Tag: rage

Dad Brog (#141): Role reversal

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There are times in which my kids bring home artwork they create in school, and in the case of #1, budding artistic talent is starting to emerge in the sense that she can now create with a relative objective in mind, and this is a family portrait that she drew, and I’ve been waiting her entire life for the day that she would create something like this.

I am going to frame it and cherish it forever.

But then there are all the other days in which my kids are absolute terrors, full of screaming, defiance, meltdowns, tantrums and more screaming, and sometimes I have to take a lot of deep breaths to try to not snap back at my children, and I ask mythical wife why we decided to have kids again?

In all fairness, most of the aggravating behavior is coming from #1 these days, and for as seemingly simple the supposed terrible twos were for us, it all seems to have held back until the age of four in this case.  I didn’t read enough dad literature to know if this is normal or not, but having a four and three-year old girls definitely has opened the door to its own unique set of challenges that I’m just guessing are a progression of time and growth.

The funny thing is, as much as #1 has become more obtuse about certain things, #2 has more or less reversed roles and become the chill one between the girls, and as often as #1 melts down, #2 is the one that’s usually cool as a cucumber in comparison and disposition.

Interestingly, and I should say unsurprising, a lot of this seems to stem from how much television we let the kids watch, as the vast majority of meltdowns typically start when it comes time to turn off the television and either take a break from screens, or get ready for bath time and bed, which has stretched even later, getting closer to 8 pm from 7, meaning I have even less time on a nightly basis to turn off dad mode and feel like a normal human being, that is when I’m not burning that time resetting the home every single night.

But when we don’t watch television, there’s no conflict over turning it off, and more often than not, certain triggers can be avoided.  But I’d be lying if that’s easier said than done, because sometimes, like when I need to prepare some meals for the kids, or just need a mental break for myself, an episode or two of a cartoon on Disney+ is just what I need in order to catch my breath, or buy time for something I need to do.

Either way, that’s parenting in a nutshell right now, and as I often stated, I don’t want Dad Brogs to only emerge when things are solely negative and I’m just looking for an outlet to vent since I don’t want to burden my actual human interactions to just spout off at how parenting is.

Things could be better, but they could also be worse; I love my kids the same every day, and for all the times they aggravate me with being kids, they also fill my heart’s bucket on a daily basis by just them being themselves, and occasionally bringing me touching artwork.

Is this anyone else’s experience or just mine?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously, it’s arrogant of me to assume that I’m the only person in the world who deals with this on a regular basis, but who really knows; I might be the only one who thinks about it to length enough to blab about it in a brog that nobody reads.  The point remains however, that this is still a phenomenon that I deal with on a daily basis, and I’m curious to know just how much this is the case in places all around the country and the rest of the world.

But I can’t help but feel like this is a behavior that spawned from life after the murderous peak of COVID.  I’ve said it many times, that I kind of miss the COVID era, minus all the senseless death and tragedies to people who really didn’t deserve it, but if there was one thing that was really nice about the whole pandemic is that it sure as hell made the roads really, really nice to drive around on.

I never really minded the early onset of return to office, because I quickly learned how much more efficiently I worked when I was in the office setting, plus it gave me the opportunity to formally return to a gym regimen.  But the commutes to and from the office were that of dreams, being able to leave the house at 8:45 and make it to the office at 8:57, almost nobody else walking into the building, almost always having an elevator to myself.

Now, I’m fucked if I leave the house at anything after 8:35, and I usually get to the parking lot at 8:55 if I’m lucky, and there’s always a ton of other people headed into the building at the same time, and I often have to get into an elevator with 2-4 other people where inevitably someone will be coughing, peaking my anxiety about getting sick because we’re long past the days of masks in public.

And in the midst of my obnoxious commute, is a whole fucking lot of this bullshit behavior; people camping the left lanes way long in advance, because they need to get ready to get on the highway, a lightyear away.

I really feel like this really started happening after COVID, because during COVID, driving behaviors in general kind of reset all over the place, and lots of common sense behavior and tendencies were forgotten all over the place.  Left is the fast lane, right for slower drivers, right-of-way rules, all of that shit seems to have been forgotten, as lots of olds have died off and stopped driving outright, and there was even a point where dumbass 17-year olds didn’t even have to take behind-the-wheel training in order to get a license.

