Author: dannyhong

2 Under 2: Critical mass (#060)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is my general schedule:

  • wake up at 7:20 so I can have ten minutes to let the dog out, feed the dog, take a piss, and get #1’s milk ready
  • Get #1 out of bed and pray to god (1) she hasn’t leaked out of her overnight diaper because she sleeps face down and butt up and no diaper company has figured out how to solve gravity
  • If she hasn’t wet herself and I don’t have to strip sheets, change outfits and give her a comprehensive wipe down, I bring her down to start her day
  • Between 7:30-9:00 I hang out with my kid and pray to god (2) she’s not in a cranky mood and going to whine and fuss all morning like she is at the time I’m writing this down. On weekdays, I’m also technically on the clock as of 8:30, so I low-key act like I’m active at work but I’m just monitoring work on my work phone, and praying to god (3) that nothing substantial happens, but if it does then I have to actually work while placating a toddler for until our nanny shows up or my wife relieves me
  • On weekdays, by like 8:50 I’m in my office so that I can prepare for my workday for a job I’ve completely soured on and want out of. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have 9 am meetings where often times I’m the one driving them because in spite of the technical competency everyone is required to have in order to have their jobs, I’m the one most capable of actually utilizing WebEx, Acrobat and Outlook. All other days, I may actually have a few minutes to breathe and compose myself on company time, but those are few and far between as I am often playing catch-up on the work that doesn’t get done because I’m often playing dad throughout the workday (despite having a hard paid nanny and wife home on maternity leave).
  • Throughout most workdays despite being on the clock, I’m pulled away multiple times to assist with #2, which are usually burps and diaper changes because mythical wife is doing her duty of pumping so that #2 can eat. However this often puts me behind on my workflow and has a trickle down effect to where I have to make up the time somewhere
  • At some point during workdays as well as weekends, I try and spend some time to begin cleaning the numerous bottles and pump parts we go through in order to feed and provide for #2. If we didn’t have two sterilizers, I would literally never be able to catch up ever
  • At noon every day, #1 goes down for her nap. This is a 2.5 hr window where only one child has to be cared for, provided her frequent screaming and crying doesn’t wake #1 up, to which I pray to god (4) daily does not happen
  • By 2:30, #1 is awakened and it’s back to 2 under 2 time, except now the nanny is clocked out, and it’s my wife and I dealing with things with me back to low-key pretending to have full undivided attention to work for the next three hours and praying to god (5) that my bosses who have no respect for core hours or late afternoon meeting etiquette don’t drop a 4 or 4:30 meeting on my head
  • 5:30 is when I’m officially off the clock, but often times due to my juggling acts there’s always a few somethings that need to be resolved, and I might have to punch in an extra 30-45 minutes to settle things down, provided my children will cooperate
  • 6:30(ish) is #1’s bath time, followed by wind down for a 7 pm bedtime. Mythical wife and I have been having to divide and conquer between two kids here and she’s often caring for a screaming #2 while I’m taking care of #1
  • By around 7:15, we’re back down to one kid, but #2 is still too early to have any routine since she’s more or less in survival mode, of eat, sleep, scream bloody murder, and any order of those three activities. It’s at this time mythical wife and I talk about how starved we are, indecisions about dinner, and how most of the local restaurants we like seem to close at 8 and we’re too late to put in a takeout order because I probably won’t get there by 8, so we eat Chick Fil-A or Zaxby’s all the time if we don’t have any palatable leftovers in the fridge
  • From dinner to bedtime, mythical wife and I play hot potato with #2 because this is the time she’s been getting colic-ky and screaming bloody murder and I’m praying to god (6) she won’t wake up #1, but the majority of the physical caring falls on me since she still has to pump a few more times to keep up with #2’s increasing eating
  • Anywhere from 11-midnight, we migrate up to the bedroom which usually feels like a meat locker now that our HVAC has been replaced, and wind #2 for the night with final feeds and diaper changes and praying to god (7) that there’s no colic or stomach aches and she’ll actually go to sleep before 1 am
  • Once #2 is down for the night, it’s typically far too late and I’m usually so gassed that I’m not even in the mood to hate-stay up late just so I can feel a shred of having two seconds for myself to not be in dad mode, and then go to bed anxious at not getting to have any me-time to unwind and feeling fried because I’m 6-7 hours from starting all this over again while also knowing there will usually be one mid-sleep wake up to feed and change #2, and I pray to god (8) that it’s just one time

If you’ve read this far and have been keeping count, you might notice that there are usually at least eight prayers to god and fewer minutes in the day where I don’t have to be a dad.

I’m sure that last part sounds selfish and gives off the impression that I don’t want to be a dad, which couldn’t be any further from the truth. However, one of the pieces of advice I was given going into parenthood was the importance of not losing one’s identity to it, to which I definitely agree that there’s definitely a balance to try and maintain when it comes to being a parent and being ourselves.

I’m in a stretch where I’ve been incapable of having the time at all to be able to switch off being dad, and having any time at all for myself to be myself. I haven’t run in over a month now, I barely have the capacity to watch any television; only really getting to when stacked on top of less effort baby activities, and most importantly to me, I have next to no time at all to write.

In fact that only reason why this post even exists is that I’ve composed it entirely in a note on my phone, while #1 was literally strapped to my head because she’s having one of those days where if dad’s not carrying her, she’s going ballistic, and I’m up to her current height off the ground at how over her bullshit I am right now, well at critical mass at how fried I am at being in dad mode for so long, and so I just strapped her in and began writing on my phone while monotonously walking in circles. At least she’s not wailing anymore.

Like most topics I write about that sound like they suck balls and might deter other bros from thinking about having kids, this would go into the category of “someday we’ll look back and laugh at this,” but in my case I look forward to the days when I can tell my kids how much they made my life pretty insufferable when they were babies.

I get why people abandon The Walking Dead

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve been churning my way through two and a half seasons of The Walking Dead to try and catch up.  Naturally, as I’m nearing the finish line, unbeknownst to me, I was days away from the premiere of season 11, and just as I’d be finishing up, there’s already more fucking TWD available to me.

But fuck that.  After finishing season 10, I’m fucking done for a little bit with TWD, and I need a god damn break from TWD.  I fully understand and get why the show, regardless of its actual ratings, seems to feel like it’s being abandoned by those in my peer groups and those people I communicate with.

Because it’s basically a live-action version of Dragon Ball Z, in the sense that the cadence of the show is basically the very definition of the meme shown above of most shonen anime.  The residents of planet Rick come across some shitty people bent on killing them, they band together and overcome them, and without missing a beat, the next episode, and sometimes in the very same episode as the penultimate finale, the next big bad shows up and the whole cycle starts all over again.

Over the span of ten seasons of TWD, we’ve had the Governor, twice actually threaten the cast and be repelled.  Then they traveled north and ran into Negan.  Then came Alpha and the Whisperers.  And not even one episode after them, they introduce the seeds of some new groups of bads, with the people hunting Maggie’s crew and the people in West Virginia.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that season 11 is just going to be more of the same, except that it’s branching off into separate storylines, like it were a season of Game of Thrones.  It’s like the sacred timeline has been deviated from because the group has branched out, but either way it’s going to be basically two sets of the meme up above, until the paths of the characters eventually reunite, only to take on the next greatest evil ever.

Either way, the last few episodes of season 10 were a definite weird way to end a season, and by doing so, they really did put a stamp on the cadence of the show to where I have no qualms with taking a fucking break from TWD, crossing it off my list, and moving onto some other show(s) to watch in my very limited time of television.  I’ll let the episode queue build back up, so I can marathon it, because frankly I couldn’t imagine watching TWD episode by episode again anymore, after running through as much of it as I have over the last few months.

2 Under 2: Up there with teething – colic (#059)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While raising my first child, I determined that of all the rigors that babies and parents go through, was teething.  The times in which the tiny chompers of our offspring are boring their way up through the gums and into the world, to help them level up in terms of foods they can eat and sensations they can experience.  It’s obviously painful and frequent, given that the average child has around 20 total teeth, and every time it seemed apparent that #1 was going through some teething, the days were full of lots of crying, lots of drool, occasional vomiting, and struggles to sleep, leading to some very exasperated parents and one definitely fried dad.

Well, with #2 a little over a month old now, I think mythical wife and I are experiencing yet another new thing: colic.  Basically periods of time when the baby goes completely apeshit ballistic nuclear and is screaming their heads off for an inconveniently long duration, and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for it.  I mean seriously:

Unfortunately, there is no definite explanation for why this happens. Most often, colic means simply that the child is unusually sensitive to stimulation or cannot “self-console” or regulate his nervous system. (Also known as an immature nervous system.) As she matures, this inability to self-console—marked by constant crying—will improve. Generally this “colicky crying” will stop by three to four months, but it can last until six months of age.

