5 Fun Facts About Me!
I love reading fun facts about other people I follow online or know in real life. The random tidbits of information help to connect me to with other remarkable souls. So today I thought I'd open up and share five fun facts about me-Rachel Smak that I bet you didn't know.
1) I'm an organizational neat freak-but somehow that hasn't translated to my car. While my kitchen cupboards are organized with precise precision and detail down to the front facing labels of my canned vegetables, the front passenger seat floor of my 2010 Prius is a place where half drank water bottles, and empty styrofoam coffee cups go to die.
2) My favorite food is a potato-in like ANY FORM! It started with my grandmother’s famous twice baked mashed potatoes (yes they’re as amazing as they sound!) I was the girl during family holiday's and get-togethers loading up my plate with heaping spoonfuls of grandma's creamy potato goodness as if they were going out of style. I joke that if I were getting married tomorrow, I’d have a full-on potato bar filled with every kind of delectable potato concoction you could imagine! Mashed, fried, scalloped, and sweet, you name it, and it'd be there, along with all the necessary toppings! During weddings I photograph, I stealthfully inquire with the wait staff if my vender meal can be comprised of nothing more than a plate filled high with the buttery starch. Want to know the way to my heart, feed me, or be a potato in any form!
3) I was homeschooled. Raised by my second generation Ukrainian father and my beauty school tech drop out mother, I found myself being the only seven-year-old in her second-grade class flunking. Naturally, my parents saw it as the failures of an overpriced and overachieving private school system and decided to educate me at home. I always use air quotes when I tell people I was "homeschooled." Technically we were home surrounded by textbooks, but my parent's believed in experiential learning. A simple act of changing a lightbulb turned into our in-depth science experiment. Instead of learning math from books, my parents made my younger brother, and I shop for groceries, add up coupons and balance the family checkbook afterward. To this day I have a recurring nightmare that I'm solving long division problems by hand-you know without your phone calculator. P.E. was swinging on the backyard swingset or joining my mother and Miss Fonda for step aerobics in our living room. While other kids were learning grammar, sentence structure, and prose, I consumed novels as a way to determine the fundamental mechanics of writing. I grew up learning everything backwards, and thinking Anglo-Saxons were the people who invented Math. But all joking aside, I wouldn't trade my valuable upbringing and unconventional education because I didn't and never will fit into a traditional box.
4) I'm really sappy. I brush back tears when I photograph a first look and an otherwise masculine groom breaks down and cries upon seeing his bride for the very first time. I ugly cry watching those cheesy animal rescue videos of stranded puppies perched delicately on a log in the middle of a rushing river. This sappiness is genetic I'm fairly certain because I can't imagine anyone else's parents crying during the commercials for the 3D motion picture Avitar in its opening week in theaters. (Yes, it was as embarrassing as it sounds-thanks mom and dad!)
5) When I have time, my favorite TV series to binge watch is Sex and the City. What's not to love, the Big Apple, the fashion, the friendship, the romance? I replayed this show so much that I melted one of my collector's edition DVD's in my DVD player! Whoops. Luckily all 6 season now stream on HBO GO so I can get my Bradshaw fix whenever and wherever I go!
There you have it folks, five little fun facts about myself you might never otherwise know. Hopefully, you got a chuckle or even just a better understanding of who I am. What is a fun fact about you that I might not know from following you online? Leave a comment below and let me know!