These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things
There is something really amazing about your last days at home before what will hopefully be a very long stay away from home. I am crouching in on my last days at home and so I am trying to get full on all of my favorite things around the house.

Pop: Pepsi. As a female and someone who has spent a large portion of her life running and needing to be in good shape, and having a mom who never let us have pop before noon and never more than 2 in a day, I have never really splurged in this department. But my dad however is a huge Pepsi drinker and because of it my brother and I can’t drink Coke. I know that I have never in my life had a Pepsi and not thought about my dad. And a Pepsi out of a fountain always leads me to think about my brother, my dad and I. You see when we were little my dad would always stop at a convenience store fill up some Styrofoam 20 oz. cup with Pepsi and ice and then my brother and I would try to mooch as much of it off of him as possible. Then when my dad would go to take a drink….opps, it is all gone. This is why to this day I still think that Pepsi in a Styrofoam cup from a gas station tastes better than any other Pepsi in the world. Kind of like how some people prefer beer from a bottle/can/keg. I myself am a bottle girl, though a good tapped keg is pretty swell as well.

Favorite Sandwich: Turkey, onion, avocado, Miracle Whip on wheat bread. My awesome Auntie Cathy made this sandwich a few years ago. This sandwich is what jumpstarted my love affair with avocados in general. Cathy made this sandwich for the 4 of us before our 1st skydiving adventure. When she was telling my friend and I about what she was planning to put on these sandwiches I will admit that I was a little turned off by the idea of green mushy things. But after waiting in line for an hour and then waiting another hour to get up into the air I was starving. I would have probably ate anything put in front of me. But to my delight they were the perfect ending to a perfect day.

Favorite Candy: Reeses Peanut Butter Cups! My momma filled up our candy jar with them yesterday…most are gone as of right now. Keep in mind it is only 10:00, by midnight I am planning on needing her to get some new ones tomorrow, she is pretty cool like that. In fact when my mom 1st brought them home a few weeks ago she had no idea that they were my favorite. It was a habit I picked up my junior year of college during March Madness that year. Not really sure why, but roaming through Wal-Mart one late night they seemed to satisfy some craving deep down inside…after that I never really had the courage to kick the habit. I can in fact, plow through a whole bag by myself and feel completely guilt free. To my delight my mom watched me do just that and never said a word about it being bad for me. She is pretty cool like that sometimes.

Favorite Person: My brother. Ever since I left for college I always told people that he is my favorite person in the whole world. He makes me happier than anyone else in the whole world and I can’t imagine ever loving anyone or thing more than I love that kid. So as of late we have been spending our mornings and nights together. He sings little bits of songs to me, I then download them so that when in Africa I will hear the particular song and think of him.
We had been getting up everyday by 11:00 so that we could catch re-runs of Nash Bridges on WGN for an hour. Then a week ago WGN pulled the rug out from under us on that. When we were little we used to watch Nash as a family every Friday night…at least I think it was Friday, could have been Saturday. I love Nash Bridges, though most people have no idea what that show is these days.
During the 11:00 hour Zach will also cook breakfast for me. He is a pretty darn good cook…especially breakfast food. And then after Nash is over we get our fill of all that ESPN has to offer. Then around noon or later we get started on something…usually it is later than noon. I am going to think of him everyday at 11:00 for the rest of my life I think.

Favorite Show: Sex and the City. Over the past few days I have been trying to get my fill of SATC before Africa. Though I am pretty sure that all of the information that the ladies have to offer will be of little use in the forests of Africa. I started watching Sex and the City in the last few weeks of my Freshman year of college. I had never seen the show growing up because well, we only had 4 channels, needless to say HBO wasn’t one of them. Anyway, after track season was over my friend Randi and I thought that it would be a good killer of time to burn through a few seasons before summer hit and we had to split ways. Needless to say I was hooked. In the years that followed I have used Sex and the City as a way to make sense of problems with friends and relationships. In the past probably 4 days I have plowed through 3 seasons. I love those four girls and have often thought that I was meant to be a part of them, the producers just didn’t think that it was proper to put a minor on such a progressive show.

As I have been sitting here typing, (while watching Sex and the City) I am not sure if all of these things are my favorite because they are my favorite, and I came by it naturally, or they are my favorite because of how they became my favorite. Like nature vs. nurture? Perhaps I was meant to be a coke girl but my dad and everything that he stands for nurtured me into a Pepsi girl and now I just can’t shake it.
But then there is the issue of the avocados, I never liked them until the skydiving incident. In fact they never even looked appealing., but after going through something so amazing with 3 people that I love so much, how could a girl not love avocados?

I think that it will always be hard to know why we are so fond of the things that we are fond of. Is it all predestined? At the end of it all I think that most of the cheesy stuff is bull shit, I know that if my aunt had fed me a seafood salad after jumping out of a plane I probably would have thrown myself from the car. But I know that I am so glad that all of my favorite things remind me of such beautiful memories.

It’s not what your looking at that matters, its what you see. –Henry David Thoreau