Jerick Galang is a friend since Rancho Alamitos High School.
I remember during college I received a Christmas card from John. In the card it said that a song that reminds him of our friendship was “Always Love” by Nada Surf. Back in Sophomore year of high school in 2006 I used to take the bus and walk to John’s house to hang out. No money and no car, I just brought whatever I had for us to hang out before I had to walk back home. DVD’s to watch movies, tv shows to binge watch seasons of whatever I liked on tv (before Netflix was invented), and my laptop so we could play Runescape (Runescape > Runescape 2). During one of our hangouts that song “Always Love” was on repeat. Maybe it was because we heard it from the show “The OC” on FOX, maybe it was just a really good song. Whatever the reason was, it was my song on my MySpace at the time when friends visited my page for a month or so, good times.
Looking back at it and rereading the lyrics, the first line in the chorus of the song still hits me to this day: “Always love, hate will get you every time,”. While some of us have found our own definition of love, I’m still in the process of looking for mine. Philip Wang from Wong Fu Productions gave a graduation speech last year in his alma mater UCSD.
His speech grasped my attention as he broke down love into 3 important aspects:
1. Love yourself
2. Love honestly
3. Love your family
Based on the song and Phil’s speech, a common ground that I got from both is to grow and be a better person from all the experiences you’ve gone through when it comes to “love”. A significant other at the time once told me that she is constantly changing, growing, and doing her best. I think that is all that we can do, and we just got to take it one day and one step at a time. We are all fighting a good fight and we are only in this Earth once after all; no do-overs, and no continues.
