Season's Grieving...Happy Three Month "Anniversary"

grieve
v. grieved, griev·ing, grieves
v. tr.
1. To cause to be sorrowful; distress.
2. To mourn or sorrow for.
3. To file an official or formal grievance on account of (an actual or perceived injustice).
4. Archaic. To hurt or harm.

adj : sorrowful through loss or deprivation; "bereft of hope" [syn: bereaved, bereft, grief-stricken, mourning(a), sorrowing(a)]

It's certainly a particularly sad Boxing Day to grieve about...other than my outstanding personal issues (that is also most certainly grieve-inducing). To date, 23,000 lifes has been lost to the horror of the earthquake and its associated tsunami that has hit 10 countries in the South & South-East Asia. It is widely expected that the body count accumulated will be few times more than that. If it's not that tragic, it'll almost be funny that while governments all over the world are preparing to fend off another terrorist's attack at this festive seasons, the nature forces turn up instead, all guns ablazing, at the puny humans as we are. Being associated in the security line, I've personally been involved in one of the rescue mission in Sri Lanka, albeit in a "Behind The Scene" role thousands of miles away from any affected areas, as one of the administrator running the communication. And it is at that moment when I really felt the might of the "Powers That Be", but all I can say, is to quote from one of the greatest movie tagline ever, from the epic movie, "Godfather"... "All The Powers In The World Can't Stop Destiny".

Regardless of the disaster, this entry's gonna be called "Season's Grieving" anyway. It's a personal grieve..as it's a three month anniversary for a certain live-altering event in my life. How do you actually address a "Three Month" Anniversary? No one ever think of that...for the simple reason in what's there to commemorate for three months. Anniversaries are only in terms of years, Silver, Gold, Diamond, so on and so forth...There's nothing to "Anniversary" about for three pathetic little months. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So you thought? I guessed that's because you've never been through a "three months" that changed you forever. Though I myself still ponder what's there to be happy about when I greeted, "Happy 3 Month Anniversary!" As a matter of fact, it can only sadden me. But I asked myself, if three months of "pain, misery and irony" & "joy, happiness and enlightenment " only accumulated into a result of "Grieving", does it means that throughout the course of the three months, all you felt is "Grieve"? No, not true at all, as the above six emotions, be it pain or joy, it'll stay...and forever it shall remains in my memory, I afraid...

Back to hell...

~Quoth The Hole~
"More often than not, A Good Man is also a proud man, and a fierce one at that, simply due to the fact that being a good man leaves him ABSOLUTELY NOTHING other than his pride."
- Joshua Lim (1978 - ????)

"when you're alone Christmas is the pits"

Christ·mas
n.
1. A Christian feast commemorating the birth of Jesus.
2. December 25, the day on which this feast is celebrated.
3. Christmastide.

n 1: period extending from Dec. 24 to Jan. 6 [syn: Christmas, Christmastide, Christmastime, Yule, Yuletide, Noel] 2: a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Christ; a quarter day in England, Wales, and Ireland [syn: Christmas, Christmas Day, Xmas, Dec 25] v : spend Christmas; "We were christmassing in New York"

Not that big deal after all. I know, I know, it's just one of those over-hyped festival the commercial world cut out to be (but the truth is, the commercial world always gets what it wants), made us feel the need to care and share, and blah blah blah the mumbo jumbo world to no end, as long as we SPEND.

Bingo. That's the keyword for the day we called Christmas Day. Spend, spend and spend. Not care, share and frigging wear and tear.

Sounding exactly like the whinning fool being left alone on this special day when the wretched gets their just deserts for being an atheistic asshole, isn't it? Well, perhaps I really am. Never a fan of Mr Jesus Christ nor his highly over-rated dad, I gotta admit having a certain soft spot for this particular day ever since I'm a 4 year old kid. To the extent of having this conspiracy theory of Santa Claus really exist. Well, screw "Polar Express", never watch it and never will, but sure as hell there ain't no Santa. But I do vividly remembered Batman ever saying, "It's healthy to be a little paranoid".

