Pop country

Missing Chicago a lot.  A lot. I got into an argument with a fellow Midwesterner today about whether he says 'soda' or 'pop.'  A very well-meaning fellow classmate conjured up way more of a visceral reaction in me than I expected. Despite the misinformation he is trying to spread, it is pop.  I started saying soda a little here and there over the last year or so because I know how pointy the word 'pop' sounds and I started becoming self-conscious about it.  Somehow now for the sake of the Midwest argument I have forced myself to ally with this word I don't even really like.  And despite what the clerk at the Popcorn Counter in the mall said, Chicago style popcorn is caramel and cheddar mixed together.  Atlanta can't just buy a bag in Chicago, change the label a little and call theirs.  Because I am a jerk about being right sometimes, I googled it.  You know what comes up when you plug 'atlanta mix popcorn' into google images?

Oh, that must be the Atlanta Chicago Bulls.

And when you look up some data about the colloquial term for soft drinks?  I highly recommend going to this website.

See all that yellow around Chicago?  That's pop country.

Before I left, I was really drawn to dumb stuff with anything Chicago on it.  Tourist-type products.  Maps?  Yes.  Embroidered towels?  Yes, please.  Belly rings with the skyline on them?  Why not?  Let's get this puppy pierced!  For some of us, there's just more of a sense of pride about the place you're from when the context changes.  It is pretty ridiculous.  Then again, Chicago is awesome.

Today, I'm also catching myself off-guard with this overwhelming, flooding feeling that I wish I had someone to share this experience with.  Or that I were just back there.  I really love my people so much.  This past summer was so incredible.  That's the danger in having an amazing time; it's temporal.

Speaking of time, I've been sitting and trying to figure out how to make a contingency table in SAS for a few hours now.  All of these things here are taking me a whole lot of time to try to figure out.  I feel super behind in all of my classes.  This is so much material that I have never been exposed to before, completely outside of my academic experience so far, which felt somewhat robust until we started really getting into this course material.  I think I finally got it!  Now on to discussions of trace gases and mechanical mixing in layers of the atmosphere (don't worry; we only have to describe and not derive the equations).

Take that, Saturday night!