. What I found was Brooklyn neighborhoods that looked the same but fancier, or in some places just the same. I found myself at the large, beautiful birthday party -- for Peter Herdrich -- talking occasionally about Los Angeles. My semi-canned response to open questions about how I like Los Angeles is to say (the truth) that I love my weird hilly neighborhood in the heart of the city, but that as far as the city at large goes traffic is out of control; that I am happier these days making my life tiny, geographically speaking; that I am so jealous of my friends in New York who walk their children to school and then keep walking to get to work. I can't remember if I told anyone what it is like to be stuck on the 10 freeway going east at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, not moving, my daughter, crying, strapped into what looks like a tiny dentist's chair in the back -- "Hang on sweetheart, don't cry, it'll just be another forty-five minutes." On those days I think this is not a good place to live. (Obviously, it's the other days that keep me here.)