Although San Francisco has somehow become my home city, I haven’t been taking advantage of it as much as I could be. This place is supposedly known for its great restaurants, but when I got asked to name five of my favorites, I couldn’t name more than three.

A few weeks ago, I resolved to at least try to expand my horizons: I’ve been recording “Check, Please! Bay Area” for suggestions, and whenever I go out or order take-out, I’ve checked yelp.com first to see if they can suggest a better alternative. And even if I go to a place I’ve been before, I’ve resolved to try at least one new thing off the menu.

Today for lunch I tried the sushi bar at Takara Restaurant in Japantown. I’m pretty far from being knowledgeable about sushi; I usually know just enough to keep from making a scene. It’s taken me years of training just to force myself to be able to tolerate it. But once I turned the corner, I actually like it a lot. At least, the standards — sake, hamachi, maguro, and ebi. The versions of those at Takara were fine — nothing mind-altering, but still good stuff.

But I’ve always seen amaebi listed on the menu as “sweet shrimp” and have been curious but never tried it. So I ordered it as “dessert.” See, here was my line of thinking: I’ve had tamago (egg) nigiri before; it was recommended as good introductory sushi. Both versions that I tried were basically a sliver of an omelet infused with a five-pound bag of sugar. I figured that “sweet shrimp” would be the same thing, ebi plus sugar.

As it turns out, and apparently this is old news to everybody but me, amaebi is raw shrimp. And the difference between the raw and cooked variety is the same as the difference between toro and maguro — nearly identical to the undereducated, but one’s trashy and commonplace while the other is a treasured delicacy.

Here’s a good time to point out my shrimp aversion. I love all varieties of cooked shrimp, minus the tails. But the animals themselves are third on my list of most vile and stomach-turning creatures on the planet (1. slugs, 2. Ann Coulter, 3. shrimp, 4. squids). Just the sight of them can make me queasy. I know that eating shrimp isn’t “Fear Factor” material — I’m from the southeast, so I’ve seen people with big buckets of crawdads, and I know that they do unspeakable things with the heads. But not only have I never tried it, I can’t even look at it. I usually have to close my eyes and think of something else if I even get the thought of it.

I thought I was behaving pretty well today — not scraping my chopsticks together, not dipping the rice in the soy sauce, ordering everything I could in Japanese, and saying “oishikatta desu” instead of “it was delicious” to offset the fact I’d ordered a Coke. But here I’ve got a plate sitting in front of me with a couple of raw sea insects; and they look pretty much like the cooked variety, albeit unnervingly slicker and more translucent; and the chef is staring at me, so I’ve got to eat one.

I managed to get it down by imagining it was just like the cooked variety and holy cow that’s an odd texture but don’t think about it and I wonder if they de-vein these things and then swallow and immediately go for the ginger and it’s done.

And there was still another one left on the plate. At that point I wanted to point behind the chef, shout “Is that Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto?”, and take advantage of the confusion to make a quick getaway. But instead I decided to be a man and just eat the damn thing. I asked for the check and hoped that I could pay it and get out before I horked raw fish and sea-bug all over their sushi bar.

But the chef pointed at my plate and said, “Oh, you aren’t finished yet!” I thought he was chastising me for not eating the tails, but after a couple of rounds of confusing half-sentences between the both of us, he pointed out that my shrimp heads hadn’t come from the kitchen yet. “No really, that’s okay,” I protested, and may have even done a childlike belly-rubbing “I’m full” pantomime, but he was insistent. The other chef assured me, “No, the heads are the best part,” and then, “That’s why people pay seventeen dollars for amaebi.”

While I was processing this bit of information, and trying to come up with a graceful exit strategy, they came back from the kitchen with a plate of delicious fried shrimp heads. “Squeeze the lemon on it, it’s delicious.” I must’ve had an easily-translatable look of revulsion on my face, because the other chef quickly asked me if I would rather take it home with me. I said “yes” in a manner that I hope adequately conveyed “Oh God yes bless you for the rest of your life,” paid my ginormous bill, said “domo arigatou” in a last attempt to save face, and escaped.

So now I’ve got a plastic container with a pair of $20 fried shrimp heads in my refrigerator. I’m obviously not going to eat it, but I’m thinking of saving it as a trophy of my resounding whiteness.

