The True "Love Story"

If you get to know me, you'll soon find out that one girl whom I've had a significant interest in recently is Taylor Swift. I will admit, she isn't some awe inspiring singer or killer guitarist and her music isn't anything close to being noteworthy in terms of skill or intricacy, but in the end what I appreciate most about her is that she is honest and expresses her heart through genuine lyrics (discounting the fact that I cant really relate to certain songs...i.e. "Hey Stephen"). Amidst our Katy Perry and Lady Gaga mainstream music culture of purely superficial single tracks banking on some chorus that is too damn catchy (every time I hear "Paparazzi" or "Waking Up In Vegas" it gets stuck in my head), Taylor stands out as an artist who delivers something heartfelt.

But as with any growing relationship, accountability is a must and I feel like I need to call attention to Taylor's fanciful depiction of love in her single, "Love Story." I'll admit I enjoy listening to the song and I will indeed label it as 'cute,' but in the end it simply remains a fairytale. I remember one day I was standing in line at the bank and in front of me was a mother and her teenage daughter when "Love Story" started playing in the background. As it played, the daughter turned to her mother and said very emphatically, "Taylor Swift doesn't know anything about love. She makes it sound so easy in this song. What a fake." Restraining my initial response to punch her for insulting Taylor, I realized that this young teenager was actually completely correct; Taylor simplifies love to be something that is way too easy. She paints this elaborate, comfortable, eloquent, desirable image of how all the "Romeos" and "Juliets" will be chilling happily ever after while riding Gandolf's white stallion into the sunset with the recitation of a single "yes."

Sorry Taylor, but I think you're wrong. As much as I wish relationships worked out that smoothly and easily, I don't think True Love is like that at all. One thing I learned throughout the strenuous/arduous/laborious course of last year is that True Love isn't simply something that spontaneously sprouts out of mutual feelings of desire and passion but is actually one that must be cultivated through countless times of sacrifice. The amazing thing is that True Love doesn't even stop after one instance of offering, but actually desires to give up more and more each and every day. It isn't just willing to sacrifice for someone, but it desires to. In the end we have to look back to the True "Love Story" of God's love for His creation throughout all of time and realize that the Love God expresses is the ultimate definition of Truth. Though He already willingly sacrificed his son once and for all as atonement for our sins, the beauty of God's grace and love is that he still reaches out to us everyday. While our hearts strive to experience easier, more tangible stimuli that we mistakenly identify as love and end up getting hurt by, God actually opens his arms even wider so that we can return to him. While we push, kick, and shove Him away with all our sin proclaiming in arrogance that we can find something out there better than him, God still runs after us with a heart of compassion that endures it all. Some days we might declare our love for Him through worship and praise but once life begins to go astray, we easily give him the cold shoulder. But God's Love is too strong and He actually chooses to forget our past and continue to do whatever it takes to have a relationship with His creation.

In the end, God is sacrifice.
God is True Love.



It's def the glasses.


aside: I am already so busy, this year is going to be ridiculous...like this picture

My Ode to Music

For some reason I feel like it's a lot harder to write blogs lately. Maybe it's because something is lingering in my brain and feasting on all my neruons and not allowing me to think of anything else, or maybe because I'm not in an "acceptable creative environment," or maybe because I'm realizing that people actually take time to read my writings (thank you so much, I appreciate it greatly) and now feel an obligation to write osmething that is nothign short of being a combination of, life changing, moving, inspiring, and entertaining. But this week in my screenwriting discussion, my TA kept stresing that a writer's best work usually comes from when he writes about what he knows and cares about so I decided to take his advice and write about one of my greatest passions.

Whenever I'm walking to class or en route anywhere, you will most likely see me listening to my beloved ipod focused entirely on the melodies it transmits. I think that God engineered me with the personality and ears to appreciate and relate to music on a very specific level. One trend by which I can describe myself is definitely my constant pursuit of balance (strictly in the internal sense because I'm not much of a surfer or ice skater...). Whether it is majoring in English while taking all these med school requirement classes or abbreviating a majority of my notes with math symbols (my favs: < / > signs, the operations: + / -, the "therefore" sign with three dots in a triangle, the greek letter delta meaning "change"), my heart always leans towards some sort of equilibrium.

The amazing thing about music to me is that it acts as the epitome of balance. At the foundation, music is completely mathematical and based on distinct patterns amongst the notes with every melody and chord structure ever imagined stemming from the octet, eight notes that make up the scale of a particular key at a particular octave. And even on the sonic plane, sound waves are ultimately sine/cosine graphs with varying amplitudes and frequencies. But the products of these integral (pun definitely intended) mathematical functions are various and unique sense of emotion. The beauty of music for me is that specific mathematical changes in graphs of various functions and sound waves have the ability to somehow resonate significant feeling within my soul.

And of course genuine and meaningful lyrics help too.


Jon Foreman: one of the most honest musicians



and I thought this picture was hilarious: