Tag: PF

Life as a married man, brog post #2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Honestly, there’s not nearly as much to say about the honeymoon as there was the wedding.  Frankly, much of this was split into two posts mostly because of my OCD of wanting to make sure a wedding photo was with the wedding post, and so that some picture from the honeymoon can also get displayed independently, therefore necessitating its own post.  Still, not to say that I can’t spout off about a honeymoon, but in the interest of transparency, this is the true impetus of this post coming to fruition.

Frankly, we’re just happy to have done a honeymoon, especially immediately after the wedding.  We’ve seen it happen to enough couples, where a honeymoon is planned anywhere from months to an entire year after the wedding to actually happen, and in some cases not even happen at all.  Yeah no, no disrespect to those who embark on similar paths, but the both of us most definitely wanted to have an actual honeymoon, where we could actually relax and take a well-earned break from the life of planning a wedding on top of our normal working lives.

In a nutshell, we went to Disney World for a few days, stayed at the Polynesian resort, and then transitioned onto a Disney cruise for the next week, where we sailed to Mexico for a few days, hit Disney’s private island Castaway Cay for a day, and then came back home.  The wife drove most of the itinerary, since she’s at least 200x more into Disney than I am, but I’m more than happy to go along for the ride, as long as the vast majority of my trip could be spent relaxing, eating like a pig, and generally having very little commitments at all.

Overall, my missions could very well be considered accomplished.  Maybe a little too much, because I still have no earthly idea what I’m doing with my life whenever I have free time back home.  I just watched Chinese Super Ninjas for the 80th time in my life last night, because I couldn’t triangulate on one better thing to do with two free hours than that.

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Life as a married man, brog post #1

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
photo courtesy Matt Altmix

Let this be the first time I put in writing that I am now an officially married man, and this is the first time that I’ve had the time to sit down and write since both the wedding and the honeymoon.  After planning for both of these things for the better part of the last year, and then actually doing both things, I have to say that it feels kind of like having been on a train for a while and then having to adjust to the speed of walking all over again.  Literally, I’ve spent parts of the last two days sitting there in a dazed stupor, not having any clue of what to do next with, life in general. 

There are certainly things that should get done and need to get done, but I’m having a hard time bringing myself to make the first step in any direction to actually get started on doing anything really just yet.  It’ll all fix itself pretty quickly as daily life and routine begin to settle back down, but for the time being, it’s definitely taking some adjustment on getting back to normal life after finishing up a journey with some finishes in extreme rhythms.

As for the wedding, I have to say that I think the wife and I put on an excellent weekend for our celebration of union.  Trying to be as objective as I can for my own event, but I really genuinely believe that just about everything went so well and smooth, and I really couldn’t have asked for anything else,* as far as how the entire weekend went, from the arrival of friends and family, the rehearsal party to the wedding itself.

*except maybe some actual leftovers from our catering, which was completely obliterated by everyone, regardless of a few no-shows, resulting in nothing left for wifey and I after the wedding, but I guess that’s just another sign of success that we picked a good caterer who put out some irresistible food

I think it started with the location, and getting hitched in downtown Decatur made for a fantastic location for guests to stay where they were right next door to the venue, in an area where there were tons of restaurants and bars to eat and hang at, and a rarity in the Metro Atlanta area, somewhere that was MARTA accessible, meaning people could easily hop aboard the train and actually do tourist things.  Plus, the hotel was brand-spanking new, and the staff was outstanding beyond belief, and there’s little reason to believe the weekend wouldn’t have been as great as it was without them themselves.

Throughout the weekend, fewer things made me happier than seeing friends and family decisively doing their own things, and going out to eat or to the aquarium or the World of Coke, and making the most of their free time.  I took great pleasure and enjoyment in seeing people having a good time in Decatur and Atlanta, and not feeling like they were just humoring us, and like they actually got some time for themselves instead of feeling like they were just here for us.

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The last singles

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If I can pull the curtain back a little bit, whenever I sit down and write, there’s no guarantee that the most recent thing I’m writing is actually the most recent thing that’s actually happening.  Especially these days, I often times come across things or thoughts that spark the want to write, but I just simply don’t have the time to write, because I’m always busy at work, and by the time I get home, I’m either too busy to write or too fried to write.

