Month: August 2020

Why are homes made out of wood?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Seriously, honest question.  Why are homes made out of wood?  A flimsy, degradable material that is so susceptible to the elements, that has pretty definitive expiration conditions.  Especially when there’s a world of materials out there that aren’t nearly as vulnerable?

Naturally, with a query like that, it stands to believe that I’ve gone through some sort of negative experience, to which is affirmative.  We’ve had some gnarly rain, and at one point, hail, and then suddenly, there are two places in my house that started leaking.  A skylight in the sunroom breached at first, leading me to put down some buckets to catch water, and what started as one corner that was leaking eventually turned into three corners, leading to my disgust and aggravation. 

Naturally, at the time in which all this occurred, there’s little sense in trying to call anyone since it’s not really an emergency, so I went on with my day, just very annoyed.

And then I heard the dripping; at first, I thought I left my kitchen faucet slightly on, but it turned out that the light fixture above my sink was dripping water.  Worse off, there was a bunch of dripping along the window frame in front of the sink, and thinking quickly, I put a bunch of little Tupperware containers to catch the water, since they fit on the sill, but it was unmistakable, that there was a second breach in my house.

Long story short, I tracked it down to some angled windows in my master bathroom on the second floor, where moisture was seeping in through either aged seals or rotting wood, and trickling down behind the walls and into my kitchen.  Also seeping through some cracks in the tile in the master bathroom itself too.  But it was clear to where it was coming from.

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Now that I’m caught up, I don’t know what to do with myself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the better part of the last three months, whenever I had a free moment after work or when I wasn’t tending to the baby, I was basically working on getting the brog back up online.  At first, it was manually backing up the old posts, then it was sorting and organizing all of the unposted posts, and then came the arduous task of manually re-posting every post in chronological order.

As I’ve mentioned before, this whole task took approximately 82 days, and a few more to fine tune and tweak things and get ready for the day in which I would let people know and officially open as if I were some grandiose important entity.

But now that I’ve accomplished the task of getting the brog back up, I really don’t know what to do with myself in my free time now.  Since I’m still on paternity leave, my only real tasks are tending to my daughter, but when I put her down for naps, and she goes to sleep for the night, suddenly I have anywhere from 2-5 hours in the day in which is me-time that I don’t really know how to fill anymore.

Sure, I’m still going to be dedicating time to writing and looking for things to write about, but since there’s no massive backlog and queue behind it anymore, I’m back to the days where posts are mostly going to be one at a time, save for those times where I write a bunch of things and put them in the can for a rainy day.  But otherwise, I’m not going to be spending all my time on my site anymore, and I’ve been perplexed on what to do next now that I’ve accomplished the one big thing for myself that I had set out to do.

There’s always a gargantuan backlog of shit I want to watch on television, which would be nice, but I’m a person who really needs to immerse myself into media to really take it in.  Basically meaning, if there’s any risk of possibly getting interrupted, I probably won’t bother starting it, and what with the fact that my daughter sleeps anywhere from 35-60 minutes, there’s no sense in starting any shows which episodes are in the 45-55 minute range, because inevitably I will have to cut it short to get my child, and then I’ll be annoyed (not at the kid) at having to stop early.

So that effectively knocks out hour-long shows and movies, and limits me to 22-30 minute shows, which are fewer and further between save for signing up for a Quibi account and I don’t want to add monthly subscriptions these days anyway.

I can’t really hit the treadmill, because my usual sessions are 32 minutes, but that’s not including the need to change, shower and cool down, and if my daughter wakes up at the short end of a nap, then I’ll be a sweaty monster that has to dirty up my child which I’m not going to voluntarily do, so that nixes that idea.

So far, I’ve just been dicking around on the internet and watching YouTube clips and seeking out wrestling belts to throw my money away further into.  Otherwise, it’s not lost on me that this is the epitomal first-world problem to be having and when the day is over, I do feel a sense of accomplishment that I’ve got the brog back up and it makes me happy, and that I’d rather be in this position rather than the former times in which I’d wish to have my brog back up, and it weren’t, and my thoughts and words would stay confined to my own digital storage.

New Father Brogging, #017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Cal Ripken, Jr. is considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time, but he was also oft-described as the man of a thousand batting stances.  His tendency to change the way he stood in the batter’s box countless times throughout his career was a metaphor of the game of baseball and how rapidly it changed, and the endless cat-and-mouse game of needing to change things for when things change on you, forcing them to change in response, and so on and so on.  Basically, what it really amounted to was the fact that in order for Ripken to have become the Hall of Famer he is, it required him to be adaptable and willing to change things up, frequently and rapidly.

