My Favourite Things

Good evening listeners, and welcome to lesson 22 in my radio training course here on 2MR at the Max Rowley Media Academy. Tonight is a fun-filled show featuring My Favourite things.

It is so nice to be blessed with five senses with which to experience the world. The world is filled with sounds, colours, tastes, aromas and textures that can stimulate our senses and bring feelings of pleasure to our brains. Combined with our own actions and choices, we can make some really nice stuff happen.

A simple walk in the park on a sunny day and taking nice deep breaths of fresh air can invigorate our whole body and clear our minds of worry and stress. Watching a great movie, with a story line we relate to can move us to tears. Swimming stimulates our whole body with the cool caress of life-sustaining water. Eating a great meal, wearing really comfortable clothes, snuggling up in front of a fire in winter, or walking into the frozen food section of Woollies on a stinking hot summers day. Listening to a great piece of music, Walking through an Art gallery or museum, stimulating our senses with colour, form and movement.

ANNIES SONG

But it’s not just our senses that can bring us feelings of happiness and pleasure. Achievement and relating to others in special ways brings us emotions like pride, self worth, compassion and understanding. How many times have you been in a conversation with someone, and suddenly when the right words are said, you get that real intense feeling of connection with that person. It could be a shop keeper, an old friend or someone in your own family, the important thing is the sharing of ideas you both relate to, or experiences you both understand. Lifting one person or the other with words of encouragement, sympathy, even just plain honesty and openness can crack that nut of emotional inertia and get the feelings moving inside us.

I must say that my favourite things are mostly these kind of human experiences. Sharing good times with friends and family, exchanging ideas and stimulating others into thought, conversation and action, confronting difficult situations with courage and seeing a way through to the other side.

A good healthy argument is a great way to get ideas rolling and evolve each participant’s viewpoint. Most people might like to argue until they are blue in the face and walk away without changing their mind, but I love finishing an argument by saying… hey, I think you have a good point there, thank you for helping me understand this situation. Even better, is when the person I’m arguing with ends up agreeing with me, but hey, you win some, you lose some, and it’s all good healthy exercise for the mind.

Another one of my favourite things is achievement. When I direct my energy towards something and that energy pays off in that thing being achieved, I get a great deal of satisfaction from looking back and seeing the work I have done. Writing these programs every week is a great example of persistence and achievement, creating a new show week after week, and looking back on all the fun and learning gained from just doing it.

I often wonder what it would feel like to be a builder and be able to drive through a neighbourhood and look at all the houses and think “yep, I built those” builders, producers, developers – they all get to see solid evidence of their achievements, which must be satisfying. Not that achieving intangible things wouldn’t be satisfying. A nurse who cares for people’s immediate needs, a policemen confronting and resolving countless difficult and sometimes terrible situations. An accountant, who helps people solve their financial problems, all these things bring with them a sense of personal achievement.

MY WAY

Yes… the emotions and feelings conjured up in songs like these are hard to dispute.

My favourite things are probably much the same as your favourite things… feeling good, happy, satisfied, fulfilled. The funny thing is that most of these feelings cost nothing – they are a choice, a state of mind, and a result of just being human and living your life in a good way. It is no surprise then to see how hard ad agencies and corporations try to delude us into thinking that the wares they happen to be peddling ought to be our favourite things.

MUSIC

The sheer exhilaration of discovering that you can pay your insurance premiums by the month, taking away the horror of that big annual lump sum payment you can never afford. Utter delight experienced each time you get your bank statement and see that the NRMA has garnisheed a slab of your income and put it straight into their account without you ever seeing it, giving you complete peace of mind about your insurance needs.

MUSIC

The rapture you experience every time you swallow a mouthful of carbonated and caffeinated brown coloured sugar water, that feels, as you burp up the excess gas, like you are snowboarding down a glacier, bungee jumping off the empire state building and crushing your nuts on the handle bars of your BMX bike.

The bliss of wiping down your bench tops of crumbs and peanut butter blobs after breakfast, filling your heart with delight as you know the antibacterial agents in the spray cleanser and the wiper are killing all those nasty bacteria that could give you dysentery, hepatitus A,B and C. and that nasty flesh eating virus.

Rejoicing in the installation of your new Clipsal power surge arrestor, and the thrill of knowing that no nasty spikes of dirty power are going to wipe out all your expensive appliances.

The unrestrained joy you share with your family as you queue up in front of ten other families at a fast food joint, to buy a few bread rolls, potatoes and mince and you search in gay abandon for a vacant table, rejoicing as you throw the tray full of rubbish the last family left there into the bin and wipe down their muck with tissues before settling down to indulge your every taste bud’s desire.

The ecstacy in signing the agreement at the car yard to pay off a $30,000 mechanical liability for the next 6 years, knowing that you’ll be on cloud nine as each and every part slowly wears out due to built in obsolescence, and watching the resale value plummet to nearly nothing by the time you have paid off it, and the interest the bank charged you. As you dream of your next new car. Oh what a feeling!!!

And the orgasmic, almost transformationally profound experience of drinking a slab of beer. As the vomit rises to your throat, you are transported to a fantasy world of gorgeous babes, incredible sporting achievements and good old fashioned mateship, even though you just realised your face is touching the toilet bowl, and it hasn’t been cleaned for months.

And finally the utterly priceless euphoria you feel when you get back from your overseas holiday with your mastercard chocka’d to the max, and having to pay it back for ten years after the holiday is over, because the interest charged is about 3 cents less than the minimum monthly payment. Total

These experiences could be my favourite things, but fortunately for me, I still hold dear the basic human values. In my books, the pleasures experienced in the simple interaction with others and with the world around us far outweigh anything a commercial enterprise can dream up.

This 2MR, stars of the new millennium, and I have been talking about My Favourite things.
That’s about it for this week’s program. I’d like to thank you for tuning in. I hope you found it both enjoyable and informative. I certainly did. Won’t you please tune in again next week when I face the ultimate challenge of filling an entire show with … well… whatever! It’s a free form next week, always surprising, entertaining and at times tragically pathetic. But not next week, next week will be fantastic! I can’t wait. Until then, this is Stefan Sojka, saying forget reality… go Sojkadelic!!! Good night.