I read shit like this, and my thoughts usually go in the direction of, how long as the human race been in existence, as well as existing in the age of modern medicine and diagnosis, and nobody’s still been able to figure this shit out?

Needless to say, it’s evident that #2 has occasional colic, and when it starts, it’s basically the worst scenario in the world.  Seriously, I’ve never had suicidal thoughts in my life before sitting there with an inconsolable newborn screaming their lungs out and there being seemingly absolutely nothing in the world that can bring them down.  Blowing my head off, or jumping off a cliff seems like a preferable alternative to trying and failing to calm a colic-ky baby back to earth.

And as often times the case during this second go-around, I’m ashamed to admit just how often I lose my cool and let it get to me.  It’s like I know that parenting is excruciatingly difficult, and I did sign up for this, but to me, and by no fault of anyone much less my precious #1, we have comparisons we’re capable of making, and when didn’t go through it so badly the first time around, but are going through it horrifically the second, it creates that space for their to be additional frustration.

All the same, good or bad, these kinds of posts exist to be the real life truth to how parenting really is going for someone like me, and I do want to remember the things that I can hopefully look forward to in the future as talking points to remind my children of in the future when they’re older, wiser, and can comprehend words in the event that they find this shit on their own. 

The daunting reality is additionally the fact that we’re still so early on that teething hasn’t even yet come into play, but considering how #2 has been so far, I can only make an educated guess that I’ll go back to thinking teething is the biggest cancer on the planet again in 4-6 months.

I hope the afterlife is ready to get their asses destroyed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

By now, I would wager that just about everyone has someone they can name off the top of their heads as someone whom they think has been the greatest casualty of the coronavirus.  Whether it’s a family member, or family of a friend, or a friend of family, a celebrity, regional personality, or what not, at this point it’s probably not a stretch for people to be able to have been affected to some degree of sadness at the death or someone they cared about.

For me, short of anyone in my family, the news of the passing of actor and martial arts legend, Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba is without question, the one death that stands out above all others in my personal little world, and it upset me tremendously to have learned of the passing of this icon.

At 82 years old, it’s not like he hasn’t lived a full and fruitful life in his own right, but the fact that he passed due to pneumonia associated with coronavirus says to me that he still died in a pointless, unfortunate and completely avoidable manner.  I won’t sugarcoat the disappointment that I felt to learn that he also wasn’t vaccinated, but given his age, I’m hoping he was more of the type to be concerned over a vaccine of such nature to a person of his age, versus someone who was just anti-vax, and flat out refused it, but this is something that I guess we’ll never know.

I don’t even really know where to go with the rest of this post.  I wanted to make sure that even in spite of my complete lack of any time to do any writing, that when I started writing this, I wanted to be clear headed, and relatively available to gather my thoughts and write, because most anyone who knows me probably knows that I’ve always been a die-hard Sonny Chiba fan, and that I saw him as more than a martial artist and an actor, and more like an icon and a personal hero, that started kind of as a joke, but really grew into something genuine and meaningful.

Continue reading “I hope the afterlife is ready to get their asses destroyed” →

Thanks, I hate it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I like baseball.  I like wrestling belts.  You’d think a collaboration between the WWE and MLB to release team-themed replica wrestling belts would be a layup for a guy like me, right?

If you think so, you couldn’t be any more fucking wrong.

An obvious cash-grab for starters, but all I see when I think about the fact that there are going to be 20-30* belts that will be put into production starting in the 2022 season, all I see are 20-30 blets that stand in the way of the WWE getting off their lazy asses and actually making replicas of the only fucking WWE blet I want left, the NXT UK Tag Team Championship.

*why anyone would want a replica belt for teams like the Rays, Rockies, Reds, Marlins or Orioles is completely beyond me, but homers are homers for a reason

For the record, I don’t just hate these MLB-WWE collab belts, I hate every other belt out there that’s not an actual active or historic belt.  I hate all the shitty tribute belts that WWE makes that takes existing plates and slaps them onto some overly-designed shitty straps themed to a hall of famer, and calling it a tribute.  I hate Xavier Woods’ and Tyler Breeze’s shitty YouTube show belts that have come into existence ahead of the only active fucking belt without a replica available.  I hate when they take some shitty stinky brown leather and wrap it around an Attitude-era World championship and call it a Mankind tribute.

But both MLB and the WWE really like money, and it really is low-hanging fruit to make these and watch them sell a justifiable number of them to warrant the decision to produce them.  I can’t hate on the business of it, I just hate that these things are definitely going to stand in the way of what I actually want.