But left lane camping, as what I like to call it, seems to have gone way the fuck up since COVID restrictions and return-to-office mandates have come into play.  There are two major left turns that I have to make on my morning commute, and it’s ridiculous the amount of camping that goes on, every single morning, by people who want to get in their lane that inevitably takes them to the left-turn lane they eventually need to be in, as early as humanly possible, regardless of how many other motorists might need to be in them, get into them, for them to make sooner left turns than they do.

There’s a stretch that’s jump into every morning where it’s around four miles until you get to the highway; every single morning, commuters pile into the one lane that inevitably dead-ends into the left turn lane of said intersection as early as humanly possible.  It doesn’t matter how empty the adjacent lane is, people will fight gangbusters in order to get into this particular lane so they don’t have to worry about switching again for the next four miles.

And not only do they give no fucks about getting passed or how much they’re inconveniencing motorists who need to turn in one mile, two miles or three miles, nobody is going to move them out of their lane to where they might actually have to put some effort into driving.

Heaven forbid you try to squeeze in at any point, because once these types of drivers get into their desired lane, they will defend their spot like they’re a Spartan warrior against the forces of Xerxes.

Naturally, the second major left turn that I need to make every day is the one that takes me to my office building.  The thing is, there are three different ways I can enter, but they all require a left turn to get in; my preferred one is the last one, as it is the closest to my actual building, but I’m not picky, if I see that the first or the second one has a green light, I’ll do it, just so I can get out of the petty rat race of left lane campers who will trudge along in a voluminous lane, because they need to get onto the highway that’s five miles away.

And honestly, it’s getting worse; since the school year started, and commuters are in an adjustment phase to their daily routes, to account for school buses and elevated traffic, I’m finding that on my route home, there are tons of people now camping the left lanes on my way home, where this was not the case just a few weeks ago.

It’s among my biggest pet peeves now when it comes to observing the behavior of the drivers all around me, and it’s times like these when I’m stuck behind a bullshit line of cars in a left lane, while everyone in the adjacent and right-er lanes are flying by, I begin to pine for the days of coronavirus, when so many of these shitheads were simply off the roads altogether.

KOREA VERSUS EVERYBODY

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BBC: South Korea wrongly introduced as North Korea at the Paris Summer Olympics

If anyone has ever been curious to why I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to the treatment of Koreans, this is a perfect example of why.  The bottom line is that my general opinion is that Korea; Korean culture, Korean contributions to the world, and Korean things in general; gets no respect from the rest of the fucking world.

Everything Japan does is admired and revered by the rest of the planet, and all UN countries are so scared of China’s population numbers and economic potential, that they all kowtow to them, as if they were the grasshoppers from A Bug’s Life, after the ants had uprisen against them.

Meanwhile, Korea has historically been an exemplary ally to the UN, the United States and many other countries.  They haven’t enslaved or bombed anyone, they’re not always lurking in the shadows installing sleepers all around the globe to spy and disrupt.  Korean economy is stable, prosperous, and other than the fact that everyone is black haired and narrow eyed, Korean society really is a lot like American culture.

Yet, people can’t even put down Asian people without disregarding Koreans, like when racists mock Asian people, asking them if they’re Chinese or Japanese.  Saying any other country much less Korea usually results in the person asking having to grind gears in their brains to process the existence of any other Asian race, but the fact that Korea is lumped into that denigrating B-tier of Asian countries fills me up with piss and vinegar.

Just in general, Korea is overlooked and not shown the respect that I think that the entire fucking culture is worthy of.  It doesn’t matter how many global industries Koreans dominate, how competent and good at athletics or competitive events they become, because we’re not Chinese or Japanese, the rest of the world tends to gloss over us, and it leaves me feeling disgusted with the entire world whenever shit like this occurs.

I mean seriously, the fucking Olympics?  The announcers had one goddamn job to do, which was to just name countries, and they can’t even get the Koreas correct?  You know they have rehearsals and practices for putting on monumentally things like this, and yet on global television, they still manage to bungle it the fuck up and mistake the Koreas.

The thing is in America, there have been numerous announcers, news anchors and commentators who have been shitcanned getting caught on a hot mic saying things that were either flagrantly racist or perceived to be racist, primarily to black people.  I would, seriously and as objective as I could try to be, put this up there with that kind of mistake, and if I were the superiors to the both English and French announcers, consider dismissal for both of these ignorant fucks for one, not knowing their world geography for the fucking Olympics, and two, being a colossal embarrassment to the entire International Olympic Committee.

