Tag: rage

Why I’m the only guy in the office still wearing a mask

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Both my kids are sick now.  Still possible that I caused it, but also some reason to believe it might not have been me.  Either way, strep was brought to them somehow, and obviously through basic transmission of germs.

But this is why I still mask up, even if in doing so, it’s still not foolproof at protecting my famiry.  I went all of 2020 with not even a common cold and it was glorious.  But as time progressed, people selfishly got sick of masks and arrogantly believed a vaccine made them invincible, sure as the sun rises, the common sicknesses that nobody got in 2020 were waiting around and it’s been a fucking war zone since.

Literally, a night nurse at the hospital #2 was born at got my wife and newborn baby sick, who immediately passed it onto #1 as soon as we got home.  That was real fun, dealing with a house full of sick people, among them a literal newborn.

2022 literally started with coronavirus infiltrating my house, where mythical wife got it, and although untested, myself and #1 probably had it too.  Amazingly, #2 seemed to escape unscathed.

And since then, I think it’s accurate to say that one or both of my kids have been sick every single month of this year.  Coincidentally, mask mandates are relaxing all over the country, and Georgia was full of yeah cmon hicks who already began ditching them, and shocker, fucking sicknesses are goddamn everywhere.

And when my kids get sick, I’m the one who has to eat the load and work from home and compromise my work responsibilities and often times run double duty on the girls.  I’m the only one who’s work suffers and the backlog usually ends up with me working into the evenings and/or having to rush and be at higher risk of shoddy work.

I’m just sick of my kids getting sick.  It’s by no fault of their own, they’re just kids.  I blame the fucking world around us full of arrogant and selfish assholes who can’t be bothered to wear masks in public, happily content with spreading two years worth of backlogged colds and other niggling ailments that everyone is spreading and getting all the fucking time.

I refuse to feel like the outcast in public because I choose to wear a mask still.  It may not be fool proof at preventing sicknesses but I’m doing the best I can to try to protect all my girls, even if it makes me seem like the outlier that was just barely months ago, the norm.

You’ve got to fucking be kidding me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ever since the WWEShop re-released the John Cena US Spinner blet, I’ve had this tab open on my laptop.  WWEShop’s prices fluctuate on a dime, and it’s always just a waiting game before any and every blet ends up going on sale at some point.

During the Royal Rumble, the blet went down to $379, and I was very tempted to pull the trigger, but then I thought that it might be even better by the time Wrestlemania rolls around.  But then Wrestlemania comes and goes, and I check the site judiciously the whole weekend, and it doesn’t dip beneath $399, much to my disappointment.

It just fucking figures that the Monday after the biggest show of the year, is just some random sale, where the Cena US Spinner not only drops to a lowest-ever $359, but by the time I check it and see it at that cost, it’s already completely sold out.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with the tab open checking on a daily basis.

So now, I get no blet, I have no idea if and when these will ever come back again, and if and when they do, it’ll be starting all over from scratch playing the waiting game all over again.  I’m quite agitated by this.  I also feel like the WWEShop’s association with a buy now, pay in installments company like Klarna really doesn’t help financially capable people like myself, because they’ll sell to anyone willing to pay in installments like a layaway schlub, but they’re able to hoover up inventory before me, in spite of the fact that I am willing and capable of paying for things outright.

Either way, I’m just mega salty that I missed out.  I literally check this shit every single day, and the one day in which I’m too busy to check until the evening, just so happens to be the day when the price drop bottoms out, and every single person who wanted this blet has beaten me to the punch.  Fuckin’ pissed.

Dad Brog (#082): will life ever ease up?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Most of my adult life, I’ve always kind of had a list to guide my general objectives. Get a good stable job. Unload the old house. Find a girl to date. To marry. To have children with. Get a new home. Leave toxic job, find better one.

Obviously, things change, life changes as does the general list. But the things on said list are pretty broad and pretty concrete things when they are checked off, with the thought being with the more things checked off, the more complete and presumably easier things get with life in general.

Well, over the last few years I’ve accomplished a large bit of my broad list.  I unloaded my old house. I found a new one. I got a good stable job that became toxic, and I left it and found a better one. And I met a girl, married her, and had kids.  For the most part, I’ve succeeded in checking off all of the big ticket items on the list, so the rhetorical question is, why is life still so fucking difficult and when will it ever ease up?

Obviously, children are the easiest thing to cite as why things are difficult, which isn’t inaccurate, but lately it feels like shit is happening in a way that feels like a competitive video game that allows a losing party suddenly get lucky, score easier, and catch back up, except in my case it’s like nothing is allowed to go smoothly for too long before shit starts happening that has me back in na position of wanting to rip my hair out and scream sometimes.

