Yesterday, after I read some more of Crime and Punishment, Nandini and I went to the general UC Berkeley commencement convocation graduation ceremony thing. I went mainly to hear my friend Shayna give her University Medalist address. Aieee! Shayna Parekh, I love you like a sister, but that speech started great and didn't live up to its potential, kinda like me, but no matter.

Most of the speeches weren't very good. Nandini suggested that we'd be better off with a limit of three quotations per speech. Oh, and I left just before the Jonny Moseley keynote address, but I still caught three mentions of the September 11th terrorist attacks and two mentions of commencement-as-beginning-rather-than-end. As I told Nandini, "it feels like a drinking game."

On the other hand, hey Jeana, Alan Dundes's speech rocked, actually daring to be intellectual and conceptual and analytic. He talked about, among other things, the abnormal emphasis that US culture places on the future rather than the past or present, and urged us to savor the present and not just think about the future all the time.

Then Nandini threw me a graduation party. Almost all of my favorite Berkeley people came! We ate food from Vik's and played Taboo and drank punch that Nandini and Leonard made and whenever someone wished me a happy graduation or congratulated me I felt very odd. I'm graduating?

Right now I'm at home and my flatmates and I conjecture that the smell of pot is coming from downstairs, since it's not coming from inside our place. But how? The heating vents?