But seeing as the only party being denigrated by their mistake was “just” Koreans, I don’t really see much retribution occurring.  Twitter apologies are not sufficient, and on behalf of Koreans worldwide, I do not accept it.  It’s insulting and embarrassing, and Koreans deserve better than this.

I hope this slight lights a fire under the asses of the 159 Korean Olympians, North and South, and they squeeze out a few extra medal wins here and there out of vindictive spite alone.  Not that it would really matter or be noticed, since the only countries that ever really get any spotlight at every Olympics is the US, China, Japan, Russia and whatever host country.

But whatever, fuck it.  It’s just another day at the office for Korea versus Everybody.

Can I get a do-over on my birthday?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So far, I’m having a birthday that has been leaving a lot to desire, and I’m trying my best to stay positive because I don’t want to get down on my birthday no matter how much I try to tell myself to treat it like any other day, but it’s feeling like one of those days where I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed and I should’ve taken the day off from work.

Because it’s naïve of me to have thought that being a WFH day, things would be easier on the workfront and that being my birthday, I would be a little more resistant to bullshit flung in my general direction.

Honestly, it didn’t start off poorly, my kids wished me a happy birthday before they went off to school, and I got some early work accomplished.  I felt like a million bucks when I was able to go to the DMV and successfully renew two cars’ registrations in four minutes because people that typically go to the DMV are afraid of technology and the self-serve kiosk was completely available, easy to use, and I was in and out in a manner that made post a bunch of eggplant emojis to various friends/groups.

I had a good run on the treadmill, and I’ve already come to the conclusion that my home treadmill and the ones at work are two completely different species of treadmills, because a 6.3 speed at home is completely tolerable, but trying anything 6.0 or higher at the treadmills at the office, and I might as well be trying to race Usain Bolt.

And that was really the last positive thing to happen, because, and I blame myself for this one, I really shouldn’t have tried to accomplish selling something on Facebook Marketplace on my birthday, because the failure rate of a sale is astronomically high, but I’ve been desperate to unload this item for months now, and I got a general commitment from this one shithead.

Naturally, he ghosted, so at this point since I had it loaded into the car, I was determined to not return home with it because I just wanted it fucking gone, so I took it to a Goodwill drop, where they claimed it was basically a piece of furniture, and wouldn’t take it, so now I’m pissed, but at this point there’s nothing else I can do about it, so I go get some lunch, so I can try to redeem some free birthday shit.

Or so I thought, despite the fact that I had an offer for some free loaded fries, the restaurant is saying I can’t redeem it because they’re already half off for a FRYday promotion, and that I should save it.  I tell them that I’d rather pay $0 than 50%, and I don’t come here often to where I probably won’t be able to save it until it’s expired, and at this point I’m annoyed that they’re challenging me at all, that I just turn around and walk, and so I end up paying for my own lunch somewhere else nearby, very agitated.

So as I’m driving to my next free shit, I remember that there’s a pawn shop, and despite the racket those places typically are, at this point, I’d take $0-10 for this piece of shit in my car.  Surely, they’d take a piece of fitness equipment right??

Wrong.  Maybe if I had some jewelry, or a gun, or perhaps some spare Air Jordans laying around, I might be able to have done business, but who would’ve thunk that lowly pawn shops have become so insufferably curating, to where they wouldn’t take my crap, even for free?

Which brings me to now, where I’m at Starbucks, amazingly the one place that made it free and easy to get something, where I decided to bring my laptop to where I could check my work email, cruise for the remainder of the workday, and perhaps do some casual writing.

I get my free drink and sit down, and lo and behold, Outlook is blowing up with many emails about new tickets, and shocker of the century, all of the tickets have less than a week turnaround.  I stare at my screen with a  face, and ping my boss that I should’ve taken the day off, and instead of doing the mountain of work that materialized out of nowhere, I opened up Word and started vomiting this colossal failure of a brog post out, because so far, this has been a real forgettable birthday that it’s taking a tremendous amount of patience to not go scorched earth on.

