It’s tearing out your lawn and putting in a drought-tolerant succulent garden.

It’s the busboy at the gourmet eatery rolling around on the bar floor and giggling with excitement when Mexico scores a gol against France during the FIFA World Cup.

It’s the Border Patrol Agents walking their beat around Dana Point Harbor.

It’s a crow in a coral tree.

It’s the tattooed mommas of Orange County.

It’s dining al fresco for breakfast, lunch and dinner in mid-March.

It’s the shirtless jogger with an unnatural-looking sandy bronze hair helmet reminiscent of Ken doll’s.

It’s the hundreds of strip malls where you can grab a burrito, see a psychic, kick back with a sake, get a mani-pedi, sell your gold, and buy things you really don’t need for just 99 cents.

It’s glass fences around houses miles from the sea and with views of busy parkways.

It's:

It’s overhearing this conversation between a man and a woman in the supermarket checkout line: (They are both very tall and very skinny, and are only purchasing one item -- a pint of chicken soup from the deli.)

Man: So, should we eat the soup, watch the movie and then go in the spa?
Woman: Well, I’ve been thinking about this.
Man: I thought you might have been.
Woman: I’ve been thinking about this chicken soup all day.
Man: We could watch the movie, eat the soup, and go in the spa.
Woman: Yeah. Or we could go in the spa, eat the soup and then watch the movie. But it might be better to eat the soup, watch the movie and then go in the spa.
Man: Or we could eat the soup in the spa.
Woman: We could.

It’s how you can tell how good your Hollywood agent is by the amount of grammatical errors in his e-mails to you -- the more errors, the better he is, since he is so important he doesn’t have time to focus on trivial things like proper English language usage and grammar.

It’s the tendency of drivers in Orange County to move heaven and earth so they can park their cars into parking spaces with the front facing outwards.

It’s the white-outlined sea turtle or hibiscus flower stickers on the back windows of cars and SUVs that desperately try to evoke a mahalo attitude, but which actually end up reminding me of chalk outlines at crime scenes.

It’s usually thousands of miles away from where its citizens grew up.

And now, for the first time since its inception, It’s So Cal will diverge from the proven format and get a little wordy. Please enjoy the following very relevant essay:

The Drake Equation for Artistic Success in Hollywood:
A Comparative Analysis
By Stacey Hegarty

In 1960, the astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake devised a formula to estimate the number of alien civilizations in outer space with which we might be able to communicate. His worked paved the way for the field of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Forty-nine years later, I will now attempt to translate his equation to describe the probability of artistic success in Hollywood (in the hopes of calculating the likelihood of my own big break).

Drake’s Equation is N = R* x fp x ne x fe x fi x fc x L. My formula follows the same structure, but the variables will be adjusted.

In Drake’s, N is equal to the number of civilizations with which we might communicate. In my equation, N is equal to the number of famous or successful artists in Hollywood who communicate with the world through various media outlets.

Drake claims that R* is the rate of star formation. My R* is similar to Drake’s, but I change “star formation” to the number of people in Tinseltown with real talent. I was tempted to leave R* as is, but decided that I needed to be more specific. There are many “stars” in Hollywood, but few of them have real talent beyond blind luck, killer abs, potato heads, famous parents or enviable beauty – and even fewer of these are true artists. An artist would be someone like Sean Penn or Lyle Lovett. A star would be Pamela Anderson or Ryan Seacrest.

Interestingly enough, the percentage of one’s stardom can often be calculated by the number of times the star has appeared on the cover of US Weekly or STAR Magazine multiplied by the number of times the star has spoken directly to reporters from TMZ (not just poured Fiji water on them). But I digress – this is a secondary calculation largely unrelated to the one I present to you today.

Drake’s fp is the number of stars that have planets, for me it is the fraction of those talented people who are more than just talk. The kind of people who can actually show you the script they have been writing for seven years, not just talk about it in a theoretical sense.

My ne is the average number of those people who actually do their art, while Drake’s is the number of stars and planets that can support life. The people who actually plan time in their week to write their script and do just that, not those who just stare at a blank page trying to write or give up entirely and watch TV instead.

The Hollywood fe is the fraction of the above that actually finish their art and go on to promote it. Drake’s fe is the number of planets that develop life. It’s one thing to finish the script, and talk about it – it’s another thing entirely to send it out into the black hole of Hollywood production companies, to linger undiscovered on an assistant’s desk until a screenplay similar to yours is green-lit (i.e. the simultaneous pairings of Mall Cop, Asteroid, Talking Bug, and Truman Capote pictures).

Drake’s fi is the development of intelligent life. And my fi is the fraction of the artists who create art that is objectively original, good or promising. We’ve all been there: slogging through a one act play, acoustic performance or improvisational comedy show by our actor/writer/musician friend who valiantly clings to the dream long past its expiration date. And we’ve also been there when a friend has nailed her art in a unique, definitive, culturally resonant way that makes us want to support her until the universe folds in on itself and we all implode into dark matter waiting to be big-banged once again.

Drake says that fc is the extraterrestrial life that we will be able to detect from earth. In Hollywood, fc becomes the fraction of these artists who know an established Hollywood operator who can show them how to get access to the phenomenon of “the right place at the right time” – therefore far increasing the likelihood that the rest of the earthly population will become familiar with the artist. In other words, people who don’t just perform their art for audiences of friends.

And L is the length of time an intelligent civilization can exist without destroying itself through weapons of mass destruction or other nuclear and atomic means. My L is almost identical to Drake’s. It stands for the length of time an artist can sustain herself via waiting tables, cleaning swimming pools, delivering for Yummy.com, or through benefactors, trust funds or sugar daddies until she is “discovered” – all the while maintaining a solid creative output without falling victim to apathy, self-doubt, exhaustion, anonymity, sex, drugs, the scene, or mainstream happiness like marriage and babies.

In closing, I would like to add that anyone who has been delighted by this piece can feel free to e-mail me directly because I don’t have an agent or manager and am approaching the event horizon of my own personal artistic expiration date. Thank you.

It’s the smell of wild sage wafting off of hillsides covered in desert chaparral.

It’s shirtlessness in the wintertime.

It’s O.C. OCD.

It’s the bare-chested man walking up the street in Old Glory board shorts and flip-flops.

It’s anorexic palm trees that feel fat when compared to bamboos.

It’s sneezing out the Santa Anas.

It’s how even Los Angeles becomes a small town during a heat wave.