Recently, my nanny has basically inexplicably left us, currently indefinitely, since they haven’t reached out since calling out.  I won’t go into specifics, but the result of it is basically fucking me because mythical wife can’t take any time off because teachers get dick for privileges as such, so the burden falls on me, to stay home, skirt my job responsibilities and wrangle two babies all day long.

Mind you, I’m still new at my job, and I’m concerned, if it’s not already manifested, I’m going to have the reputation of being that headcase worker who’s high maintenance on account of their children.  Pre-kids I loathed people who did it at prior places I worked, but I’m basically becoming that person when my paid help flakes on me.  Plus, I don’t exactly have the formal PTO accrued, so I’m instead trying my best to pretend to work while watching the girls, and I’m extremely lucky to have colleagues with children who can empathize and understand and give me more leeway than my old C of a boss did.

This isn’t to say I have no empathy for what the nanny is going through, but there’s a finite ceiling I have for the circumstances that they’re citing.  I’m upset and disappointed for a variety of reasons, but more for ones beyond the, I have to take time from my job and looks like an asshole to my team.  All the same, I’m in a position where I can’t operate in the unknown, and might have to start looking for a plan B, in a highly, highly nanny’s market.

Oh, also it appears that #2 is at yet another sleep regression, according to mythical wife.  Except that she’s sucked at sleep since her arrival, so it’s hard to tell when things are at a regression, or if we’re just back to the usual routine of nightly she won’t sleep routine bullshit.

It’s classic fallacy of thinking things will get better, but we’re back to the point where we spend so much time just trying and praying and hoping she’ll go down that by the time we get anywhere it’s like 9 pm, way later than I want to eat dinner, and I still have a fuckton of daily chores and cleaning that has to get done that I get no fucking help with ever.

List or no list, this is life at its most classic. Nothing is ever allowed to be easy, and just when things look like they might be easing up, shit just happens that ratchets the difficulty back to fuck you mode, and I’m in a position where I can’t really do anything about it but make agitated dad brogs.

Undefeated, no longer

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the many things I hate about very likely having COVID is whenever anyone insinuates that it’s remotely close to okay, because the infection numbers are so rampant that it’s almost inevitable that everyone will have caught a variant of it at some point.

My response to that is that a loss is a loss, and there’s no wiping a loss from your record, no matter how successful you are afterward.

Because I’m me, everything is an analogy to sports or wrestling, and the way I see it, everyone who has managed to evade COVID as long as I and my household had, was basically undefeated. 

Fewer things in competition are as hallowed as undefeated streaks, and there’s little more frequent narrative of a streak to inevitably break, with it growing more and more value the longer it goes unbroken. 

The ‘72 Dolphins. DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak. Ripken’s 2,632 consecutive game streak.  The Oakland A’s 20-game win streak. The Cleveland Indians’ 22-game win streak. Goldberg’s 173-0 streak. Asuka’s 914-day undefeated streak. The Undertaker’s 21-0 Wrestlemania streak.

And in my head, every single person who has managed to go without COVID since it came into existence, y’all are also undefeated.  And up until a week ago, my wife was.  Up until more recently, so was I. 

But now, (very, very likely) not anymore. 

No, it isn’t the end of the world. My wife will recover. I will recover. We could thrive afterward. But it’s still a loss on our records, and that will never go away.  And I fucking hate it.

Back in like 1995, I was playing a season NBA Live ‘95. I wanted to have a season where the Orlando Magic went undefeated with my Penny Hardaway having 100% field goal percentage and averaging like 169 points a game and a triple-double.  I put a lot of time into it, but after about 30 games, the game apparently didn’t like such unrealistic conditions, and next thing I knew, I had a loss to the Seattle SuperSonics on my record and my Hardaway’s numbers were all tarnished. 

I quit the game.  That and-1 was a loss that I couldn’t expunge no matter if I won every single game afterward.  It ruined the ultimate goal.

Having the ‘Rona brought into my home and infecting my household makes me feel like the 2007 Patriots.  We were doing so well, only to be derailed and defeated by an unlikely party.  And the worst part is, I highly doubt the offending party realizes just how much they’ve fucked us.

Whereas they can go home to a childless environment with nobody but themselves to care to recover over, or any real demanding jobs to go to, mythical wife and I have two young kids to be mindful of, boatloads of duties that still have to get done no matter how addled we are; on top of our respective jobs.

Ask any parent how it feels to have to deny their kids an embrace that they want, and tell me that it’s still “fine” that “everyone’s going to get it eventually.”  Don’t try and calm me down with that bullshit reassurance that everyone will get it or that Omicron isn’t as lethal, because I will tell you to go fuck yourselves.