I want to hope that my birthday will get better, but with the exception of myself, my entire household is sick and combating various illnesses, so it doesn’t seem likely that anything but taking it easy at home is going to be on the agenda for the remainder of the day, but honestly, compared to the afternoon that I’ve had so far, that doesn’t really sound bad.

Does nobody move for ‘excuse me’ anymore?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

During my last family trip, I observed a noticeable amount of instances where saying ‘excuse me’ to people, resulted in absolutely no response at all.  And it’s not like I’m taking any off-path routes to get from point A to B to C, I’m talking about very general, public and heavy-traffic walkways or paths, where people clog up traffic, I want to get around them, and they have the space to move elsewhere, but for whatever selfish reason, they exist in the way.

I say excuse me, in a normal, neutral tone, and in some instances, people glanced over at me, and in other either people pretended like they couldn’t hear me, or proceeded to completely no-sell the fuck out of me.  It’s at this point, I say excuse me in a louder, more insistent tone and this usually does the trick to get them to acknowledge my existence, and when I usually just proceed to move at them, will they actually move.

It’s not like I was walking by myself in most cases, and could just as alternatively take longer, wider routes to avoid being close to people in the first place.  In most of these cases, I’m wheeling a stroller, luggage, or, in a rush carrying a toddler that needs to go to the bathroom, but for whatever reason it is, it just felt like a conspicuously high number of instances where it just seems like people have dropped common courtesy of moving the fuck out of the way when people say excuse me.

And when I have to repeat myself, louder and more hostile sounding, all these cocksuckers look at me like I’m the asshole for trying to get somewhere, where they’re the conceited selfish shitheads blocking walkways and thinking their inane conversations or needs are higher priority than others.

It’s not lost on me that this is sounding like an old man yelling at the sky kind of rant, but what’s really wrong with hoping that people have common decency to continue honoring the simple and basic human interaction of moving out of the way when someone says excuse me?  It’s not like I’m barreling through with the intention of initiating contact and shoving people out of the way, I’m simply alerting people that I need to get around them, and to pardon any potential contact and give them a heads up to move if they can.  Fuck me, right??

Dear world: it’s not you, it’s me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After all, I am Korean.  And no culture has higher expectations from other people as Koreans do, and I ponder the day if and when anyone can prove to me that anyone can work harder than a Korean can, because as far as my personal experiences are concerned, I’m hard pressed to ever have bared witness to such.

Mythical wife and I got into a little tiff coming back from the airport, because she was tired of everything coming out of my mouth being a complaint, and I was tired of being criticized for speaking negatively in a scenario where everything was going annoyingly when I feel that everything else I do is usually for the sake of others because I’m always trying to please everyone.  Atlanta Hartsfield Latoya-Jackson Ching Chong Chang really is capable of bringing the worst out of everyone at the drop of a hat, even those who are on their way out of it.

We landed right at midnight, and having sat at the very back of the aircraft, we’re the last to deplane, which is never a pleasant experience sitting in a giant metal tube with stagnant air for an extra 20 minutes than most other people.  Naturally, we’re at the very end of the terminal, so it’s a quarter mile to get to the escalators only to find out that the Pain Train shuttle is on reduced service and only one side of the tracks are operating, so we start walking, only for there to be assholes who clog up the moving walkway with wheelchairs they’re using as push carts or people just too fucking stupid and/or oblivious and not moving out the way for those actually walking.

We get on the next pain train, and of course, it stops because the tracks are clogged, right before we need to get off, adding even more time to our arrival, to which I am being cognizant about because as it’s past midnight, a new day is ticking, and I don’t want to get charged even more for parking than I have to at this point, so getting out as soon as possible is the objective.

Arriving at the main terminal, it turns out that basically the entire north wing is cordoned off, so we have to do a really cumbersome detour around south and then back to north, and of course the parking payment machines are all gone, presumably so that people can no longer pre-pay for their parking and increase the chances of time lapsing further while you get to your car, and drive through the maze-like exits of the on-site parking.

By the time we’re off the premises, mythical wife and I are already not speaking, because she’s tired of my complaining, and I’m over not being allowed to be upset at the fact that Atlanta Hartsfield Latoya-Jackson is run by brain dead invalids who love to parrot that they’re the busiest airport in the world, leaving out the fact that such business is wholly a result of the fact that they’re run by a bunch of brain dead invalids.

