1. The majority of your high school milestones (makeouts, intense talks, and memorable experiences) occurred in a car, usually at the end of that one street nobody ever goes down.

2. All distances were measured relative to the major town landmark — i.e. Target, Kroeger, or the Starbucks parking lot.

3. High school sports weren’t that huge of a deal, in the sense that everyone in the town didn’t shut down to go attend the big game. Everyone was too busy, off doing…what were they too busy doing?

4. Streets were named after the most innocuous things possible — Presidents, flowers, birds, and that one heroic firefighter.

5. You always wanted to go over someone else’s house, because it was somewhere other than your house.

6. At age 12, there was nothing cooler than going to the mall, buying nothing, and spending the majority of the time hanging outside, terrified that the badass kid of the group was gonna peer pressure everyone into smoking cigarettes.

7. You’ve dominated your fair share of Marco Polo games in above-ground pools.

8. If you had an in-ground pool, you were basically a Kennedy.

9. Half the movies in high school you had no desire to see — you only saw The Lake House because for whatever reason, that was what the group was doing.

10. Getting spotted at the movies with your parents was social suicide.

11. The early drivers license/having a car thing was a big double-edge sword. On one hand, you were a hot commodity. On the other hand, every weekend night was spent driving all across town, hoping that everyone in the car didn’t insult your music.

12. To this day, you still are at a loss as to who would buy advertising space on the paper placemats from the diner.

13. For the amount of times you’ve gone bowling, you should be much better at bowling.

14. You’re kinda confused as to why there’s now like 3 different hibachi places.

15. When people have no idea what “manhunt” is, you die a little inside.

16. When a semi-major town landmark gets closed down in favor of building more houses, you momentarily hate everything about the world.

17. When friends from college/other places come to visit, they are often marveled by the amount of parks there are.

18. The most exciting part of the holiday season was driving through that one neighborhood with the outrageous Christmas decorations.

19. The last few years of high school were almost exclusively reserved for talking about how exciting it was gonna be that you were gonna finally get to leave.

20. You get irrationally insulted when someone else insults the boring suburb you grew up in. Because while you’re well aware that it kinda sucked, it was also kinda the greatest.