Life is already very difficult as it is right now, but to throw fucking coronavirus into our mix, sounds like a pretty crushing loss and way to end an undefeated streak in a terrible fashion.  I will always resent it, and unlike a video game, this loss on the record is permanent and there’s no turning off and quitting it.

How today should be versus how it is

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today is my last day with *Fortune 50 company redacted*.  I’ve been here for a hair under six years, and this is the longest job I’ve ever had.  As much of a stressor and source of frustration the job had turned into over the last two years, under normal circumstances today really should be a bittersweet one, because there are still a lot of good people there, I’ve made a lot of good relationships, as I close this chapter of my career.

Instead I’m just bitter, at all the life’s circumstances that are swirling around in play right now, and I’m having a very difficult time letting go of all this anger and frustration I’m feeling. It’s tarnishing absolutely everything around in my life right now, and I’m fully aware of it and how calm people always wax poetic about how it’s never good to hold onto anger, but I can’t help it because my entire household has been compromised by one fucking person who thinks vaccination means they can resume living life like it were 2018 again and going into crowds and picking up plagues to spread unto others.

I should be excited about my new job starting up soon, but I’m not.  I haven’t even worked a day, but I’m already dreading it, because my home is still fucked with COVID, and in spite of me originally thinking I may have been asymptomatic, I’m feeling shit in my throat that is saying otherwise and I’m 99% sure I too now have dropped off the list of the undefeated but I can’t know definitively because the America is too full of stupid fucks, the disease is everywhere and I can’t get tested because all sites are slammed to oblivion and and all home tests are sold out everywhere until like 2025.

Instead of embarking on my new career path full of optimism and hope eternal, it’ll more than likely be just like a day like today: me on double duty with my girls because we can’t bring in help because of COVID and mythical wife still having to go to work because the school system is more fucked up than Heaven’s Gate and they’re more than willing to turn a blind eye to someone with a very recent exposure as long as they don’t have to go get a substitute teacher.  So I’m quadruple stressed out because I probably have the ‘Rona, I’m still on the clock with my last day of work, I’m worried for my wife, and dealing with both kids.

All because one person brought the fucking plague into my home.

I should be coasting to the finish line and feeling melancholy as I bid adieu.  I should be excited about my new job coming up. 

I should be in good spirits.

But I’m not.  I’m angry, frustrated, disappointed and disgusted.  Brain full of bile, throat full of phlegm, feeling bitter and resentful and helpless because there’s absolutely jack shit that can really be done about any of this but wait it out.Have to power through orientation and day 1 of new job while putting up a facade that everything is fine.  Have to wait out 10-14 days to hope that this Omicron bullshit works its way through my house’s residents.  Have to eventually find somewhere to test or have to pay for fucking home tests if they can even be found.

Have to keep life in fucking hold stasis for even longer, because of the conduct of someone outside my home.

Today should be a good day.  But it’s fucking not.  I can get over me getting sick, but my wife and my innocent children getting sick, is inexcusable.  It’s not fucking fair, and this is anger that I will be incapable of letting go of, for a long time. 

A kick in the balls at the buzzer

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you’ve never seen one of these before, no this is not a pregnancy test.  God forbid, no.  Mythical wife and I used those fancy tests that could actually run Doom on them.  Two kids was the plan and mission accomplished.

No, this is a rapid COVID-19 test, and the two lines that are shown indicate a positive, yes you have coronavirus within your system.

For all the caution, masking, distancing, isolating  and other measures mythical wife and I have done over the last 22 months, it still made it into our home.

To clarify, this is not my test, although considering someone in my household is registering a positive, it’s safe to say that we’re all exposed.  I, or anyone else in my house can’t really go get confirmed, because everyone in my area has gone bonkers and any testing sites are all slam packed not to mention it’s New Years fucking Eve.

I’m quite upset over the likely circumstances that brought this unfortunate development to light, but what’s done is done and raging about it will accomplish nothing at all.  But the result is still the same, and for the next week, maybe two, my household is going to be wonky, my wife and kids and myself will have to play spatial chess as we try to minimize together time so that those with symptoms avoid those without.

It upsets me that the world went from intelligent avoidance to eventual acceptance that everyone was inevitably going to contract coronavirus at some point, and in the case my home, it wasn’t anyone here that went out of their way to get themselves exposed.  We’ve been doing our part to minimize exposure and stay safe, but unfortunately we can’t monitor the world outside our doors and the activities that the people outside our doors are doing.

