A thousand first kisses

 Again it has been a very long time since my last post. Life has almost finally caught up with my writing and I see that Valentine's Day 2021 was the last time that I contributed to this blog.

The Valentine post has always been a classic feature of my blog, so I thought that if I wanted to give it a new go, Valentine was a good place to start.

I have often spoken about love, from many different angles, and what is there more to say, one could ask. The beautiful thing about love is that one can never stop writing about it. Poetry, literature, music and pretty much every form of art keep drawing from this theme since centuries. The source of my inspiration for today is my latest obsession: K-Drama.

In the past year, I must have watched hundreds, if not thousand hours of K-Drama shows broadcasted strictly in Korean with English subtitles. There are as many types of K-Drama plot types as there are minutes in a day, but I basically only watch one type "sweet romantic comedies". 

I have to admit that these are definitely not representing the intellectual level that I normally boast but there is something addictive about these overly sweet stories: the beauty of youth and the hearth fluttering of first love. What these stories unfortunately do not contain is good acting, assuming one can gloss over (like I do) the barely believable plots.

Do you still remember how you felt when your first love held your hand for the first time? I am sure you do, but can you re-live the feeling? What would you give to feel that again? Binging on these stories kind of brings that feeling back. One's first kiss lasts forever they say but what if you could live it over and over again, show after show? 

It is not surprising that the innocent charm of K-Drama shows is conquering not only Asian but also Western public. In a society which is becoming more and more hard and polarized one needs a lovely escape from time to time, to be able to keep up with the ruthless game. 

Of course excessive watching of these shows also has some side effects that have nothing to do with love. Filling your house with useless gadgets being one (these shows are full of very effective product placements), longing for a pearl perfect skin being another. But this is another story.

People might think that first love is being used as a commodity that sells well and they might be correct, but I do not think that way. I think that first love reminds us not to be too hard on ourselves and others, from time to time.