12 Random Facts About Me

In an attempt to make my blog more personal, check out the list below of random facts about me!

1. I’m the youngest child of four, resulting in me being infinitely spoiled by my grandparents as a child and having to learn from my parents at a young age that I, in fact, cannot get everything that I want.
2. Speaking of being the youngest, I always joke about getting the hand-me-down genetics.  To an extent though, I truly do believe it.  I’m only 5 foot half an inch, and I stopped growing in 8th grade.  My two brothers (the oldest two siblings) are both over 6 foot and my older sister is inches taller than me.  So, hand-me-down genetics, right?
3. Being the youngest influenced my parents to bless me with eight names.  Just kidding!  I only have four names but that still confuses everyone- one first name, two middle names, and my last name.  To make matters more confusing, I go by my second middle name.  How?  Two words- my grandma.  She was a saint and helped my parents with me when I was first born (remember, I’m the youngest so my parents were dealing with toddlers and a pre-teen) and she was really in love with the name “Emily,” so when push came to shove, my parents just threw that in after my other middle name because I was the last kid.  I have a hunch that as soon as I was born, my grandma immediately started calling me Emily and that’s how I became stuck with it.  It’s actually a pretty cool story.  Also to note, I have the same name as the royal toddler (Charlotte Elizabeth).  The only difference is the Emily vs. Diana as the second middle name, but I still think it’s pretty cool.
4. I started karate when I was 11.  Chugoku Kenpo Karate, a Japanese style, that literally means “Chinese secret science of the law of the fist and empty hand.”  Also, I was one step away from black belt (in my style, that means a three-striped brown belt) and didn’t move forward to my black belt only because of timing (I was in college, it was difficult to cram all of the testing into summers and holiday breaks).  But I’m very close with my sensei and she’s like a second mom to me.  She’s the first person in the first row on the left.
5. I have done other sports, too!  Karate was my first love, but running is a close second.  I did cross-country and track from middle school through college.  In fact, I just ran my first half-marathon in my hometown last weekend!
   

   

   Two hours and nineteen minutes later…

6. And that handsome man in that picture is my fiancé, who I met in college and have been dating for four years, engaged for two, and who I’m getting married to in just 17 short days!  And in reference to my names that I listed earlier, I told Kyle I was going to hyphenate as a joke to just continue the ridiculous length of my name.
7. Speaking of weddings, I have a kickass pair of heels that I splurged on (treat yo’ self!) but I actually HATE shoes.  I mean I love the heels that I got and I really am looking forward to wearing them, but I hate anything being on my feet, unless they’re sandals where my feet can breathe.  (This means I hate socks, too!). As a side note, when I say “splurge” I really only mean like $60, which is WAY better than what I spend on running shoes (~$100) but it still doesn’t sit well with me to spend that much on one thing.
8. I love walking and running and hiking and traveling to new places.  I’ve been to several states in the US, but I’ve also fortunately had opportunities to travel to England and Germany.  Next on my bucket list: Ireland, Italy, and Switzerland, hopefully!
   

   
9. Here’s a weird one for you that I’m sure not many people can relate to: I HATE cheese.  Absolutely hate it.  Hate the smell, hate the taste, hate the texture.  I’m un-American (my fiancé’s words, not mine).  I’m not sure what happened.  I used to love Mac and cheese as a kid, along with cheesy pizza, but something clicked one day and I gagged when I bit into a previously thought delicious slice of Papa John’s pizza.  To the people who love cheese but cannot have it due to their digestive systems, I’m the worst, and I apologize for my un-Americanness.
10. Speaking of weird things, I have an irrational fear of…..water.  Yep, you read that right.  Whenever I go into a pool, or an ocean, I have to stay in a level where my feet can always touch the ground.  I know what you’re thinking- can you swim, can you tread water?  I can do both of those things.  However, for whatever reason, the moment I’m in a body of water that’s deeper than neck level, I freak out because that’s when I have to be on tippy toes and any further I feel like I’ll drown.  You guys probably think I’m so weird by this point.
11. But something that’s pretty cool and un-weird is my love for tattoos.  I love how the same designs (i.e. Harry Potter tattoos) can mean something completely different to another person, and I love how you can express what you’re feeling on your body.  I have two tattoos, and they’re both for my grandma on my dad’s side who passed away of lung/metastasized breast cancer.  She lived in Texas so I only met her a handful of times before she passed away, but she made a huge, positive impact on my life.  The first tattoo I got was a flower that was designed by my sister.  The second tattoo was from my favorite book, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and it lists the famous quote, “So it goes…”  My sister and I got that one together in almost the same spot on our bodies.  She has also designed another tattoo from Slaughterhouse-Five with the quote “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” in remembrance of my grandparents on my mom’s side (yes, the grandma who gave me my name).  But that is a story for another time.
12. Lastly before this post gets absurdly long, I clean when I’m upset.  Why?  I have no idea.  I supposed it relieves stress?  Any psychologists have any idea why I do this?