That’s what sleep training a baby kind of feels like.  Every time I manage to get my daughter to go down for a nap successfully, and then try to reenact the exact same procedure the next time around and it inevitably fails, resulting in a screaming baby that takes 45 minutes to go down for 45 minutes, I feel like a failure of a father all over again, and mentally defeated and fried.  I realize that no trick, tactic or strategy is ever going to work more than one time in a row, and it’s like going to war with Ultron or Cyclopsis the War Zord from Power Rangers, in that exact sense.

I can read everything on the internet and watch all sorts of mommy vloggers, but I think when the day is over, as long as I go into the pre-nap battleground with a mentally clean slate, and keep consistent to the few rules that mythical wife and I have agreed upon for like circadian rhythm and bassinet, I just have to accept that it’s going to be a new challenge each time, and accept that it might be more difficult than the last time.  Considering the fact that anything from indigestion, teething, growth spurts or all of the above can come into play, sleep training ultimately is a constantly moving target, and all I can really do is mentally catalog cues and tendencies, and try to react best to whatever may come.

Just the other day, no amount of holding her was working, and she was wailing for 45 minutes.  Needing to take a break, I set her down in the bassinet, and she was out cold almost instantly, much to my confusion; she abhorred the idea of being put on her back just days ago, and now she was falling immediately??  Just two naps ago, holding her still and rocking her had her passed out in my arms, and it was around this time I came to the conclusion that no one thing was ever going to work twice in a row.

Either way, I think I can easily say that up to this point, five months in, sleep training has been the most difficult challenge of new fatherhood.  I haven’t felt so discouraged and as much of a failure as a parent as often as I have as much as I have during this time, and as calm as I can get myself back to, the feelings of anxiety and self-loathing is always just the next nap time away.

A microcosm of American idealogy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long: Cleveland Indians demote pitchers Mike Clevinger and Zach Plesac for disciplinary reasons AKA they went out at night while on the road instead of adhering to a team-wide curfew and safely containing themselves at the team’s hotel and lied about their actions, putting the entire team at exposure risk to coronavirus

At the time I’m writing, this, the Cleveland Indians are 4th place in the American League, and regardless of the expansion of the playoff field, they’d have been at least, playing for the Wild Card, even if it weren’t.  They’re a playoff team, right now.  It’s extraordinarily difficult to get into the playoffs in MLB, as prior to this year’s expansion, typically only five teams make the playoffs, with the bottom two requiring a play-in game to become eligible for a best-of series.

A lot of the Indians’ success has been on the arms of Clevinger and Plesac, whom have been both pitching decently in a year where everyone is a little off-kilter due to the uncertainty of the year.  But it says a lot about the makeup of a team, when a team is without hesitation willing to jettison two starting pitchers because of breaking the rules.

Because it’s not even so much about the rules as much as it was the fact that two guys needlessly and selfishly put themselves over the rest of the team, and furthermore raised the potential for coronavirus exposure, especially when pretty much every single franchise in MLB has had at least some player or personnel exposed at some point already.  Fortunately, both tested negative, but that’s really besides the point.

It should be mentioned that the Indians also have a player who is a leukemia survivor, which is of course outstanding, but also means that he’s immunocompromised, and is at higher risk of contracting coronavirus if exposed.

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Things that have happened since the brog’s been down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shortly after my brog went down in April 2016, I started a document, bulleting things that want to potentially write about, in the event that the site would be back up within like a month or two.  Obviously that never happened, but it didn’t really stop me from adding to the list on a regular basis, even if it continued for nearly four years.

At first, it was a pretty nitty-gritty list, straight to the point and pretty succinct at what I wanted to remember.  But by the time 2018 rolled around, I noticed some patterns and categories in which things caught my attention and warranted notation, and so some categories started to take place.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to share all of this, but for whatever reason I’m following through with it, and basically this is going to be little more than a massive bulleted list of things that happened between mid-2016 through mid-2020, with probably not a lot of context, but likely some snark and veiled commentary peppered throughout.

