Tag: angst

Identity crisis

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just the other night mythical wife said that our household should be What We Do in the Shadows characters for Halloween.  And without any hesitation, she said that I should be Guillermo.

To the credit of that opinion, my face immediately made the same face Guillermo does whenever he looks at the camera after the vampires do something stupid.  But I wasn’t at all impressed at the knee-jerk association.

The lack of excitement of that was obviously noticed, and the back pedaling and explaining begins; he’s a badass vampire slayer, he’s the glue that holds the house together, he’s the guy that’s perpetually on the edge and verge of snapping being sick of everyone else’s shit, and I’m just thinking about the guy that’s fat, gets walked on by everyone around him, and is basically there for comedic relief but usually at his own expense.

Now I love the show, and it’s a fair comp, but the fact of the matter is that Guillermo is kind of the show loser, and it depressed me to be so immediately comped up to him.  He is an awesome character with a lot more depth than all the others, but when you take a step back and look at Guillermo as a whole, he’s a guy with no discernable identity, and spends the vast majority of his existence cleaning up after others and not at all doing anything for himself, much less forming an identity.  He’s the joke, he’s the doormat, he’s the comic relief.

But like I said, it’s not a completely unfair comparison.  I am the guy that keeps my house together; I’m the guy that maintains or manages the landscaping, the (attempted) cleanliness, tries to keep the house in working order and somewhat organized, with little or no help.  I take the vast majority of parenting duties, and any minute where I’m not working my job, I’m spending time with my kids while they’re awake, and it’s not until they are in bed that I have any semblance of downtime, that is when I’m not back to managing the home.

And I am, perpetually on the verge of losing my shit, because my life is not at all easy, I’m overworked, under-helped, taken for granted, and I’ve just been reminded of my general lack of identity in the world other than a dad or a housekeeper.  Both titles are undoubtedly important and I take them seriously, but when I try to picture anyone else thinking about me, I struggle to wonder what in the world words formulate in their minds when they think about me, other than those two things.

Because I don’t know what words formulate in my own mind when it comes to trying to describe myself.  I think I used to be a sports guy, specifically a baseball guy, when I was super into baseball and talking about sports all the time.  I used to be a League guy when I spent so much of my life buried in the League of Legends community.  I used to be the wrestling guy, which might be the closest thing I’m still identifiable to these days, and I most definitely was the belt guy, but the thing is that I’ve gotten pretty much every blet I want and until I have an office again, there’s not much point in getting any others.  Ironically, the one thing that I have staunchly refused to ever give up, being my desire to write, is probably the one thing so few people actually know I do, because I have zero readers and I’m neurotic and don’t want to advertise that I do it, so being a writing guy or a brogger isn’t exactly something anyone would know me for.

But the thing is, other than the latter I don’t think I’m really any of these things anymore.  As my kids came into existence, and my personal time diminished into negligible amounts, all my hobbies and interests fell to the wayside as any time I had to myself was either staring at a wall or trying to motivate myself to write something, usually about how burned out and over my life in general I was feeling at the time, kind of like I’m doing right now.

And so, I don’t really have an identity anymore, I don’t think.  As often as I think I would benefit from a day or two completely by myself to actually rest and recharge, I really don’t know what I’d even do.  I’m so money conscious that I wouldn’t want to spend the money to go hide out at a hotel or something, and I’d feel guilty eating out and spending money that I know I shouldn’t be spending, but I also can’t really expect to get any recharge time when I’m around my kids, because I want to spend time with them, so I’m left in this spiraling swirl of indecisiveness and end up doing nothing but watching television and treading the waters of depression.

Really, I just need this funky emotional wave to pass so I can go about my life without the baggage.  Hopefully I won’t be reminded of how much of a Guillermo I am again any time soon.

Dad Brog (#112): The inevitability of needing less sleep

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the last few months, the daily routine has been as such:

  • The girls go to bed at 7 pm
  • At around 10:30 pm I tell myself that I need to start winding down and go to bed early, ultimately do anything but, actually go to bed at around 1 am
  • Alarm #1 goes off at 6 am for me to take dog out
  • Alarm #2 goes off at 7 am which I promptly disable
  • Alarm #3 goes off at 7:10 am and I finally get up
  • Prepare breakfast for the girls
  • #1 usually wakes up by 8 am, promptly comes down to start breakfast
  • #2 is woken up five minutes later, promptly brought down to start breakfast
  • Dad mode engage

It’s not always easy, but it’s the life of parenting.  I wish just once in my life that someone else would do this for one morning without me having to be out of town, but I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon, so every single day of my life for the last year or so has been like this.  Obviously nothing involving kids lasts forever, and I knew that there would come a time in which the schedule was going to start deviating, and I believe that time has finally come. 

Over the last few weeks, more often than it hasn’t, #1 has been waking up earlier and earlier in the mornings, and it sometimes throws a monkey wrench into my morning routine, since when things go tits up and she decides to not be chill in her room and wait until 8 pm, I have to bring her down lest she wakes #2 up earlier than hoped, and she’s a colossal pill while I’m trying to prepare breakfast.  Some mornings she’s cool with hanging out in her room and calmly peruses books or plays with her stuffed animals, but usually she’s up and announcing to the baby monitor that she wants to go downstairs, or just whining loud enough to where I’m worried she’ll wake up her sister and things will really go poorly.

The easy solution is to just start waking up earlier so that I can have my peaceful mornings of calms before the storms of parenting, but I’m already sleep deprived enough, and I really dread the idea of doing it.  I’d definitively have to go to bed earlier in order to accommodate it, but I already feel like I don’t have enough time to myself as it is, and it’s difficult to want to sacrifice even more time for myself when I already feel like I always sacrifice too much of myself already.

I really am harkened to the days of reading old Calvin & Hobbes comic strips where Calvin starts waking up at ass o’clock on weekends much to the chagrin of his parents, and now I’m the square unnamed dad character.  But the mornings of angsty kid and grumbly dad aren’t good for anyone, and something’s got to give eventually, and realistically speaking, it’s most likely going to be me.

I’ll tell you how I’m going to become rich

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My sister made a recommendation to our family group chat about a film she saw; Happy Cleaners on Amazon Prime Video.  Just from the title alone and given the context of my very Korean family, I knew that this was definitely going to be about the Korean Story, and that it was going to fuck with my emotions.  I watched the trailer and yup, it was about the Korean Story and the trailer alone did succeed at fucking with my emotions.

Make no mistake, in spite of the title of the film, this was going to be anything but happy.  I anticipated that like so many Korean stories, this was going to be depressing, thought-provoking, probably relatable and leave me feeling like I’ll probably want to cry from having my emotional heartstrings yanked around.  Sounds like a great idea to watch right?

But because I’m a sucker for my nationality, I went ahead and watched it anyway, in spite of all the red flags of getting aboard an emotional roller coaster.

And of course, Happy Cleaners was everything I anticipated it would be, and I ended the film in a lower emotional state than which I started at.  Not only was it about an entirely too relatable Korean family much like my own, the plot of the film doesn’t really have much lateral movement, and unsurprisingly starts depressing, and ends in a more depressing state than the beginning.

To make matters worse, there’s a character in the film who’s named Danny, and he’s a Korean-American who has the weight of the world on his shoulders to the point where he can’t achieve any objectives and is working two menial jobs in order to survive.  He’s a classic underachiever, and I’m triggered because after just watching Beef, whose main character is also an underachieving struggling Korean-American named Danny, I feel like the world is trying to tell me something unpleasant.

Frankly, as much as I want to support Asians and specifically Korean or Korean-American filmmakers and storytellers, I’m just kind of over everyone’s rendition of the Korean Story.  Yes, Korean immigrants have historically had it really poor throughout the passage of time, but in most cases in everywhere in the world, when people immigrate to other countries, they’re usually going to struggle unless they learn the native language and/or get the education of the country they’re moving to. 

In most cases of the Korean Story, Korean immigrants get straight to work after arrival, seldom really try to become fluent in English, don’t bother getting an American education, and put all of their eggs and pressure onto their kids to succeed, and there just ain’t that much need for one million Korean doctors or lawyers and there aren’t that many scholarships to be had at all of the Ivy League schools combined.  Instead we’ve got hundreds to thousands of Korean storytellers all telling the same stories of their family’s struggles of surviving in America, with minimal variation.

So I’ll tell you all how I’m going to make my fortune: by writing the Korean story that isn’t the Korean Story.  Even if it’s fictitious and unrelatable to the 1.7 million Koreans in America, maybe it can just be a good exercise in escapism for all of us instead of needing yet another film of book or television special about how Korean lives suck in America.  It won’t be as exploitatively parodying like fucking Kim’s Convenience, and it wouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Happy Cleaners or Beef.

It can just be a story about a Korean family that succeeds at coming to America, embarking on and succeeding at achieving their American dream.  By learning English, re-learning an American education, and breaking out of the mold of working at liquor stores or dry cleaners or shitty food franchises, they become contributing members of society not completely insulated in their cultural silo.  Their kids grow up without the pressures of their entire bloodline on their shoulders, and they too become successful adults who are both well-cultured and well-educated and succeed in life.

Surely this narrative has happened somewhere in the culture, but without the angst of feeling cursed by the Korean Story, those that live it probably just haven’t gotten around to writing it out to where it could become a piece of Korean media that doesn’t make me want to jump off a bridge.

So I should just do it myself.  I’m sure I’d become filthy rich from all the Koreans who want to seek that escapism, and I’ll know I really made it if I could then get all the white guilters to get on board with it and ingest my story so that they can seem tolerant of foreigners, and then the rest will follow suite like dominoes.

Just got to have time away from parenting to get right on that though, so I guess in about 5-6 years I can pursue my destiny, hopefully.

Beef: Great show, hits a little too hard for me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I saw a trailer for Netflix’s Beef, I didn’t know much else about the plot other than the fact that the general introduction to the plot was two people having a chance road rage encounter, and it supposedly escalating to comedic hijinks.  But now that I’m finished with the show, yes, the general boiled down plot of it does remain similar to the early perception of what the show could’ve been, but it was also way more complex, way more substantial, way more important for Asian representation on camera, and most notably, way more relatable to Asians, to admittedly uncomfortable levels at times.

Don’t get me wrong, as a whole, I loved Beef.  It was a fantastic show.  But at the same time, it dove into some topics and had dialogue and situations where it kind of mind-fucked me at just how targeted this felt, beyond the fact that the male lead’s name is Danny and he’s Korean, but obviously I know I’m far from the only person much less Asian person who probably deals with a lot of these thoughts, emotions and struggles to where a plot like this can probably impact a lot of people out there.

Aside from the praise for the strong writing and the strong performing of all actors in the show, one thing that I appreciated the most about the show is just how casually but impactfully demolishes the door of Asian stereotypes in film and television, on a global basis.  Koreans in media in both Korea and America are often set to a lot of unwritten rules and guidelines, like when it comes to physical intimacy, sex and dialogue.  When I was growing up and seeing Korean shows or dramas that my mom or grandma would watch, and seeing any sort of meaningful relationships much less physical intimacy just didn’t happen.

As countless American articles have called out, Asian representation in American media is even worse, and Asian men get it the worst, being emasculated left and right, causing generations of Americans to see Asian men as a bunch of auto-cuckold wimps by default.

Beef just goes on like none of the old rules or bars ever existed, and it’s a breath of fresh air to see people, regardless of race, acting like the people of today would conduct themselves.  Danny is allowed to be emotional, introspective and have flaws.  Amy is allowed to be a breadwinner, the alpha in her marriage and stand up to men fearlessly.  Paul is allowed to be sexy and naïve, and I’m glad to see him fight the good fight to hopefully paint Korean men as anything other than either overweight comic sidekick, or a plastic-molded K-pop boy band member.

AND THERE’S FUCKING SEX in the show, involving Asian people, and it’s not like a sensual love making scene to IU singing in the background.  It’s emotional and raw and actual fucking like you’d see in real American media between non-Asian people.  I’m not writing this fact to try and be funny and make this post memorable or anything, it’s that such occurrences really are so rare, that I feel the need to really hammer it out and make sure it’s known.

And in spite of all the heavy swings the show does to break a lot of molds of Asian representation, the show still takes plenty of time to really tell the stories of the Asian sides of all the characters.  The importance of church to Korean-Americans.  The fetishization of Japanese culture when it comes to affluent white people.  And the sheer lack of communication between generations of Asian children with their own parents, which is an unfortunate trope that just about every second-generation Asian child deals with, with their respective parents.

I really enjoyed Beef as a whole.  But I’d be remiss to ignore the fact that on multiple occasions, I found the show really kind of difficult watch and digest at times, just because of the sheer relatability I felt with it.  It was like getting emotionally mind-fucked a few times, and I really wonder if any of my non-Asian friends and extended family that might watch it, will feel the same way I did when watching it.

I’m amazed I managed to write a post about this without resorting to any spoilers, but for what it’s worth to the zero people that read my swill, Beef is something that I highly recommend if you’re in the mood for a dark comedy that relies heavily on dialogue, but is full of substance, humor, and thought-provoking situations.

When being a Yes Man has its drawbacks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When Jim Carrey’s Yes Man was released back in 2008, I remember liking the film a lot.  Beyond just myself, I think it really kind of helped paint the picture of just how many people and much of the world were just a whole lot of cynical shut-ins, quick to say no to everything that comes in their direction.  Aside from the big crush I had on Zooey Deschanel back then, I really enjoyed the film, and it low-key inspired me to want to be more open minded and willing to say yes to things, even if I knew they might put me out of my comfort zone.

At first, things went about as well as things did in the film, with getting into swing dancing, and I found it somewhat liberating to try something new and experience growing and developing a new skill.  But just in general, I told myself to be more open minded, and say yes to things, and have faith and trust that other people might steer me in the right direction.

However, all these years later, sometimes I think that I’m too much of a yes man in my life, and that being open too much is putting me in a position in my life where I’m not particularly thrilled to be in, namely in a financial sense.  Sure, there’s an allegory about kids and the cost of raising children, but I’ve always been pretty financially conservative, wanting to save, liking cushions and becoming anxious when certain thresholds are below lines I don’t like being under, but these days I feel like I’m drowning, and that no matter what I do, or what cuts I try to implement, I just can’t make any headway or gain any sort of progress in the direction I want to be headed.

Yes I know that there are millions of people in the world who have it worse than I do, seeing as how I have gainful employment, as does mythical wife, but I feel like our lifestyle occasionally exceeds our means at times, and it’s in these periods in which I wish that I could be more of a NO man and just say no to everything that encroaches on my personal state of being, because being agreeable and wanting to please and remain flexible doesn’t seem to be fucking anyone over but me, and I think it’s an unhealthy dynamic I’m in when my mood goes sour and my world grows dark.

I feel like I’m living almost entirely in other peoples’ worlds and almost never in my own.  Not just in a financial sense, but also with time.  I give so much myself to my family and kids and my job, and there’s so little time for myself, and when I do have any I’m fretting about finances and dreading tomorrow’s responsibilities.  Relaxation truly is a skill that I do not possess.

The bottom line is that as much as I wish it wouldn’t dictate my well-being, I’m not feeling very financially secure currently, and it makes me feel embarrassed and ashamed to admit.  I’m 40 years old and I look around at the rest of my family and it feels like they all had their shit together better than I do at a similar age and I hate feeling so bothered by money, and had some actionable and tangible plans to gain some improvement.  Maybe saying no to more things might help me feel like I’m gaining a measure of control in my own life’s path again, but we’ll see what happens when a query is lobbed in my direction and I don’t want to feel like the bad guy.

