Boston is a freezing cold, poorly designed, ridiculous garbage city that I will love and defend until the day I die. I can't help it. None of us can. For those of us born and raised there, our relationship with our hometown exists as some tangled combination of rabid love and utter hatred. It's a piece of our identity we couldn't shed even if we wanted to. It's also a piece of our identity, that for many of us, we didn't even fully comprehend until we moved away.

Things start happening when you leave Boston. Some little, some big. You're reminded constantly, by yourself and others, of the place you grew up and how it is inherently tangled up in you as a person. It can be annoying (it usually is) but it can also be reassuring. Here are some of those things:

1. Discovering that the MBTA has ruined your brain

For those of us who started riding the T alone while still in elementary school, the various routes of the red, blue, green and orange lines are tucked in the same corner of our brain as the alphabet and basic multiplication. We can't forget how to get from our junior high school to Loews Boston Common even if we wanted to. This can lead to some confusion/embarassing moments when we have to navigate the public transit systems in other places, including, but not limited to, consistently referring to the subway as the "T" wherever you go and being mocked for it.

2. People really want you to have an accent

Upon discovering you hail fro the greater Boston area, people will let you know that they are disappointed to find you do not speak like a character in "The Departed." You'll tell them that nobody talks like a character in The Departed and they don't seem to believe you. Duh, Boston accents exist, but they don't sound like that. Also, they'll freak out whenever they hear you use "wicked" as a modifier.

3. Getting yelled at about sports

As it turns out, outside of New England, New England sports teams are pretty universally despised. On multiple occasions, I've heard the Patriots referred to as "the Yankees of football," which, yikes. Also, "Sweet Caroline"? Yeah, not just a Red Sox thing. They play it at pretty much every sporting event in every city. Mind. Blown.

4. Learning new names for things

The "T" is only the start of the confusion when it comes to names of things. You'll also get weird looks for shortening Dunkin Donuts to "Dunks" and referring to the blessed machine found in hallways everywhere at which you refill your water bottle as a "bubbler." A really strange one I encountered pretty recently was that "nips" is apparently New England localism. When I discovered this, I asked my friend, "then what do you call the tiny bottles of alcohol drunk exclusively by middle schoolers and homeless people that are always halfway buried in the sand at the playground?" As it turns out, the rest of the country has no word for nips, so when they want to talk about them they have to call them "the tiny bottles of alcohol drunk exclusively by middle schoolers and homeless people that are always halfway buried in the sand at the playground." Which seems shortsighted on their behalf.

5. Being hit with the soul-shattering realization that “Evacuation Day” is not, in fact, a real holiday

Yup. I am 20 years old and not once in my life have I had school on St. Patrick's Day. This is due to "Evacuation Day," a nonsense holiday invented by Boston Public Schools because they aren't legally allowed to give St. Patrick's Day off. Many of us (myself included) did not know that Evacuation Day is not an actual holiday, and that it is not celebrated anywhere else until we left Boston.

On that note, I'd like to wish you a happy ~Evacuation Day~ this week!