I’m just upset on varying levels and degrees right now.  There’s never any good time for anyone to get sick, but happening right on a holiday makes things a little bit harder and more inconvenient.  There is no consolation in me being negative or asymptomatic, when my wife and one of my kids are ill and addled.

My daughter registered a fever of 103F. Ordinarily, that’s a need to go to urgent care, but clinics and facilities all over are so overrun, that they do an assessment to see who’s at the greatest risk of death to determine on whether or not they should go or.  Seeing as how my daughter is acting fairly normal in spite of the temperatures, we’ve been recommended to “stick with what you’re doing – at home” instead of going to urgent care—that’s where the fuck we’re at in this state of the world right now.

Life is already fucking difficult enough as it is, but to throw coronavirus on top of it, and I’m just feeling defeated and owned and all sorts of dejected.  Things will seemingly never get easier, and all I can really feel like is the endless need to endure and be patient, instead of thrive and enjoying life more than I am.

It’s funny, because as I was finishing out my last post and ending it with how the book on 2021 was closing with that post, it was almost like tempting fate that something should occur with the one day we had left.  And much like the title of this post is called, it really does feel like a kick in the balls, right at the buzzer.

Happy fucking new year, everyone.

2 Under 2: A very different story this time (#076)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I wind down my second paternity leave, I feel pretty much not much from the dread of returning to work, and a lot of anxiety at the uncertainty of what life is going to be like in the coming weeks.  I went into this paternity leave feeling burned out and exasperated from the combination of a job that I’d soured on plus the rigors of parenting two under two.  I conclude my paternity leave feeling burned out and exasperated, except this time there is no work to blame for the overflow of stress and in fact, I’m going back to it.

I had hoped that taking the working part out of the equation would alleviate a lot of pressures of daily life of parenting, but things just didn’t really work out that way, much to my disappointment.  A vast combination of parenting factors, such as sleep issues with #2 that are wildly inconsistent and persistent, #1 entering a very precarious stage in her life where basically everything is a hair trigger to a crying meltdown, the fact that I have basically little to no help on a regular basis, and have spent an inordinate amount of hours doing double duty on both kids at the same time.

Most every day over the last twelve weeks has had at least one instance where I get upset or exasperated, and by now I’m often feeling so over parenting and as I’ve said numerous times, just want a single day where I can not have to be a parent so that I can appropriately recharge, but know it’ll never happen because my circumstances are precarious and difficult for anyone to really handle plus I don’t trust anyone to do all the ungodly amount of chores and tasks I do on a daily basis as well as I do.

Make no mistake, I feel like shit and am endlessly guilty admitting to all of this, but inherently therein lies just how difficult the journey of life with two children under the age of two is, and made more difficult in the midst of an endless pandemic where we can’t send #1 off to daycare or have a larger pool of people to trust with child care that isn’t the family that lives 3-10 hours away from us.

But at the same time, I’m not going to sugar coat it, lie and say everything is fine, because it most definitely isn’t.  Parenting is hard.  Parenting two kids is even harder, especially when I’m having to do it on my own as often as I do.  Multiply that by difficult behaviors, a lack of sleep, no breaks or times to unwind, and you have me.  Obviously, it would be arrogant to think that I am a genuinely unique instance as dads throughout history have undoubtedly matched my circumstances if not worse countless times, but I sure as shit don’t know anyone who is or has, in my little bubble of life.

I don’t have enough help.  My wife and I do not have enough help.  The state we live in, in the country it resides in, isn’t doing enough to help us much less themselves, based on the rise of Omicron and the endless existence of coronavirus.  Child care is expensive and bleeding us, especially since the last six weeks of my leave were the unpaid portion of it.  I really didn’t want to go unpaid for six weeks, but the needs of my children still come first, and seeing as how we still have no fucking clue to what’s going to happen once both mythical wife and I are both working, there is no light at the end of the tunnel right now.

I want to enjoy the last moments of this leave with my second child as I did with my first, but it’s proving to be difficult to do so.  Time is never on our side, and I am always against a clock somewhere for some reason.  Again, it sucks balls writing all of this out and admitting to just how upset I’ve gotten more than I like to admit, but shit, life has been hard, and there’s no reason to deny it.  One of these days, I hope that it won’t be as much so, but I’m definitely struggling to navigate things beyond a few hours of each day at a time.

Maybe in the near-to-distant future, or later on down the line when this post shows up on my On This Day, I’ll re-read posts like this and cringe at just how stupid I sounded, because life then will be so much better, or hopefully not, still be in this depressing state in the future.  But true to the brog, this is where I am at in this juncture of time, and shit ain’t easy.  And with going back to work on the near horizon, it probably won’t be getting any simpler any time soon.