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I was sitting on my couch this evening, recovering from an afternoon bike ride, and as is my usual evening routine, I tuned the old TV to TBS…the sitcom station.  I love watching old syndicated shows…I don’t really know why.  Tonight, as I found myself doing other tasks (church web updates, anyone?), I was enjoying another episode of my all-time favorite show, Friends.  Something hit me as I watched.  It was an episode that I vividly remember watching the night it aired…the Finale.  That was a sad night for me.  You see, I had basically grown up with those six folks.  They helped me make it through High School, College, and my first steps into the “real world.”  I know, it sounds silly, but that was one of the few shows I’ve ever encountered on television that I really connected with.  Remembering how I felt during that fateful night of May 6, 2004, it really got my mind wandering to all of the other things that I will never enjoy again.

So here is a list of some of the things I miss the most:

• Friends Viewing Parties - While in college, Thursday night was Friends night.  Often, we would have Open House in our dorms (semi-conservative Baptist U) and my roommate and I would invite folks to come over and watch the show.  What fun times!  A small dorm room packed with friends sitting on the bed, the floor, anywhere they could get.  While I never claimed to be a “ladies’ man,” I remember one particular night where the RD of the dorm came by to see who this Phil guy was that had so many girls sign in.  One of my proudest moments!  
• Sharing a dorm suite/house with two of my closest friends - My last couple of years at Campbell U, I was fortunate enough to share a dorm suite, and later a house, with two of my closest friends.  Those were good times.  Sure, we got on each others nerves, but we had the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.  Trips to Los Arados Mexican Restaurant, playing music, N64, talking about the ladies, making fun of my friend’s Britney Spears posters (while secretly glad he had them), heading to the Caf or cooking together.  That sense of brotherhood is something that I think gets lost as we grow up.  
• Ditching Class - Yeah, I know.  I’m such a bad influence.  Even so…some of my fondest college memories came from ditching class.  Mostly to do something pointless, but it was totally worth it!  I remember one moment that I am particularly proud of.  It was the first REAL spring day of the semester…you know, one of those days that it just sickened you to waste in a classroom.  Sitting in the back of the class as it was set to begin, I looked out the window and just couldn’t take it anymore.  I turned to my buddy sitting next to me and proceeded to give him a hundred reasons why we should ditch class and go play golf.  After countless seconds of him protesting, he relented.  As we packed our things and headed down the aisle, the prof was calling roll….and got to my name.  As I walked past him in the front of the classroom, I simply responded “I’m not here today.”  The look on his face was priceless…he stopped calling roll and just watched me leave.  As I walked out the door, I turned towards him and swung an imaginary golf club.  I can still see the smile that crossed his face as I turned away.  I still don’t know if it was a gutsy move, or the most idiotic thing I’ve ever done, but it makes for a great story.
   
• Goldeneye 007 - My first love.  I can’t even begin to tell you how many hours my friends and I wasted playing this game on the N64.  Between Goldeneye and MarioKart, it’s no wonder I never had time to study.  While it was always fun to play solo, Goldeneye came into its own as a multiplayer game.  I can remember having a standing room only crowd packed into a tiny dorm room, yelling and screaming at one another, watching 4 guys try to dominate the Bond world.  Loser rotates out.  That was some of the most intense gaming competition I have ever experienced.  Simply amazing.
• Ming the Merciless - For three years, I was on staff at a Christian camp in South Carolina.  As a rule, every staff member was given a nickname that was to stick with them for the rest of their lives.  Here it is…Hello, my name is Ming, and I’m a former McCall Staffer.  Being on camp staff was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but also the most rewarding.  It also provided me with my story of the DUMBEST thing I’ve ever done. It was the last night of another long, grueling summer, and some friends and I really wanted to go out with a bang.  So we decided that we would, after the campers were in bed, hike one of the longer trails armed with only a MagLite.  Why?  We were on the hunt for rattlesnakes.  That’s right.  Not satisfied with hunting the copperheads that infested camp property, we wanted a REAL trophy.  So we proceed to hike the trail all the way to Reedy Cove Falls, which I believe is the second largest waterfall in SC.  This trail took us through the mountains, down rushing creeks over slippery rock towards the top of the waterfall, and ended with a steep descent down down a sheer bank to the bottom of the falls.  So there we were, 3 of us…one flashlight.  It was tough going on that trail in the pitch black night, but we made it back alive…and snakeless.  Looking back, I can see just how stupid and dangerous that venture was, but the three of us felt such a sense of accomplishment, and have a memory that will last forever.
• The Huxtables -  The Cosby Show was THE television icon of the 80’s.  I’ve always loved the humor of Bill Cosby, and my family frequently gathered around the tube to watch the most famous family in television.  I remember one particular night, watching my Father laugh until he cried.  It was Cliff’s parents’ anniversary, and the family had put together a performance of Ray Charles’ The Nighttime (is the Right Time).  The moment when little Rudy Huxtable appears and lip-syncs “Babaaaaay…Babaaaaay” still stands out as one of the fondest childhood memories about my dad.  He absolutely lost it.  He laughed and laughed, louder than I’ve ever seen him laugh before.  That sort of sums up his personality…he loves life, and it’s infectious.  I still smile when I see that episode.

• Graduation Day - School was never really my thing (as if it wasn’t obvious from some of my above references).  I constantly struggled, and motivation was just plain absent.  In fact, I ended up dropping out of Campbell, and a few years later I transferred to Anderson College (University now) in Anderson, SC.  I had grown up quite a bit by this time, and better understood the importance of a college education.  It was still a struggle, but I worked extremely hard.  My last semester, I had to take Hebrew in order to graduate (because I didn’t make it out of Greek the year before).  Talk about pressure!  I studied and studied, and struggled through that last semester.  It was brutal.  The proudest moment in my life was when my professor called me into his office, and informed me that I simply needed to make a 12 on my final to make it out of Hebrew and graduate.  Needless to say, I walked into my very last final exam with an air of confidence that I had never experienced before.  The exam consisted of two parts:  a master verb chart and sentence translations.  I knew that chart like the back of my hand, so I filled out the chart…and proceeded to write random sentences about nothing in particular on the translation pages.  I may have even slipped a couple of Monty Python references in there for good measure.  I turned in my exam, smiled at the prof, and walked out of that room knowing that the day I had wanted most in my life was finally going to happen.  When I walked across that stage on graduation day, it was the greatest moment of my life.