In times like those, what typically happens is that I have a cloud-based document where I jot down the date and the general theme of what was going to be written, and if there’s any links that I want to refer to, that too.  And when I have the time and the motivation to do some writing, those are the things that I try to tackle first.  Typically, I don’t like the queue to grow too big, because then it gives me anxiety and a feeling of being worthless as someone who likes to write.  But there are exceptions to the queue, where I start writing about something in the true present, because usually there’s some degree of time sensitivity to where it’s not something that I can go back and write about retroactively.  At the time I’m writing this, there are three posts queued up that I still want to write about when I get the time.

Right now, is one of those moments.  Because the last few days, I’ve been coming to the realization that a lot of the things I’m doing, are the last time I’m doing them as a single guy.  Yes, melodramatic me is actually writing about the slow farewell to single, unattached life, because I’m two days from entering the wedded bliss of holy matrimony, and getting married.  What started out as mythical gf became mythical fiancé, and now I’m about to have a mythical wifey, and I’m actually going to be somebody’s husband.  Sucks to be them!

But anyway, it’s a lot of little things that I’m doing that I’m realizing are the last times I’m doing them as a single person.  All throughout the week, I’ve had my final chest and tris day as a single guy.  My last time running on the treadmill as a single guy.  Today was my last bis-shoulders-hamstrings day.  As the weekend progresses, I’ll have my last meals and drinks as a single person, and then when I’m at the altar, likely watching down at mythical fiancé coming down the aisle, probably looking radiant and beautiful, I’ll be ticking down my last minutes and seconds as a single person.

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I lost a mythical gf

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

On this day, I no longer have a girlfriend. 

I have a fiancée now.

Marriage is one of those things that I always imagined would be in my future.  Even though jaded people like to claim that it’s an archaic institution or something that doesn’t really mean much these days, the eternal romantic in me always saw it as something that I figured I’d want to attain in my life.  I’ve watched couples that I’ve always thought were great, mothers and fathers of children, and even my own parents dissolve and divorce which I’d be lying didn’t give me concerns for pursuing it myself, but it just seems like one of those things that always had a place in my life, personally.

And fortunately, I’ve had an accommodating partner throughout this journey towards marriage, and the once-mythical gf has stuck with me throughout the last four years, and kind of made it something of a no-brainer that we just might work out in the long haul.  I’m lucky to have a girl in my life that loves and accepts me, is supportive of my pursuits, and encourages me to be the best person that I can be, and I’m pretty stoked and excited to go through the awkward transition of calling her “my girl-I mean fiancée,” and eventually, my wife.

It’s funny because despite the fact that it took four years to get to this point, this is something that has been on my mind for a way lot longer.  But I didn’t want to be one of those people who were just giddy to be in a relationship, and rush straight into marriage, without really knowing their better halves, and despite the fact that I was wondering if this could go in this direction, I always erred on the side of steady, to let things grow, feel things out, and really be more and more sure of, well everything.

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The unintentional greatness of opt-out clauses

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the day is over, I’m not really a fan of opt-out clauses in sports contract.  They’re like slimy, sleazy trap doors out of contracts that professionals can claim they’re really going to commit to a team for seven years, but dude-bail after two years or five years, or whenever they’ve negotiated to have an opt-out available to them.  It’s like being in a fucked-up relationship where the dude is allowed to leave after the second year scot-free, but if they pass up on that escape window, then they’re locked in for the long haul.

More often than not, we’ve seen classic examples of guys who sign 7-10 year deals, with opt-out clauses after like three years; where the fans think they’ll have a guy for 7-10 years, they’re all stoked to see him play out of his mind in year three, put up career best numbers, lead their teams deep into playoffs… and then opt the fuck out of their contracts, and then put a gun to their teams’ heads and stick them up for another lucrative long-term contract, lest they become free agents and jump to whomever else would be willing to instead. 

Off the top of my head, Alex Rodriguez and CC Sabathia are prime examples of guys who have successfully parlayed the opt-out clause to perfection and bilked the New York Yankees out of more money than their original Yankee contracts were originally worth.  LeBron James is a perfect recent example of a guy who has not only opted out this year, but has done it twice now, opting out of the contract he had with the Miami Heat to escape back to Cleveland, and then now opting out of his deal with the Cavaliers to go to Los Angeles.

On the flip side, there’s the hilarious example of Dwyane Wade, who opted out of a guaranteed $16 million for one year with the Miami Heat, only to discover that nobody wanted him, and then came crawling back to the Heat, where he had to sign for two more years in order to get than $16 million back.