 

I’d love to learn about you!  Share a random fact (or several, if you wish), or even rant to me about my un-Americanness in the comments section.  I look forward to reading them!

Thankful Tuesday: The ability to travel

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

I love to travel.  I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid.  From a very young age, my parents began taking me places such as my grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania (3 1/2 hour trip from my home) and my other grandparents’ house in Texas, all via a car.  I loved beautiful West Virginia (It’s called “Almost Heaven” and “West by God” for a reason), but I always liked the idea of seeing other places around the world.  It’s too big to only stay in one place for your whole life.

It all started with road trippin down to good ole’ North Carolina with my best pal, Kotch.  Her real name is Melissa, but her last name is German and everyone always mispronounces it so I call her by the mispronunciation.  But anyway, we either started this tradition the summer before our freshman year of college or the summer before our sophomore year of college.  Unfortunately I have a terrible memory, but I’m sure she’ll correct me soon enough (aka when she reads this post and most likely makes a comment on it or just to me in a text).  My senior year of high school, Kotch and I became best pals/worst enemies and as that happened, her love for Duke basketball rubbed off on me and now I’m a huge Duke fan because of her.  Through the Duke fandom, we met two wonderful people named Alavia and Haley who became great friends of ours and who both happened to go to the same school/live closely to each other in North Carolina (at least during the school year).  We wanted to visit not only them but Duke itself to actually see it in person.  To convince my parents to let me drive us down (they were just paranoid something was going to happen to us on a 6 hour journey down to NC), we put together a ridiculous PowerPoint (don’t get me wrong, at the time it was awesome but we were weird kids lemme tell ya) and then before we knew it we were headed to the beautiful Raleigh/Durham/Cary area.  For the first few times we went on our road trips, we stayed in cheap hotels (but hey, anything works on a budget as long as we had a safe and comfy place to sleep..plus we’re poor) until Alavia offered us her guest bedroom in her house, so that’s where we tend to stay whenever we go now.

But basically, all of those road trips we take/have taken to North Carolina result in a few things: Watching scary movies (because Melissa is the worst and hates Alavia and I), visiting Duke’s campus (and sometimes meeting Duke players and getting their autographs/getting them to follow us on twitter–I’ll write about this more in detail in another post!), Eating Cook Out, and laughing obnoxiously over the most random things until at least 1 in the morning.  Basically our road trips down to North Carolina either once or twice a year are some of the best times of my life, and I’m appreciative of having such great friends to share those experiences with (including Kotch who somehow keeps me sane while driving for hours upon hours. Shout out to you, pal!)

(From left to right: Alavia, Haley, Kotch and myself at K-ville at Duke right outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium)

Besides North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas, I never got the chance to travel somewhere else until my sophomore year when I traveled to the ever beautiful San Francisco.  The song doesn’t lie- I definitely left my heart there.  I went there on a conference with one of my sorority sisters for a conference for PRSSA, of which we were both members (she was the president and I was the vice-president).  Besides attending conferences all day, we familiarized ourselves with the area our conference was in, along with a path to somehow make it to a trolley stop in order to make it to the bay.  From the moment I saw her aunt’s house where we were staying, however, I knew that I could live and work in San Francisco and be completely okay with it.  Her aunt lived in the suburbs of San Fran that had cute little running paths all throughout it that were perfect to run on during sunset.  The whole experience was phenomenal.  The only thing I wish we could’ve done was see the Golden Gate Bridge up close, but we still saw it from the Fisherman’s Wharf.

I also wanted to go on a cross-country road trip during one of my summers before I graduated college, but I didn’t have the funds for it.  But luckily, because of college, I finally got the opportunity to go to two more places I’ve always been itching to travel to:  London (because it’s my favorite city in the world and because of Harry Potter) and Germany (because I took it as a second language from high school and into college, where I achieved a minor in it).  Last year over Spring Break I went to London with History Club, while the Spring Break prior to that I went to Germany.  Both experiences were amazing in their own ways.  The people I spent those trips with and the memories we made while venturing in foreign lands are some that I’ll never forget.  Because this post is already so long, I’ll cover each trip separately over the next two weeks on Thankful Tuesday, but for a teaser, I’ll upload one picture I took from each place until you get to read my blogs about them.  I’m sure you’ll be able to tell them apart.

Until I post about one of the places above next week, just know that I’m fortunate to have the ability to travel.  I know that many people come across the opportunities but can’t jump on them for a variety of reasons, so I’m very thankful for having parents who want to see me travel since they had the opportunity to do so when they were young as well and helped me to live out my dreams by helping me fund my trips to go to both London and Germany.