Dearly beloved,

Dearly beloved,

If this love only exists in my dreams, don’t wake me up…

Saying I Love You First…

“I love you!

I know that women aren’t supposed to say I love you first, but I am down to break all the rules here. I just wanted you to know that I love you… You’re probably freaked out, but I just can’t imagine saying that to anyone except you. And even though we may not be on the same page yet, I am not ashamed of how I feel about you. I don’t wanna fight my feelings for you, I wanna nurture them because they’re beautiful.  And don’t you worry about hurting me and all that BS, because I can take care of myself pretty well. (And why do you assume I’ll be the one getting hurt anyways?!) But, I choose to be here because I want to and I want YOU. I can easily divert my attention from this, live my life (like I was before), and have this with someone new. But, I just don’t see the point cause I already have this with you and I want you and (baby) you’re worth it.

Unless you wanna say goodbye, in which case I will accept your decision…

All I want from you is to see you… Let’s just hang out and see how it goes…just go with it and trust me, it won’t be so bad ;)!”

-Unknown

 

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

-Eleonor Roosevelt

 

LIFE IS SO beautiful. So full of magic and possibilities.

Dear Wonderful Reader,

“LIFE IS SO beautiful. So full of magic and possibilities. When Billy died, I thought that my story had come to an end. But I was wrong.

Joe helped me to find something I had lost along the way.  Something I’d once believed so strongly: that the storms of life are bound to come, but maybe even in the storms, in the loneliest  times of all, you’re never really alone.

Love is the most powerful thing on Earth. I’ve seen what it can do. And it can do amazing things. Sometimes I imagine a world where everyone knows of a love that’s unconditional. And what a beautiful world it is.

I think Billy had it right, that there truly is enough love to go around. All you have to do is share it.

What is God’s love is like the sun constant and unchanging? What if you woke up one day and realized…nothing can take away?”

P.S. Watch this life-transforming movie as soon as you can. Also there is a book version!

Operation Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Dear Wonderful Reader,
I had the honor to participate in fellow blogger Keith project, Happy Happy Joy Joy. He is trying to explore what gives people hope and joy to help everyone stay motivated, but especially those who are struggling with physical or emotional burdens in their lives.

Click here to check out Keith’s blog for some great inspiration. Follow him and support this great message. It will be awesome if some of you participated to; all the information are on his blog.

Thank you Keith for giving me this amazing opportunity!

-Christina

The Beauty of Life: A Lighthouse

Dear Wonderful Reader,

I’m infatuated with lighthouses; I find them  quaint, symbolic, and somehow very setimental.

“There is no fog so dense, no night so dark, no gale so strong, no mariner so lost but what its beacon light can rescue. It beckons through the storms of life. It calls,

‘This way to safety; this way to home.’”
― Thomas S. Monson

Perhaps its their classic charm, that brings me comfort. Unlike cars or phones, a lighthouse has always looked like a lighthouse and this sense of familiarity is so nice to have in an age where everything and everyone gets a makeover.

Gazing at a lighthouse fills my soul with a great sense of tranquility. They blend in so beautifully with nature, because they haven’t been altered and stained with modern day technology. Breathe deeply and take in the serene sky, the crystal water, and the peaceful lighthouse in this picture; relax and clear your mind!

Perhaps its the metaphoric significance of their function: they provide light to those who are lost or struggling in deep sea. The kind of light that promises home to the lost, and hope to those who are fighting vigorous waters.

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

(John 8:12)

They symbolize God and his promise to us: no matter how murky it gets, there is always a guiding light to a  safe shore.

Perhaps its their graceful strength and how they stand tall and still in the midst of ferocious waters and ruthless storms.

This amazing lighthouse located in Long Beach, CA is where I had my very first, real date (along with other spots). It was a great day and the date was very special. This bitter-sweet Lighthouse will always hold a special place in my heart.

“Man must behave like a lighthouse; he must shine day and night for the goodness of everyman.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

Works that Feature Lighthouses

• Most of Nicholas Sparks novels (Sorry, can’t remember which ones exactly)
• Share with me, any artistic/literary (music or movies even) works that feature Lighthouses in THAT way.

 

P.S. Shine like a beacon today!

Thoughtful Thursday: The Great Gatsby Quotes-Picture Book Pt. 2

Dear Wonderful Reader,

I couldn’t help but share with you  some more of my favorite quotes that gave me many insights about life. I am totally addicted to “The Great Gatsby”; I love the novel and the movie too much. They just transport me to another realm, that is surreal and whimsical (even if the ending is sad!).

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.”

“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it – overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

“Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”

“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”

(*Selfie Alert!)

“As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed — that voice was a deathless song.”

“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

“So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.”