It’s all about perspective

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had a thought today, that I realized that since 2023 has started, my job has kind of sucked.  This isn’t to say that I need to update my LinkedIn profile and start fervently looking for an exit strategy, but that coincidentally since the start of the new year, everyone coming back to work after the holidays and lots of people who feel they need an arbitrary date of a calendar before they start tryharding, it’s been a bit of a lengthy rough patch.

I still work with good people, and I like a lot of the people I work with, but it’s just been frequently busy, the nature of the work I’m doing often feels somewhat pointless, and not particularly gratifying.  I feel that due to employee turnover on the project management side, there’s some communicative chasms that are forming that’s creating a lot of job tickets that are full of incomplete/inadequate information, and I’m spending more time on the clock playing detective and trying to track down information versus doing my actual job, and when I am doing my actual job, there’s a backlog of job tickets, because of insufficient project management.

Seldom do I have as much downtime as I used to have, and I’m often going from ticket to ticket, and in this frustrating game of stop-and-go with trying to work versus knowing what I’m supposed to work on, and all the conversations with my superiors and skip-level meetings haven’t really gotten any traction at improving any of the frustrations of the job.

Here’s the thing though: no matter how unsatisfying and occasionally frustrating my job has been over the last six weeks, I still realize that I had to think and analyze and come to the conclusion that things aren’t particularly great on the job front right now.  And compared to where I was at prior to 2022 and changing jobs, it’s still a relative cake walk, and just how abysmally terrible things were prior to switching.

Like, my old boss at my old place of work made my life a living hell every single day I was on the clock.  From her endless pursuits of hyper-analyzing everything I did, looking for any and every angle possible to criticize me about, to initiating a timeline in which I could have potentially ended up fired, because I didn’t CC her on an email once, the word “toxic” doesn’t even come close to being adequate at describing my work life at my old job.

I was driven to such misery that I’ve become partially numb to when work is actually sucking, because my current situation isn’t that great right now, but I’m able to compare it to where I was before, and it’s really not that bad in comparison.

Ultimately, I’m just glad to be employed.  I’ve had moments of concern for my job, because I’ve seen more people let go by this company in 13 months than I had seen in six years at my previous place, and when my workload becomes too trite and full of projects that don’t seem worthy for someone at my paygrade to be doing, not that I personally feel that I am above anything, perception is reality to the working world, and it’s not about what I think so much as it could be seen by those above me, that I’m getting paid too well for the scope of work that I’m being assigned.

But as long as I stay busy and am helping keeping shit assignments off of people who don’t want to do them, I suppose I can feel some modicum of job security.  And as long as I don’t have to deal with the c-word of the old boss I used to have, pretty much any job in the world is perfectly fine.

Observations of doing online food delivery

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I came to the conclusion that in spite of the fact that I make more money than I’ve ever made in my career, I basically still have no money when it comes to any sort of leisure or just wanting to treat yo-self on rare instances.  To no surprise, it’s all going towards my children or expenses related to my children, and this is one of those instances where I think about how much simpler life can be for those without kids, not to say I have any regrets at all for having them they’re perfect and I love them until the end of existence.

But I don’t really do well when it comes to financial anxiety, and a lot of my general well-being is often tied to how comfortable I feel about paying bills while staying out of debt, and over the last few months, as much as I loathe and avoid it at all costs, I’ve had to carry partial balances over with my credit cards, simply because my outgoing money was surpassing incoming money, no matter how much I try to avoid it.

In the prior two years, I made a pretty penny on doing online surveys for nickels and dimes, enough to make people take notice in like the ten new wrestling blet replicas I was able to get with all of them, but that well has kind of dried up in the sense that the circumstances in which I was able to do them aren’t really applicable anymore, because my kids command a lot of attention, and I can’t absent mindedly bullshit my way through multiple surveys a day like I used to.

Needless to say, I had this revelation while I was in the car one day, that my household now has a third car that’s kind of dormant, and how it would be an ideal ride if I were to get into online food delivery.  It’s small, gets great mileage and is pretty fun and agile to drive, and it would be getting some use, instead of just sitting around deteriorating in dormancy.  Plus, the take home from doing online food delivery would be exponentially larger than doing online surveys, and it was something that I could do when the girls were down for the night.

