#11 is a reminder

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/whole-life/features/25956-11-things-to-know-at-25ish?start=1

11. Don’t Get Stuck

This is the thing: When you hit 28 or 30, everything begins to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find God and themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults. Then there’s the other kind, who are hanging onto college, or high school even, with all their might. They’ve stayed in jobs they hate, because they’re too scared to get another one. They’ve stayed with men or women who are good but not great, because they don’t want to be lonely. They mean to find a church, they mean to develop intimate friendships, they mean to stop drinking like life is one big frat party. But they don’t do those things, so they live in an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than when they graduated.

Don’t be like that. Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal.

Ask yourself some good questions like: “Am I proud of the life I’m living? What have I tried this month? What have I learned about God this year? What parts of my childhood faith am I leaving behind, and what parts am I choosing to keep? Do the people I’m spending time with give me life, or make me feel small? Is there any brokenness in my life that’s keeping me from moving forward?”

Now is your time. Walk closely with people you love, and with people who believe God is good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned.

Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life’s path.

My new favorite song!

Grey’s Anatomy’s musical episode

I’ve recently been doing a marathon to catch up with all the Grey’s Anatomy seasons I’ve missed. You see, it’s actually a bit painful for me to watch it, getting hit in the gut with a lot of realizations in my life one after the other, relating a bit to characters’ dark and twisty phases, or simply moved by the medical/surgery dramas of encountering impossible cases. Seeing their loved ones hoping against hope for the patient to live are always heartwrenching. I get moved to tears the most, admittedly, with their crazy love problems, and voice-over narrations on the nuggets of lessons learned at the start and end of every episode became my words to live by. There was a hiatus for this fangirling on the series after season 4 for more than a year. I’ve recently mustered up the courage to sit through seasons 5-7, and am back to witnessing the lives of these doctors unfold slowly, like observing close friends.

I’ve heard of this musical when it happened, but I didn’t read the write-ups about it so it won’t spoil my excitement to see it when I had the time to sit down and do my marathon.

It.blew.me.away.

I didn’t know that Sara Ramirez, who played the loveable but hardcore ortho surgeon Dr. Calliope [what a beautiful name!] Torres was a Tony Award winner for Spamalot the musical! Kevin McKidd (Dr. Owen Hunt), whom I knew as Poseidon in the Percy Jackson movie and Scottish hottie who tried to snag Michelle Monaghan away from Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor, had a wonderful, wonderful, modulated singing voice…super hot! He won in the 14th Prism Awards for being a really intense trauma surgeon, who, irony of ironies, battles a lot of trauma demons of his own from time to time. Chandra Wilson, as ‘The Nazi’ with a golden heart, is Dr. Miranda Bailey and in real life is a theatre veteran in the staging of musicals Chicago and Avenue Q, just to name a few! Lastly, Chyler Leigh, who plays the pretty face born with a photographic memory Dr. Lexie Grey, hits the notes quite well and gets a full solo.

The episode’s basic premise is quite amusing yet heartbreaking, as Dr. Callie Torres experiences an out-of-body experience and undergoes a ‘musical’ hallucination where she sings and her doctor friends sing along with her. Critics gave the episode mixed reviews, and detractors have dissed it as an absurd move for a serious medical drama. My being a musical person colors my judgement, because anything with music that moves me makes me happy, but objectively, the music weaved through the plot quite well, if not intensified its emotional tugs. Friends and fans who’ve seen it still loved it and had tears running down their faces. The title of the episode is ‘Song Beneath A Song’. Here are a few videos you can view to see what I’m talking about. You be the judge. If these don’t work for you, you’re probably heartless.

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Chasing Cars

by Snow Patrol

Sung by Sara Ramierz, Kevin McKidd, and Chandra Wilson

 

Breathe 

by Anna Nalick

Sung by Chyler Leigh

 

How To Save A Life

by The Fray

Sung by the entire cast

Quote

“I don’t want to be married just to be married. I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.” – Mary Ann Shaffer

G.K. Chesterton’s The Strange Crime of John Boulnois

G.K. Chesterton’s The Strange Crime of John Boulnois.

Right brain or left brain?

Left brain: I am the left brain. I am a scientist. A mathematician. I love the familiar. I categorize. I am accurate. Linear. Analytical. Strategic. I am practical. Always in control. A master of words and language. Realistic. I calculate equations and play with numbers. I am order. I am logic. I know exactly who I am.

Right brain: I am the right brain. I am creativity. A free spirit. I am passion. Yearning. Sensuality. I am the sound of roaring laughter. I am taste. The feeling of sand beneath bare feat. I am movement. Vivid colors. I am the urge to paint on an empty canvas. I am boundless imagination. Art. Poetry. I sense. I feel. I am everything I wanted to be.

*

DEFINITELY COLORFUL, DEFINITELY RIGHT! 🙂

 

 

Cycles

Working in a university in the Philippines means that the bulk of work life starts in June. June feels like my New Year, because January is when the 2nd semester is almost ending on the tertiary/college level. Anyway, another school year is beginning. Students I know have gone up a level, or are already graduating seniors. The nostalgia is something I easily embrace, unlike the helluva time my character is being put to the test. Patience, obsessive-compulsiveness, resourcefulness, and efficiency are on overdrive. And so I begin again, realizing that I’m staying again for another year, accepting to endure the same old challenges when in 2010 I really had a strong urge to leave. It’s still at the back of my head, but I realize too that last year’s pressing circumstances have led me to just give everything up, including work. It’s hello again to a love-hate work relationship.

Wu Wei.