Those of you who read my columns frequently will remember that I come from a small hamlet by the name of Lompoc. Lompoc is a small town on the Central Coast of California that I can tell you by staccato repetition is between Santa Maria and Santa Barbara and ten miles away from Vandenberg Air Force Base,

        Typically, I'm always a bit reticent to head back there. I only do so at the times that the dorms close down, namely Christmas and Easter Recess.

        Over the break, I was trying to ponder on exactly why that is. At Point Loma, I'm in the sixth most populous city in the United States, in an environment of people dedicated to scholastic pursuit (some more than others), and for better or worse, I've developed my own niche here.

        In Lompoc with its population of about forty thousand, most of the people who would even remember me are gone. It seems that all the negative things about Lompoc have remained stuck in a time warp, while the few positives have vanished.

        Even beyond that, the events of my hometown simply hold no interest for me. I do not care about the fact that a K-Mart returned to Lompoc recently. I do not care about the annual "Flower Festival" except for being happy that my church will again make a boatload of money selling the same strawberry shortcake that they do every year.

        I am a bit annoyed that the seemingly moronic members of my community chose to add The Golf Channel to our basic cable lineup when they could have selected Cartoon Network or Comedy Central, but even that fails to capture my interest as much as it would someone who has stayed in Lompoc.

        Have I become an elitist? Or have my horizons been broadened by classes, late-night conversations or these little mental exercises every whenever-Bell-feels-like-printing-them?

        I cannot think of a single instance in which a conversation here in Point Loma has engendered the same "I don't care about this" attitude most of my conversations in Lompoc engender.

        What frightens me about this is the realization that Point Loma is not a permanent community for me. Sometime in the very near future, I will have to leave the nest and make my way in the world, either starting from scratch somewhere completely new, or returning to Lompoc and letting myself be reabsorbed by that community.

        To be honest, I'm not sure which scares me more.