And so I signed up for both DoorDash and UberEats, and over the last 6-7 weeks, I’ve embarked on moonlighting as a delivery driver.  Suffice to say, I’ve learned a lot in that span, but overall I can’t say that it’s been that negative of an experience as far as wanting to make some side cash for only as much effort as driving around picking up and dropping off bags of food takes.

It’s also been giving me a lot of perspective of being on the other side of the transaction, and naturally a remark like that isn’t said if it wasn’t to commentate on the sheer lack of respect and consideration customers have for their drivers.  Which is all a more eloquent way of saying that the vast majority of customers are a bunch of cheap motherfuckers who by all right shouldn’t deserve to eat if they’re unwilling to pay the people that bring their food to them.

For every generous tip I get from a customer who seems to recognize that I beat the estimated time, took into consideration the swing of their doors when placing their shit so they didn’t hit it, or other little things I do to make sure everything is right, I will have probably like 6-7 cheap motherfuckers who tip the bare minimum it takes for their order to not get outright rejected by all other drivers.  Like in 98%* of instances, I won’t even entertain a request where my take away is $2.75 or less because there’s a 100% chance that $0.00 is a tip and you’ll just be getting the base fare, and these are the shitheads that truly don’t deserve to eat if they’re not willing to pay for any labor.

*why not 100%?  Because sometimes UberEats will do these quests that give you bonus money for completion of trips, regardless of their amount, so if I’m teetering on a quest completion, I’ll take a shit fare if it means getting a bonus afterward

But the majority of tips that I accrue are somewhere in the $2-3 range, and these are orders that looking at the things they’re ordering, are usually well over $20-30, meaning on average, these are barely 10% tips.

The point is, it’s a good thing that I’m doing this as a side hustle and not relying on this to be my primary income, because I think I would go insane by how much passive abuse I’m getting from cheap-ass customers who use the veil of anonymity to justify being cheap assholes to have their shit delivered to their doors.

Another thing I’ve observed is that initially, I thought doing this, I’d be exposed to a lot of new restaurants where I could passively learn about through delivering their stuff.  I mean I’ve found a few places that I wasn’t really aware of, but when it really comes down to it, I’d have to say the majority of the drops that I’m doing are usually delivering someone their fast food, or Chinese food, or chain-establishment pizza, which really befuddles me, because I’m usually passing a number of Chinese or pizza joints on the way to these delivery spots, so I have no idea how these algorithms are when it comes to people and their choice of food.

I’ve learned that chain joints like McDonald’s, Popeyes and other massive chains don’t really give two shits about service time and having an order ready for pickup, because no amount of negative feedback to them is going to really improve their operations, so when I’m able to be picky about things, I try to tell myself to avoid them, because the bane of my existence is waiting for these businesses to prepare orders, and not a single night has gone by where there hasn’t been one pickup that hasn’t made me wait because I’m fast and they’re slow, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re the ones who cost me the chances at getting better tips on account of being extra early.

Favorite words to see: Leave at door
Least favorite words to see: Meet at door
You guys are assholes: Customer PIN required

Overall, the experience hasn’t been that bad.  I’m making some side cash in about 60-90 minutes on the nights I decide to go out, and I can usually do like 2-3 drops whenever I do go out.  It’s a decent way to clear my head and do something mindless, but at least make money in the process, and with these funds, I’ll hopefully be able to supplement my income for the ever-mounting expenditures that seem to be creeping into my life, or maybe even sack some of it away for some me-shit like a new raptop or inevitably, moar wrestling blets.

And to get in front of an inevitable question: yes, I have taken a French fry from a customer’s order before.  They didn’t tip, Chick fil-A didn’t seal the bag, I was hungry, and I didn’t know how to cancel orders yet, so in order to feel like I was getting any sort of retribution to an asshole, I totally took a French fry out of their order.  So the picture of Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai isn’t entirely just coincidental.