Today I said goodbye for the last time to Burbank and Glendale, as well as my shirtless-and-red-shorts-wearing slavedriver*. I got on the plane in perfect, sunny but cool weather and after a short, uneventful ride, got dumped out into a cold, sharp wind and an impenetrable wall of fog and traffic.

And it made me as giddy as I can get when not on Space Mountain. I would’ve even done a hop in the air and clicked my heels together if I weren’t so fat.

Get me back in my apartment and in front of my keyboard again, and it’s like giving a pacifier to a fussy baby. I still can’t remember when San Francisco turned from “that annoying, expensive place over-filled with smug hipsters” into “home,” but it’s locked into place now. Maybe it just requires a southern Californian hotel to make me realize it.

* Used as poetic license only. The Disney people I’ve worked with are friendly, easygoing, and unpretentious to a degree completely unbecoming for a gigantic multinational entertainment corporation.

I’m in the middle of another week-long stay in the glorious Burbank/Glendale area. It’s made slightly more pleasant by the fact that it’s almost certainly going to be my last. Barring any unforseen catastrophe, of course, and assuming that I’m not seriously mistaken in my belief that Hell is a concept and not an actual place.

I’ve been here dozens of times now, and it’s settled into a familiar routine: go to SFO, fly down to Burbank, get unduly annoyed at the rental car lady, drive to the office, spend the day in meetings, check into the hotel, get on the internet and bitch about LA, collapse into an uneasy sleep of Glendale-themed nightmares, repeat.

The weird thing is that although it’s gotten routine, it still doesn’t feel comfortable. My default state in any unfamiliar place is to feel like I don’t belong, but here, that feeling is almost palpable. It’s as if the entire LA area is filled with trillions of Chuck antibodies, persistently and aggressively reminding me that I’m not supposed to be here.

It starts with the nasal congestion I’ve complained about earlier; the city’s first defense is to try to suffocate me. Next it tries to drive me out with a headache that usually lasts a day and a half. Then, once it realizes I’m still here, it decides it’ll at least render me harmless, by making me fall asleep at some ridiculously early hour, like 4 in the afternoon. Once all the initial attacks fail, it just spends the rest of the time giving me indigestion.

Traveling down here is about as simple as it could possibly be while still having an airplane involved. The people are friendly enough. The hotel is comfortable. But it still just feels overwhelmingly off. And even after two years of frequent visits, it still doesn’t sit right with me. As I was driving in, I started trying to build up some nostalgia, thinking “this is the last time I’ll see this rental car booth” and the like, but none of it would take. After this is all wrapped up, I’ll miss some of my coworkers, but I won’t miss the place, because I never feel like I’m really here.

My current, non-biovirus-based theory to explain why I have such an aversion to LA, when plenty of people adjust to it fine and even love it, is that it’s just a combination of unrealistic expectations and burnout. I was reminded last weekend that growing up, I always thought of LA (and inexplicably, Burbank) as exotic places. That was where all the TV happened, after all. And in particular, the building I’m typing in now is the epicenter of everything my eight-year-old self thought was cool.

The problem is that Burbank and Glendale, and much of LA in fact, isn’t exotic, but is aggressively mundane. It doesn’t even have the depressing-but-still-somehow-interesting slickness and artificiality of downtown LA. It’s just miles and miles of outdated chain restaurants and grocery stores and office buildings and strip malls, punctuated by TV and movie studios and the Hollywood Bowl.

You’ll find that feeling in any suburb — the sense that the people there have sacrificed a little bit of their souls for the sake of convenient shopping and easy parking. And who am I to judge, seeing as how I’m an outspoken advocate of the path of least resistance. Plus, there’s only so much excitement you can take before it’s time to just run errands and buy groceries again.

But here, it’s amplified. Living in the middle of the entertainment industry is supposed to be at least interesting: either like some bohemian artists’ neighborhood in New York or Europe, or the soulless but tempting live of excess privilege like you always see in the cautionary tales about success in Hollywood. It’s not supposed to be so flat, and average, and suburban, and boring.

So basically, after about two and half years of frequent visits, my assessment is: it’s a nice place to visit, but get me the hell out of here.