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By Amelia Gravagno, Staff Writer

Leaving the foggy gloom of SF State for my hometown in Orange County this summer made me miss this city so much.

I knew the suburbs were boring, that’s why I wanted to move to the city in the first place, but I never realized just how boring.

Huntington Beach is Pleasantville.

There is no absolutely no crime. The cops there are so bored they actually drive around looking for expired registration stickers (I should know, my first week back I got slammed with a fix-it ticket).

Their favorite thing to do on a Saturday night is chase all the home-for-summer college kids out of all parks, beaches, parking lots and any other public place we might gather to have a good time. We weren't even doing anything illegal (for the most part.) We just needed a place to hang out where we wouldn't be constantly watched over by hovering parents who no longer trusted us even though we never before gave them a reason to worry.

“It’s that damn city! It changed you, I know it did!” they say.

I also needed to get away because I was disturbing my parents during their newfound and obnoxiously early bedtime. When did they turn eighty? When did they decide that
4p.m. was a good time for dinner and 9p.m. was bedtime?

Then they got mad at me for not eating dinner, but I’m sorry, when you wake up at noon or 1p.m. and eat a big lunch, you’re not really hungry by 4p.m.

And then they’re suddenly suspicious of all my friends who they’ve known for years.

Why does coming home suck so much?

Where are all the friends I used to hang out with in high school?

It’s like my clique diminished into just those 3 or 4 people I regularly talk to and I never see anyone else. I was so excited to come back and hang out with everyone from high school and catch up with the friends I still care about, but maybe not enough to call and email them during the school year.

Instead, the majority of people my age have completely disappeared from my hometown, never to be seen again. And the ones I do run into are people I couldn't care less about. I didn’t hang out with those people when we lived in the same area, why should we now make the effort to be friends long distance?

I love my best friends from high school, I really do. But night after night of the same four people doing the same things and having the same conversations is making me go crazy!

Here at SF State I got accustomed to going out at night with groups of twenty people. At home I was lucky if I could gather seven people together to just chill.

And nobody has any motivation to do anything in Huntington Beach. What the hell did we do in high school? I remember so many crazy and exciting stories from our “wacky youth."

Why aren’t we like that anymore?

Here at school, someone is always wandering over, usually inebriated, and starting up a conversation with something like: “Dude, wouldn’t it be cool if we connected a bunch of ‘slip-n-slides’ together in the quad at midnight when the sprinklers go off?” Now that is some quality college-age entertainment.

But back in the OC if I had to endure another night of simply sitting at Denny’s complaining about having nothing to do, I was going to kill myself.