And that’s where we get a glimpse of the unintentional greatness of the opt-out clause, because every now and then it provides the opportunity for overpaid babies we know as professional athletes to get owned.  And there are fewer things I take a sadistic pleasure out of seeing than professional athletes getting owned financially.

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Office Space-ing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s only been a year and chance since I moved into my house, but I haven’t really done anything with my office.  Sure, I made and installed my wall of belts, and hung a few frames on the walls, in addition to positioning the futon and setting up a space for my computer.  But I still had a lot of boxes sitting in the closet along with general ideas for lots of little trinkets and nerdy figurines that I had imagined displaying in whatever room I’d designate as my office, that I simply never bothered really getting to.

Another thing I decided to do while mythical gf was out of the country was to finally do something with my office space, and get it to a point beyond where it was just a whole bunch of boxes stacked in a corner with just a computer and a wall of wrestling belts.  A few posts ago, I touched on the hanging wall shelves that I had put together, which are in place and I’m generally happy with, even though I underestimated a little bit just how many Rito figures that I had and how much space they’d take up.

So among the things not making the cut of the above picture are two shelves that I purchased and installed; neither are particularly impressive things, but more like essentials in order to get a degree of organization for all my various personal effects.  The obstacle I faced with my primary shelf was that I had some general dimensions that I did not want to exceed in any capacity so that I could retain as much open floor space as possible but still be able to have a place to hold some shit.

At first, I had resigned myself that storage cubes would be the most logical shelving solution for what I had in mind, but after a lot of digging on various sites, it was Amazon of all places where I found this shelf that fit into my dimensional parameters, and definitely looked like it had way more character than the cubes that just about everyone in my generation has from Ikea, Target or Walmart.  Not to mention I loved the faux-incomplete half edges on opposite ends that definitely gives it some personality as well flexibility in case something is a little wider than the surface area.

I only needed one row and the top to display stuff like nice figures and photo frames, and I didn’t have a lot of printed materials that exceeded the smaller shelf spaces, that didn’t quite fit into my library shelf elsewhere, so that left the entire bottom row available for general storage.  I got these storage bins to store shit like camera equipment, electronic peripherals and art supplies, but also looking a little bit nicer than the army of cardboard printer paper boxes they’d all been sitting in previously.

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When in doubt, make it yourself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While mythical gf is vacationing out of the country without me because I’m not a teacher and I don’t get entire months off at a time, I decided that I would spend a chunk of my solitude working on my office. 

I mean, after a year of living here, it would only make sense that I would have the room where I do the bulk of my artwork and gaming to a point where I’d be able to sit back in my chair and look around and be somewhat satisfied with my immediate surroundings.  Nah, as is often times the case in my life, when it comes to the intricate things for myself, I have a tendency to slack on them, putting just about everything else first, like responsibilities.

One of the things I had in mind was that I wanted to have some floating shelves for the vast array of figurines that I’ve amassed throughout the years.  Primarily the League of Legends figures that I’d been collecting since they started producing them.  They’re pretty good quality, and I can appreciate the consistency and cohesiveness of them as a collection, and I wanted to display them.

The thing is, I was having a great deal of difficulty in finding floating shelves that I was satisfied with.  Primarily, I did not want floating shelves with a massive depth, that would fuck with my peripheral vision when I would be sitting at my machine, at the height that I had envisioned setting them up at.  Furthermore, floating shelves seem to be a really in thing when it comes to home decorating these days, so the cost of them are most certainly not as cheap as when the first time I came across them years ago at like either a Target or a Container Store.

To make matters worse, the shelves that I once had on the walls of the old house were nowhere to be found anymore; a simple floating shelf with a minimal depth, that would’ve been perfect for Rito figures.  In their place were an array of shelves with pretentious bevels and faux-trim accents, with shoddy hardware that were most certainly not very cost effective, nor were they remotely long enough to accommodate all the figures that I have.

Over the last year or so, my brother has gotten really into woodworking.  He’s gotten really good at it in that span of time, and he’s made an array of shelves, tables and other practical furniture with his own hands and tools.  Needless to say, as all good big brothers do, it inspired me to want to make some practical shit on my own.  I figure I’m a pretty meticulous person who has zero fear of working with my hands, I know I have the capabilities to do similar stuff to him, except that I don’t have near the hardware he does at his disposal to do the depth of work that he can.

But making floating shelves?  Simple, shallow-depth and of course, simple floating shelves?  Oh yeah, I know I could do this at least.

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