Gotta admit something real shitty happened on this xmas eve, thereby carving its mark as the worst xmas eve EVER in my 26 years to hell. From the juvenile years of hanging up my socks, awaiting for that fatass to climb down my chimney (there ain't none) to give me what I want, to being influenced by the mundane world of the mundane needs of making it an ultra-romantic (think ULTRA-violent in Clockwork Orange sense) day for the girl you happen to be infatulated with at that particular moment, the 25th of December never cease to make me feel a little different. Hmmm, the wonders of the achievements of the Commercial World....It just somehow strikes me as a really romantic festival, with the likes of the departed Nat King Cole's "Christmas Song" and all, creating the unforgetable ambience, and then further enhanced by Wong Kar Wai's 2046 concept, where the train running from the memoryless zone of 2047 back to the supposedly happy place of good old 2046, gotta bypass a sector, aptly coded, 1224, 1225 where one can only hug someone, anyone, in order to survive the coldness. Well, I endured through, no matter what. It's a perfect analogy of what one passes through during Xmas. And the motivations? It's nothing. Absolute nothing. (The concept of 2046 is that Deng Xiao Ping promises 50 years of "NO CHANGES" to the panicking hongkongers back in the late 70s to early 80s, both expats and locals, that just so to convince them that communism won't rear its ugly head's up at the turn of the century.) But can you yourself promise that you can love your most beloved one for five frigging decade with NO CHANGES at all? Can you? I can. (As gullible as that may sound to you, in my opinion, what really matters is the crazy determination and motivation that drives someone to say that.) But damn, does she knows. Boy does she knows how deep i'm in?

She wouldn't know. Will she regret someday? Perhaps so. But is she bothered? No, I afraid not. I can only hope for the best...for her. If SKY's the limits, so be it. Just so that I can reside in the nameless Hell I've always been in. Mountain? I sure am. But guess there's no one interested in taking shelter in this particularly pathetic one.

Enough whinning. Next up will be the best of 2004...be it anime, movie, game, so on and so forth, Feel free to post whatever comments you have.
Next Time,
Regards

I Got "Punished"

Okay, they done it again. This is one of those prominent staple in comic book-to-movie adaption where they simply SUCK ASS!!! And to think that this is the second attempt for hollywood to create the big screen version of arguably one of the coolest comic character around ever!

Garth Ennis's "Welcome Back, Frank" was, to me, THE greatest chapter in Punisher's decades of, mostly decadence, despite the fact that Frank has always been an interesting character, but done to death in similar scenarios over and over again. Garth picked up Punisher on the hardest note: the ultra-disastrous arc by where Frank was killed and come back as a sort of avenging angel with mythical powers! But Garth effortlessly kills that plot,( while still acknowledging it, though with a slight nod only) and bring "back" the Punisher that should had been. The remorseless, kill-frenzy psychotic called Frank Castle, who's no longer haunted by his family tragedy, and knows where he's heading. (Hell, definitely)

And yes, the movie was heavily based on the arc, (The appearance of Bumpo, Spacker Dave, the waitress called Joan and The Russian) while mixing elements from Punisher: Year One,(Amongst lotsa other stuffs, the quote:"Si vis pacem, para bellum") and what a giant piece of crap has it turns out. The climatic battle between Frank and The Russian was supposed to be off-the-chart cool in the comic, but in the movie, the director decides to provide the fight with an opera score, which results into an extremely anti-climatic comedic sequence. Whereas the part where Spacker Dave got his piercings took out while being interrogated was deem as both crude fun and dark humour in the comic, the movie went on and make the scene emotionally heavy.

The number one rule in watching a comic book-to-screen movie is, don't compare it to the original. But the thing is, the movie's plot itself has a hole so big that John Travolta's fading star powers can't even think about covering it. To quote from kingpete007 from the forum of imdb.com, some of the points as follows:-

-the entirely useless characters of the toro brothers. if the punisher's final goal is to kill howard saint, the financial woes he goes through first shouldn't really matter. who cares who has more guns? why did i need to know that? if you need to show the punisher messing with saint, then make the money SAINT'S. watching travolta kiss ass to his superiors only undermined him as a villain.

-the excessive way castle organized the death of saint's friend and wife. if saint is the kind of guy to throw his wife in front of a train, i highly doubt he's the kind of guy who'd feel guilty when he finds out he may have been wrong. it was a plot twist for the sake of having a plot twist, to fool the lowest common denominator into thinking that they'd seen an "intellectual" film.

Can't remember where I read this, but it was from a movie review from a Singapore paper. It quoted the following dialogue from the movie:-

Candelaria: Vaya con Dios, Castle. Go with God.
Frank Castle: God's going to sit this one out.

And God better sit this crappy movie out.