"Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more." -Roald Dahl

J.T. McHart's Pizza Restaurant is my favorite pizza place in the entire world. I realize this is a bold statement considering I have never been to Italy, the alleged birthplace of pizza. But McHart's is my favorite for reasons beyond the pizza.

My first visit was about eighteen years ago and I am convinced that I fully remember it, down to where I sat and with whom I went. Since then, McHart's has been the obvious choice for my pizza needs on both ordinary and extraordinary occasions. The owner recognizes me, which is to be expected from my frequent visits, but unusual and refreshing in a large city like mine. Whenever I came home from college, I squeezed in as many meals as possible with as many people as possible at McHart's.

What is ironic is that this hole-in-the-wall restaurant houses some of my best memories. Memories of the days before college when my entire family was in the same city for more than ten days. Memories of a lazy Sunday evening with a childhood friend. Memories of cliche moments, you know, the "ordinary moments with extraordinary people." Meals that at the time, didn't seem at all special, but looking back, I cherish.

I recently watched Up (it's been a Pixar summer), in which young Russell muses, "Sometimes, it's the boring stuff I remember the most." My dad and I discussed this sentiment as we were going for a walk the other night, another "boring" daily activity in which we engage. The thing about "big adventures" is that we expect a lot of them. We embellish and idealize said adventure in our minds and spend days awaiting some specific moment. And when we finally get there, when we finally take a step back and look at our house built on Paradise Falls, we feel a sense of emptiness. It's all over. A sole moment that has for so long has consumed our minds is suddenly a thing of the past. We almost want to forget it.

There are no stakes in the random and boring moments of our lives. They just...happen. Happen so that we might fondly look back on them.

Last weekend I met up with a friend after several months. She insisted, Tell me about graduation weekend! In a cinema-esque flashback moment, I was flooded with completely random memories, playing Scattergories in my freshman dorm room, DP Dough (that's for all the Penn readers), carving names in the fresh cement outside our house. That was the adventure. Graduation weekend was ceremonious but that's all.

In a very paradoxical sense, adventure is all that occurs during our search for adventure. Adventure is a series of boring moments compiled in our memories. As I prepare to blast off on an adventure of the more traditional type, I have promised myself to make the most of the "boring stuff" as well, train rides, for example. After all, those are the moments of which I will likely have the least photographic documentation but the best memory. And upon my return, I will be able to state with absolute certainty that J.T. McHart's Pizza Restaurant is my favorite pizza place in the entire world.