2016

  • Pokemon Go came, lit the world on fire for 15 minutes, and then flamed out harder than the FOX Fantastic Four films
  • I became The Burrito King of Atlanta, winning Willy’s Road Trip promotion by visiting 27 Willy’s locations in four days
  • Kobe Bryant retired from professional basketball, but not before dropping 60 in his final game
  • The Golden State Warriors won 73 games and passed the ’96 Bulls’ unbreakable record, but then lost in the NBA finals like chumps
  • The Atlanta Braves retired Turner Field for whiter pastures, by sucking hardcore and losing 93 games
  • Hulk Hogan killed Gawker
  • Went on a European cruise vacation with mythical then-gf, visiting Italy, Turkey, Croatia and Greece
  • Went to Korea for the first time in my life, with my mom
  • The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking a 108-year long drought and endless memes
  • An orange baked potato reality television personality inexplicably won the presidency of the United States of America
  • A fuckton of people died from senseless gun violence

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How things can change over the span of a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout my 82-day journey of re-posting literally ten years’ worth of brog posts, I naturally took the time to go down memory lane and re-read everything I’d written over that time.  I think as a whole, the collective brog does paint a decent picture of who I really am, but I’ll also be the first person to admit that hoo-boy, there’s some shit I’ve written in the past that most certainly isn’t the way I think these days.

Inherently, I don’t think people are capable of dramatic change in their lives, but I think it’s fair game to say that opinions most certainly can change throughout time.  Environment, influence, and/or just plain growing up, the way people think can harden or soften, or just plain go in different directions as time passes.

I don’t want to one of those people whom when they get become rich, famous and have the spotlight of the internet shone on them (because that’s totally going to happen to me one day), and have their internet history drug out of the past and screen shots slapped onto Twitter for the world to ridicule and judge, I went ahead and took the liberty to drag out some of the more notable changes that I’d witnessed about myself throughout the last ten years, and regardless of how wince-worthy and regrettable some of the things I’ve written may have been, the fact of the matter is that these are things that I’d thought, ways that my mind worked, and feelings that I felt at those specific instances, and I own the things I’ve said.

Because as much as some of the more regrettable things I’ve written might make me, much less anyone else, wince, cringe or face palm, I do think the revisionist history culture of 2020 is way worse.

Alternatively, this post probably should’ve just been titled “content that did not age well”

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Hello. It’s been a long time

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t even really know where to begin.  It’s been so long since my brog was back online, and I’d grown used to the fact that I no longer had it, that I’m blanking on what to write now that it’s really up and running again.

The last time my brog was online, I was writing about the absurdity of Cody sleeping on a waterbed inside of his van in Wisconsin on Step-by-Step, and the country was ridiculing the idea that an orange baked potato was claiming to be running for president.

Now I’ve got a wife and an infant child, that orange baked potato is actually the president, and the country that ridiculed him has been brought to its knees by a global pandemic.

Crazy how much things can change in four years.

The thing is, throughout all the time in which I had no brog, I did not stop writing, and I continued to write as if my brog were going to be back up in four days and not four years.  Sure, it was disheartening and frustrating at times, since to me, my site was always more like the mouth my words and thoughts came from and how I primarily expressed myself, as opposed to the real mouth I have which is mostly where junk food is shoveled into, but ultimately the writing itself was the more important thing that I made sure to continue doing, because writing is my hobby and passion, and no matter if six people read my nonsense or zero, it was still very important to me that I did it anyway.

Once my brother was able to get my site back up online, it turns out that over the last four years, WordPress has surely made some strides, and all my old content was far too back in time for any sort of WP app or extension could successfully migrate all my old content into the present day dynamically. 

So whereas I could’ve just punted on all the old stuff, and start anew, that obviously is not how a nostalgic empath like me does things, so in a true labor of love, I went back in time, and manually backed each and every single brog post from February 2010 through April 2016 (1,621 posts), merged them with the queue of posts that I’d written offline (813 posts), and then one-by-one, post at a time, retroactively re-published each and every single one of them in chronological order, which brings us back into the present, where I have literally ten years worth of brog posts back up and online, for basically nobody’s satisfaction except my own.

Not that it really changes anything, but I also took this as an opportunity to integrate and utilize tagging, and if anything at all, I can see trends of the things that I gravitate towards writing about, even if I didn’t notice them back then.

It took 57 days to back up and repost all of the old brog’s content, in its (mostly) unedited and original words, regardless of if they were good, bad, fluffy, controversial, or things that I regret putting in writing, but we’ll touch on that later.  And then another 25 days to publish all of the “new” stuff, all in between the windows of time in which my infant child was sleeping, because ain’t nobody got time to do anything else when baby is awake.

But for all intents and purposes, my site is back.  After this much time, I can hardly believe it, but it’s up and online, and hopefully not going anywhere again any time soon.  As the dust settles, it’s my aspirations to get back to more of a normalized writing schedule, and before you know it, this’ll be a place to get opinionated commentary on the rigors of new fatherhood, on top of a lot of the old tropes and trends of things that I enjoyed writing about, like professional wrestling, the fuck-ups of Atlanta and Georgia, and other random topics, but also the likely observations and tribulations that I’ll inevitably go through in my journey into fatherhood.