Irrational favorites

I have multiple favorites in most categories where favorites are picked, which after consulting the Miriam-Webster Dictionary, I no longer feel bad about. While the common connotation of "favorite" is closer to "best" of which you technically can really only have one, I think... wait... I think you can have two bests if they are equal...

Alright, forget that first part, because it doesn't have as much to do with what I want to say as I thought it did at first. Yes, I know I could just delete it, but there's something about the authenticity of my bizarre train of thought that gets me from point A to the point I was trying to make that I find compelling, so I'm leaving it right were it is.

So, some things it sort of makes sense to have favorites of: songs, movies, colors, foods, actors, cars, toothpaste, and stuff like that. Preferences for certain things like despising spearmint and wintergreen will cause things with more preferable attributes to be seen as favored over things with less desirable attributes. Right. That's just plain logic taken and twisted with ridiculous words until it seems like something that I just thought up. Which I didn't. In case you were fooled. The sky is also mostly blue, due to light scattering through the atmosphere in a specific and scientific way that I can't adequately explain.

There are many other things that it seems pretty silly to claim that any one is favored over another. And yet... I have some pretty irrational "favorite" things. For example, the carpet tiles in my office have a stripe pattern, but the tiles are laid at right angles to one another, so the over all effect is sort of like checkers... with stripes. My favorite tiles are the ones in which the stripes are pointing the same way as my feet. So, obviously, my favorite changes every time I turn a corner, and I would have no favorite if I weren't standing parallel/perpendicular to some squares. If there are only two choices, and one is better than the other--in a prefered way, not in an intrinsic value sort of way, then that one is the favorite. By definition, that's the way it works. Logically. Rationally. And yet, it's totally irrational to have a favorite carpet square, right?

Squares aren't even my favorite rhombus. I like the slanty kind of parallelograms better, and six-pointed stars even better than that. In general, I prefer shapes that have even numbers of sides to odd. This is all beginning to sound a little more OCD than I imagined.

See, it all started when I was playing Bejeweled and began to think that maybe one of the reasons that I wasn't better at the game was because I tended to look for combinations that included "jewels" that I liked rather than ones that I was indifferent towards. As far as strategies go, it's pretty crappy, but also fairly representative of my thought processes. Rather than focus on the whole picture, trying to make the best and most beneficial combinations, I choose to focus on ones with the purple stones, or the diamonds. That kind of thinking will never lead to a record-breaking high score. Then again, if that were my goal, I'd live in a constant state of disappointment. Since I play to make pretty patterns and pass the time, I'm generally quite successful. If I were smarter, I'd apply that approach to the rest of my life--not the pretty patterns and time wasting part (I think I do enough of that already), but the "define the goals that make sense to you rather than strive to achieve goals set by someone else" thing.

But first... TACOS!