Goodbye, Hello
Here comes the obligatory entry about last year and the new one.
2009 was a challenging year. It is the only 365 days in my life that I was in National Service for the entire period.
Upon discovering my design skills, related tasks and artistic work from my unit came pouring into my hands like felines and canines would during a heavy rain. I have always felt like I have two jobs instead of one.
Last year an important friendship that I held so dear nearly died, but fortunately somehow got resuscitated in the end. Got to know a few new friends and had the most after-midnight stay-outs ever (well, since I am still young enough to do so, why not?).
I’ve grown a lot mentally, physically, emotionally…
…and a lot white hair too. -_-
The few to-dos I wrote down for my 2009 wasn’t exactly completed, of course. Lol. Sometimes new things happen, plans were delayed and I just had to go with the flow.
I guess I’m not the sort who can stick to a list so closely for a year. At the very least I did make some progress in some areas I intended to focus on, like learning guitar, Korean, maintaining physical fitness and my skin health. The resolutions I made last year did serve as a useful guideline afterall.
But what always happens is that I’ll get obsessed in one thing for a period, then I get a little bored of it and move on to another thing. After moving around different places somehow I’ll go always go back to the first one I started on, like a cycle.
So what about this year?
First and foremost, I intend to watch classic movies! If I have time, maybe all of them.
Some of my friends gasped to the point of oxygen deprivation when they found out I haven’t seen movies like Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Grease, Stephen Chow’s famous comedies in the 90’s, Infernal Affairs, etc..
Lol, reason being I’ve spent much of my childhood and teenagehood free time following Looney Tunes, Power Rangers, Doraemon, Ranma ½ and random movies that you may not have heard of. (One of them is the movie by John Travolta, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, which ranks 90 in IMDb’s bottom 100 movies of all time. I didn’t think it was that bad, but I don’t remember much about it either. I need to watch Grease…)
I didn’t really like Disney at that time because it was too fairy-tale-ish and superficially magical for me.
This year will also be the year I take a (major?) step towards achieving my dreams as I ORD in May. While my dream is roughly about promoting an idea and influencing people to, hopefully, change the world for the better, I haven’t thought about the kind of life I would be having while trying to achieve it or when I already make it. It’s not really about money making nor improving my skillsets just to become a better designer.
Finding out how to monetise this passion will be kind of awesome too.. haha. I guess along the way it will be important to keep learning, understanding and exploring.
Most people around me generally have a good feeling about this year, and for me, the possibilities of being free (in other words, unemployed/self-employed) after my NS are so overwhelmingly huge I sometimes get both frightened and excited just by thinking about it.
Maybe by the end of this year I’ll be an even more physically fit guitar-player who has nicer skin singing Korean songs? Heh.
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Movie Review!
Treasure Hunter
I thought Storm Warriors was the worst Chinese movie in 2009, but here we have a challenger. The story was like a lost sheep unsure where to go, characters seemed to have no motivations behind what they do sometimes, villains (one of them had unlimited toilet paper flying all over) constantly popped out of nowhere to fight losing battles with male lead Jay Chou, the dialogues sounded like something they came up with on the spot, and this movie has the most boring chase sequence I have ever seen. Even with all the sand storm effects and gun fights, the chase sequence was nothing more than a travel from point A to point B. This movie tried to be as epic as The Mummy, Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider combined, but the ambitious effort turned out to be an epic failure instead. The only redeeming factor is, perhaps, Lin Chi Ling.
3 / 10
