The personal here is the feeling of being an outsider when I first came to California from New Jersey. Different coasts, different cultures, different weather, different everything. A part of me was mesmerized by it all and had this feeling that I needed to understand as much as possible, so I could make this place feel like home. While I do live in this state, it didn’t feel like home until I embraced the culture and understood it. It was all about finding what made this place home to me, which became the genesis of why I’m writing this as my ethnography.

The universal here is how we strive to make where we are home. Finding that thing that make comfortable in our surroundings. For some, it’s easy. For others, it takes some time. The thing about surfing is that it was home for so many people. Specifically in the 60s, sp many people did not feel as thought they fit with the society presented to them, so to go to the beach was home, it was comfortable, they understood it. Where societal norms like getting married and getting a job and settling down constrained people from their California setting, it was surfing that made that state home to them.

Overall, I look for the things that make California home, which was the same way that surfing culture in California started in the 60s.  Doing this research makes me feel closer to this state I call home the same way being on a surfboard on the California waves felt like home to them.