I don’t apologize for having higher expectations of the world around me, and I understand that the only one set up for failure for having such a mindset is myself, because the rest of the non-Korean world is way more accepting of substandard performance out of fucking everyone than I am.  And like a self-fulfilling prophecy, I am failing, because I fall victim to getting annoyed by fucking everything, because nobody in the world is capable of performing a job at a satisfactory level, seemingly anywhere I go.

I know the easy solution to a large percentage of the angst I experience on a daily basis would probably go away if I simply lowered my expectations on the world around me and were better capable of accepting the fact that the world is way less competent than I hope they could be, but it’s difficult for me.  I’m Korean, and culturally, Korean people expect a lot out of other people, and it’s never not disappointing when our expectations are not met.  This is a facet of my personality that in spite of my American upbringing that remains very much Korean, and it sucks because it means I’m an easy mark for disappointment, negativity and pessimism.

I don’t mean to be so negative and pessimistic and nihilistic about the world around me, but sometimes I really can’t help it.  I expect basic competence from everyone around me, and when everyone around me mostly, inevitably falls short, it’s a disappointment.  But I’m not going to apologize for voicing my opinions; I may try to be more cognizant that not everyone is going to want to hear them, but I don’t apologize if they come out.  If the world around me were more competent at their jobs and fostered efficiency and smooth operating, I wouldn’t have room for complaint, and in fact be grateful and praising of good work, because few things please me more than benefiting from efficient operating.

But as the subject of this post says, I know it’s not the world’s fault that I’m always so cranky and critical.  It’s entirely on me, because I have too many expectations from everyone, that I’m only setting myself up for let down and disappointment when they all inevitably fail to meet such par but lofty standards.  I’m working on it as much as a person like me can possibly work on it.

My kitchen counter is like Animal Crossing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the pet peeves that I’ve developed is that it annoys the ever-living piss out of me whenever my kitchen counter becomes overrun with crap that really has no place being on a kitchen counter.  Purses, junk mail, kids toys, handbags, regular mail, kids toys, clutches, old mail that never gets opened, and kids toys come to mind as the most common things that end up on my own kitchen counter, and it always gets on my nerves when things are placed there “for now” and for now turns into until I lose my cool and passive aggressively relocate things myself.

The thing is, either nobody notices or nobody cares how much this annoys me, neither of which is good.  But it’s not like I don’t have reason to be bothered by it so much, because the fact of the matter is that I do the majority of the cooking, especially for the kids, and when I’m making things, I just want to have some space on the counter to do my thing, without having to worry about toys, junk mail or a bunch of purses getting in my way.  Fewer things are more irritating than setting everything I need out, and then having no room for the cutting board or a bowl, or a place to just set an immediate need down.

But no matter how many times I clean the counter, relocate everyone’s shit and getting the surface nice and clear again, it’s only a matter of time before it just gets all overrun again.  Somewhere in time, it became as human nature to throw all your shit on the counter when you walk in the door as going to the bathroom first thing in the morning, because it usually only takes 1-2 days of people coming in from outside for the counter to get covered up with everyone else’s shit again, and then I get annoyed again, and this cycle repeats itself over and over again.

I came to the realization of the perfect analogy for the kitchen counter, which is that it’s just like playing Animal Crossing, and the endless chore of plucking weeds throughout your little islands.  It requires endless maintenance, and every day you let go by without tending to it, the worse it gets, and because my life is already packed to the brim with bullshit tasks and chores, sometimes I don’t always get to assessing and cleaning the counter every night.

And when the counter does get overrun, I just feel dejected, disappointed and annoyed, and after there are 10+ weeds all over the place, I just wish that that ghost from Animal Crossing would show up and clear everything from the counter for me magically.

But even that would be just a temporary fix, because in only a matter of days, the mess would just respawn, and I’ll be having a bad day as it is, and then I’ll try to make the girls a meal only to have all this shit all over the place and I’ll just get pissed all over again.

The thing is, I know this frustration is not limited to just me.  And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to hear just how many people share this frustration, but again, somewhere in history, it became a reflex for people to throw all their shit over the kitchen counters.  It’s gotten to a point where I’ll judge television shows now, that the most unrealistic thing about portraying a modern household is if the kitchen counter is clean, because I’m just not convinced that Americans are capable of living without countertops overrun by a whole bunch of unnecessary shit that doesn’t need to belong there.