14 Signs You’ve Been Away From Arizona Too Long

1. Your autocorrect can’t remember how to spell “Tucson” and instead turns it into “Toucan” every single time.

2. You’re totally reliant on your phone to tell you what direction you’re facing because there’s no sun and the flat horizon is totally uninterrupted by mountains — or really, any kind of topography.

3. You’re the only one pissed off about the lettuce that this so-called Mexican food restaurant put all over your so-called taco. And forget about the salsa.

4. Whether it be Sanchez, Juarez, Reyes, or Robles, everyone butchers your last name.

5. You understand the implications of a wind chill factor and know when to change your clocks. But not why. You still don’t understand why, but you know when.

6. You start wondering if jackalopes are real and one just never appeared to you. On the flip side, you wonder whether those huge tusked javelinas were just products of the peyote.

7. Your skin burns and/or freckles at the very mention of sunlight, and you have to pay to get an orange tan. Indoors.

8. You drive the speed limit and have mastered the art of the turn signal.

9. You’ve forgotten how to prepare prickly pear cacti for tea, jam, and salad, and you can’t remember your abuelita’s magical method of turning masa into tamale.

10. You start to wax romantic about Phoenix. It might be a soulless concrete jungle, but it’s your concrete jungle, dammit.

11. You stall out when driving a standard, but you’ve learned to maneuver a car in weather.

12. In the evenings, you shake your fist at the sky, shouting, “you call that a sunset? I’ll show you a sunset!” Same with lightning storms.

13. You’re stunned and amazed by the fact that the roads aren’t flooded whenever there’s a hint of precipitation.

14. You’re faced with a fine for trespassing. Private property? What’s that? Don’t we pay taxes for a reason?