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

Thoughtful Thursday: ‘The Great Gatsby’ Quote-Picture Book

Dear Wonderful Reader,

I Present to you, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Words fail to describe how in love I am with Fitzgerald’s surreal writing style and his extraordinary ability to powerfully build every nuance in Gatsby’s characters to create, The Great Gatsby. I can vividly imagine from reading those quotes just how fantastical, and bigger-than-life Gatsby is, as equally as I can feel just how hollow and lonely he is; books like this make me  grateful that books ever existed. It’s no wonder that this is considered the greatest American novel.  The film too is so beautiful, artistic, and really captures the quaint and grand ambiance of the book. And DiCaprio is like the physical incarnation of Jay Gatsby. Well done!

Favorite Quotes

“His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning– So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’–it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“ It had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one.”

“He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ….”

“Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

“The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

“He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

P.S. Don’t forget that you can ALWAYS reinvent yourself, if you need to!

Thoughtful Thursday: Evil People Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Procreate

Dear Wonderful Reader,

You know when you meet someone so, so dumb and you wonder in you head, “how did you make it on Earth for that long?!” Or someone so, so beautiful– needless to say, its the reaction people get when they see me– and they wonder in their heads “how can she not be famous already?!” Jk! Or someone so evil, so horrible, so nasty and you’re just like, “how did you survive Karma all that long?! You gotta be on Karma’s top 20 list!” And then you start pondering the future of humanity with them in it and think how can such people ACTUALLY EXIST IN THE WORLD! Well, those were my exact thoughts too when this happened…

A couple days ago, we got a phone call from my sister, shortly after she left for work. Unfortunately, we learned that she got in a major car crash that involved two other cars. But, don’t worry, she’s okay and apparently the other two drivers were okay too, though one of them practiced her acting skills as soon as the ambulance arrived, in hopes of “milking” the situation *rolls eyes. Upon hearing the news, my father and I rolled out of bed (well, just me honestly, he was already dressed and ready to carpe diem) and drove to her rescue. My dad still thinks she’s a little girl (she’s 22) who doesn’t know how to handle such situations. (Mind you, I rolled out really quickly and didn’t even brush my teeth, cause my dad was rushing me. My morning breath was tolerable bur the worst part was how I didn’t have time to put on a bra and how uncomfortable I felt during the drive and how much I strongly disliked gravity at those moments…) Anyways, we arrived there safely and pulled up in the first left lane (if you’re unfamiliar with California freeways, this is the fastest lane, located on the very far left and then you have a cement fence that separates the freeway from the opposite-direction traffic) and went out to seize her and see what the hell happened…

Here is a little visual aid for you to help you get a clearer, less distorted perspective of the situation on hand.

As we were standing in the midst of this destruction and despair, some and I mean quiet a few of the drivers passing by were yelling unkind words like “IDIOTS”, “STOP TEXTING”, and some were doing the loud HAHAHA evil-witch laugh to our faces. In fact, at one point some (weirdo) driver drove extra slowly and was genuinely angry because we had occupied the first lane and thus caused a traffic delay. As if we were doing that on purpose!!

I had so much to say, so much. But I let my shirt do the talking for me.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have one of those on hand but I made a mental note to get me one as soon as I get home. Though honestly, I did my fair share of flipping the bird to them; sorry to distort the image of a respectable, well-mannered blogger in your head, but I gotta be real.

In all seriousness though, when I (and I don’t claim to be Buddha or anything) see car accidents anywhere, the first thing I do is pray for them in my head asking God to be with them, hoping that no one was injured or God forbid dead (Well, the first thing I REALLY do is thank Him that it wasn’t me). And I am sure that is the natural response because all my family and friends do the same. BUT THOSE PEOPLE THAT DELIGHT IN OTHER PEOPLE’ MISERY? HOW CAN THEY EXIST? HOW CAN THEY BE ALLOWED TO PROCREATE?  I know that the world is full of ugly things and people but I’m always shocked to experience them first hand. And you know maybe if that was an enemy of theirs, then I’d understand if they took delight in his misery; though that would be still messed up. But, we were just random strangers and It’s scary to think that those people live among us and their nastiness just comes out at you in our most vulnerable moments.

But, all we, Warriors of Light gotta do is smile and politely say “F*** Y**” and let them nasty people go on their way with their nastiness. Remind ourselves not to let anyone steal our happiness or our peace. And when we go home we pray because prayer is truly the most invincible weapon against all evil. Even though us, Warriors of Light, are forgetful sometimes and we forget that. But we know that at the end, we won’t be defeated! Because good ALWAYS defeats evil.

Appropriate Quotes: 

“In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” (John 16: 33)

” When I despair, I reme,her that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”

-Mahatma Ghandi