What I Think About Love

On my way to college today, I was listening to a song that my friend was playing. It was obviously a romantic song and the girl was singing about how the guy she loved had become her everything- her laughter, her tears, her sky, her life. Yes, that's even cheesier than it sounds
I don't understand it. I don't understand a love like that. A love that's all consuming that your identity completely changes. A love that seems to be even more unconditional and blind than a mother's love for her child.
I understand love. I interpret it as having the courage to say what's hard to say because you care enough to say it. I see love as a meeting of two minds, of two hearts. I see it as intense and passionate, but I don't see it as something that takes away what makes you who you are. I don't see it as something that changes the way you define yourself.
And I really don't see how a love like that can last. Doesn't it get exhausting? That much intensity all the time? Why can't love be an interesting conversation over a cup of coffee? Why can't songs be written about that? Simple, uncomplicated and happy.
Life is complicated enough as it is, why add this Romeo-Juliet touch to romances? I've never understood the appeal of these kinds of love stories. They're completely overrated. They couldn't stand the thought of living without each other that they would rather die? Come on! Elope, for God's sake. Figure something out. There's no need to kill yourself. And these are just stories you read in books and hear at bedtime. Love like that doesn't exist. And if it does, it happens once in a century. So that we can fawn over it till we find the next one

Finding Your Inner Crazy

We live in strange times; where, the physical attractiveness of someone is determined by the number of likes on their Facebook profile picture, popularity by the number of followers on Instagram, talent by the number of followers on Tumblr, Wordpress or Blogger. Strange, isn't it? There was the Neoclassical age, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of the Romantics, the Renaissance and now? What would this age be called? The Age of the Emoticons? Or the Age of Narcissism? We're all so caught up with our own lives, we don't even know what's going on in the lives of our friends and families. We're concerned about our hair. We're concerned about our body. We're concerned about our image. We're concerned only with our own opinion, with our own "gift". It's all about me, me, me.
We don't even stop to acknowledge the fact that our work, whatever it may be, hasn't been compared to the  We believe we are the best. Us aspiring writers fancy ourselves the next J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling. The aspiring photographers fancy themselves the next big thing. The aspiring dancers imagine they're the next sensation to take the stage by storm. The singers hope to achieve the fame that Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar did and the bands want to be The Beatles. And that's good. It's great that all of us have such high expectations of ourselves. What we have to ensure is that those aims of ours aren't lofty and beyond our reach. All of us start out aiming for the stars and beyond. Most of us crash and burn. As much as we hate to admit it, all of us can't be great. So, my question to you is, are you going to risk crashing and burning to go after something you love? Do you really love it? Or do you give up and choose the more traditional route and become part of the mundane but practical workforce? That's the real test, isn't it? Being crazy enough to jump off the deep end? This new year, let's search within and find the crazy that all of us have tried to hide within ourselves and attempted to stamp into oblivion. It's nice to be crazy sometimes.