In Illinois, all fun and socializing crashes to a screeching halt at high school graduation.

[traveller]

Even I have seen premonitions of it, as early as even my Sophomore year. The ones graduating when I was still an underclassman, and the friendly ones don't go to like Morton College, Triton College, College of DuPage, or even University of Illinois at Chicago. Instead, the friendly ones would go to college in Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, and even Louisiana. And I would even get scared for them when they said they were going to, for instance, "Miami University" and I thought, literally, Miami, Florida, which in the 1990s and especially the 1980s had some really ominous rates of violent crime.

High school was fun. I was in a number of clubs. My favorite one was Snowball, where we learned about the dangers of alcohol and drugs, and where we lived by the "hugs not drugs" slogan. Most of my classes were a lot of fun, too, although English was never really my favorite subject. My favorite subjects were pretty much art and science.

And then I graduated in 1999, and discovered, no more social atmosphere anymore. No more "hugs not drugs" anymore, nobody picked up where they left off, not at Morton College, not at Triton College, not at College of DuPage, even classmates from my high school were not as sociable in college as they were in high school. And then I went on a series of field studies classes from College of DuPage, including to the Florida Keys in 2004, 2006, and 2008, where I experienced literally a culture shock. I was surprised at how friendly and sociable people were in Florida. Then I read this study that shows that people in the southern states (Texas, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, and what not) hug more than people in the northern states (Illinois, Wisconsin, Alaska, Montana, and what not) do. And then I realized, no wonder all the nice ones graduating Morton West High School prefer to go to college in the Sun Belt region! Because "hugs, not drugs" is more appropriate for the Sun Belt region than it is for the Frost Belt, Rust Belt, Rocky Mountains, and Corn Belt areas.