Beverly Hills is not my home.

I don't think that Beverly Hills has felt like "home" for several years, and it really doesn't feel that way now. This is what assaults my feelings the most whenever I am in my parents' house. I just don't belong in this city anymore, and I'm not sure that I ever did. Ah well... (Caltech feels like home and so does Oxford, and I think that's about it.)

Maybe I'll write a longer entry about this at some point, but I'm really not sure what else there is to say.

Whenever I think about the early years with my family, I always feel that I have orders of magnitude more bad memories than good ones. (I have many good memories with my friends.) Maybe I'll eventually feel differently, but I have to be honest with myself and for now let me just say that I am so thankful that other aspects of my life (my wonderful friends, my career, etc.) have done a Hell of an excellent job of making up for any deficiencies in my life. This is the holidays and although being in the house of my childhood makes some of the bad stuff from the past come to the front of my thinking a bit more than usual, I will do my best to focus instead on all of the great things in my life---which (a) far outshine the bad things nowadays and (b) make me immeasurably luckier than most people. My deepest thanks go out to the people who have played such important roles in this.