And frankly, given the news over the last months of NXT kind of being rumored to being shifted back into a true developmental territory, who’s to say that any of the NXT and NXT UK blets will even get to be sold for much longer in the future, especially if they’re deactivated and removed from television.

Only hardcore blet-heads like myself may have noticed that for about four days, the WWEShop released the NXT Women’s Tag Team Championship Replicas that’s still listed as available in the Euro store, but was already taken down from the American site, which initially had me curious that they took it down in order to have a brand new blet available at promotional discount, but seeing as how it hasn’t been brought back, it makes me wonder if it’s more the possibility that the blets will be deactivated on television, and therefore not needing replicas to be sold online.

As far as the NXT UK Tag blets, I’m beginning to think that they’ll never even be made in the first place, because perhaps the division as a whole might get folded up, if the talking heads surrounding Vince McMahon in Stamford see them as a risky ROI.

At least I’ll have an Atlanta Barves blet available to me with the cash I’ve been sitting on for literal years, waiting for the one blet I actually wanted.

2 Under 2: Fuck Jimmy Fallon (#058)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife and I are raising our daughters with some fairly simple rules, one of which being no screen time until the age of 2, in which we will introduce small amounts of screen time of quality kid-friendly content with at least some educational value, and work our way up from there, so they don’t become lifeless couch potatoes by the time they’re age five.  Maybe that’ll happen when they’re seven instead, but hey if we can bilk out two years of life where they’re not parked in front of a screen, then all the better for us.

That being said, we’ve accumulated a lot of books over the last year and change, as books and reading have been among the primary forms of entertainment and storytelling to our first, and will be for our second.  Among the things that brings pride and happiness to me is seeing my first hustle over to her bookshelf, pick out a book, rush back, hand it to me, and then plop into my lap to enjoy some story time with dada, and her appreciation and enjoyment in books is already being established.

However, of all the books that we’ve amassed so far, few make me scrunch my eyebrow and hope that my daughter doesn’t pick it and bring it back, than the books mythical wife picked out by none other than quote-unquote “comedian,” Jimmy Fallon.  Everything is Mama and Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada, specifically, because I for one won’t go out of my way to pick either myself.

Why?  Because they’re both complete and utter bullshit.  Spoiler alert, both books are basically 15 pages of either “MAMA” or “DADA” over and over again, with literally nothing other than single contrast words and some singular illustrations.  I’m not saying my children should already be capable of reading The DaVinci Code or anything, but even infants and newborns deserve better than this horse shit.

Let’s be real here, if not for the simple fact that these books are “authored” by, and has the name of Jimmy Fallon slapped onto these things, these shit books would probably rank lower than the bible at being usable for toilet paper.  It truly is a case of how nice it must be to be a celebrity, because an unfunny hack like Jimmy Fallon can literally produce a bullshit no effort stack of cardstock paper, put his name on it, and it will make it onto bookshelves, and I bet if I took two seconds to look it up, these were probably New York Times bestsellers at some point in history, but I’m not going to because I’d rather spend 52 seconds typing this sentence up instead.  He’s probably made more than what I make in a year in salary, on the royalties of this fucking snooze job of children’s literature, which only further feed the angsty narrative of how unfair the world is.

The takeaway of this post is that if any new or impending parents ever read this, do yourselves and your children a favor and stay the fuck away from Jimmy Fallon’s shitty books, especially if you actually love your kids and want their brains to actually develop.  Might I recommend authors such as Anna Dewdney or Sandra Boynton instead as opposed to the guy who could barely keep it together on SNL and often times failed, to not laugh at his own unfunny shit jokes?

2 Under 2: I have already become my mother (#057)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

All through my life, my mom would accidentally call me by my sister’s name, before correcting herself and addressing me by my name.  There were younger points in my life where I would let that piss me off, but eventually it more or less because everyday occurrences, and I stopped really noticing them beyond hearing them when they happened.

It didn’t even take a full 24 hours to pass before I had already called #2 by #1’s name.  It happened more frequently in the AM hours where we were struggling to get any sleep we could.  But by day two of #2’s life, I had already slipped up numerous times, and even the times where I stopped myself from making the mistake, if there was ever any hesitation in my flow of speech, mythical wife would pick it out and know that I was on the verge of using the wrong name again.

Therefore, I have become my mother in this regard, and I can only hope that as their lives progress, they can forgive their dad for being just like halmoni, and roll with the slights as well as I eventually learned how to do as I got older.