Things that are good about Orange: The weather. Mongolian BBQ. The house I grew up in, though my parents sold it a couple years ago and there are strangers living in it now. My amazing high school teachers Ms Hahn and Mr. McCoun and Mr. Peterson and Ms Rippe and Mrs. Moseley. The girls at church who stuck by me all the way from early childhood through painful adolescence.

Things that suck about Orange: The suburbia. The smog. The way people whine if a restaurant isn't air conditioned. My conservative and overly-superficial church where judgment is more important than love. The sneers. The skinny girls and the way they flip their hair. No culture. No public transportation. Too much development. Fake smiles, fake bodies, fake everything.

However, there is still one great goodness about OC. My little brother Brent lives there. He just graduated from UCI with a major in political science and minors in computer science and philosophy, and the commencement ceremony was on Saturday. Hence the 8 hours in Orange. Patrick and I flew down in the morning, ate lunch with my family at the aforementioned Mongolian BBQ, went to the ceremony, and then flew back to Oakland in time to drop right into bed.

The commencement itself was pretty damn interminable at two and a half hours long. That's about an hour and a half too long to be sitting on a folding chair in an Irvine park, watching student after student receive their handshake from the dean. This was after we had had to sit through a CEO-type and a politician-type spout reassuring platitudes, dumb jokes, and ceaseless optimism at the graduates. Rejoice, I wanted to yell. For you will now have to work almost every day for the rest of your life just to survive. Have fun! Patrick buried himself in a copy of Cryptonomicon and mumbled about the need for a ticker to let the audience know how many students were left. I stood watch with a pair of binoculars, examining each figure as it approached the platform for brother-sign. Mom and Dad shot dirty looks at the people around us who were chattering so loud we couldn't hear the names being read. When I finally spotted Brent with his bright green Nader button pinned to the front of his robe, I whooped to alert the others and then handed the binoculars over to Mom while Dad peered through his telefoto lens. I did my best Xena ululation when his name was pronounced. I don't think he possibly could have heard me.

Ceremony is important. I remember my own (very different) graduation from UCSC and how I scribbled all over my identifying card so everyone in the quarry where commencement was held would know I graduated with a degree in, not just literature, classical literature. I remember my mom coming to see me as we lined up before the ceremony and me gloating at her, "I got honors in the major!" and making her shriek with glee and jump up and down. Watching the PhDs get hooded during Brent's ceremony Saturday was such a powerful ritualistic thing that it almost made me regret my decision to give up on going back to school. But is that fleeting moment onstage worth the years of misery and torture and homework that lead up to it? Not for me, not anymore.

Now I've just got to get Brent to leave Orange and move up to the Bay Area.

my bro