I realized today why I have so badly wanted to leave Southern California almost since the day we moved here. Put quite simply, I don't fit in.

Let me start by explaining to you a little bit about my day Wednesday.

At 8:00 in the morning, I was in a housing development in Newport Coast called Shady Canyon, where none of the homes is under a couple of million dollars. I was in one of the model homes for a construction company which would sell for no less than $14.4 million. It has an exercise room and a movie theater in the basement, and the master suite is larger than my entire apartment.

I was there for a photo shoot for a client of the PR firm I work for. The client is a fine jewelry designer, and we were shooting their new consumer advertising campaign. He brought more than $3 million worth of jewelry -- that's $3 million cost. (Triple it for retail prices.)

The stylist for the shoot showed up, and she had several large, painful looking sores on her face. She told us that she had gone to her dermatologist for a facial peel, and it had burned her terribly, but she assured us that it will make her skin look amazing. If the sores don't scar. When our boss turned up an hour and a half late, she expressed her concern that the model would be too "fat" (her words) to fit into the clothes she had picked out. The model was six feet tall and a size six.

Fortunately, the model had no trouble fitting into the clothes that our boss had purchased on her credit card and fully intended to return -- worn -- to the stores. My boss did complain that the model's breasts were slightly too large for some of the tops. I quipped that if that was our biggest issue, we were probably going to be fine. The model was gorgeous, with beautiful sleek, shiny black hair and lovely, flawless brown skin. My boss was concerned whether the photographer would be able to photoshop out the beauty mark on her neck and hand, but he assured her that it wouldn't be a problem. Then the makeup artist put spray-on body makeup all over the model's arms and legs.

While we were waiting for the model to finish getting ready, my boss and the stylist were chatting, and my boss mentioned that she had read that Demi Moore has had a knee lift. She wanted to know where she could get one.

After arriving before anyone else, making sure the house was open, learning to use the lighting and music system, meeting the caterers, greeting the photographer, model, makeup artist and hair stylist, shoot stylist, and jewelry clients, my boss told me she was glad I had come to the shoot after all -- so that I could drive her nanny back to her house before I went into the office. My intern was allowed to stay, ostensibly because she has dark skin and could "stand in" for the model while the photographer sets up shots. My suspicion is that it was because our intern wears more fashionable clothing than I do.

And that was when I realized it. I can't compete with that mentality. I don't fit in here, and I never will.

And frankly, I'm not sure I would ever want to.