Month: May 2020

New Father Brogging, #010

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A thought that often crosses my mind is that I can’t believe the world that my daughter was born into.  And then I feel really sad about it, despite knowing that she very well won’t remember any of this stuff, but one day she might read about it in history books or any sort of resource that outlines the happening throughout history.

It’s bad enough she was born right at the very start of when coronavirus came into the United States and was shortly declared a global pandemic, literally changing the landscape of the world where the vast majority of educated people began to take shelter in their homes, to minimize the spread of a new disease.

But in a way that can only be described as amazing, a global pandemic still managed to get pushed into to the backseat by the more recent civil unrest that’s boiled over on account of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and very recently George Floyd in Minnesota, with the latter being pretty flagrantly executed by a white police officer, when his neck was low-key crushed under the knee of the cop.

As I’m writing this, all across the country, there have been countless protests, many of which escalated into riots complete with looting, and there are hundreds to thousands of people who have been physically harmed, gassed, tazed or impacted by some form of crowd control.  The police are widely viewed as the enemy now instead of the agency that’s meant to serve and protect, and it’s times like this in which I’m kind of glad that one, I don’t live/work as close to actual city-proper Atlanta as I used to, and two, add the staying home as yet another ironic benefit to there being a fucking pandemic.

It’s a very sad and scary thought to think of this being the world that my first child was born into, and I feel like the generations before her have already let her down in fostering a world that’s supposed to be safe and better for the future.

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Fulfilling the weeb dream

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If anyone knew me 20 years ago, they might remember me as an anime-obsessed weeaboo who loved everything Japan, even more so than my own Korean heritage.  Most everything I was interested was related to anime or Japanese culture, and I even took four years of Japanese between high school and college to further enhance my fascination with the culture.

All the time, I would’ve loved to have visited Japan, but when you’re a teenager and have no money or means to make such trips happen, that was more or less of a pipedream that would probably never happen any time soon.

Eventually, I grew out of it, further embraced my true heritage and kind of went on with my life. As the years passed however, I’d watched people all around me eventually make their pilgrimages to the glorious nation.  Few have ever said anything bad about it, and generally everyone has nothing but glowing things to say about their trips to Japan.  But for whatever reasons, the boyhood dream of visiting glorious Nippon had always eluded me.  Just about all of my closest friends had been to Japan at some point and I began to feel like everyone but me had been there.

When I got with mythical wife when she was still mythical girlfriend and she made me realize foreign travel wasn’t as unattainable as I’d been living my life believing, we started going to a bunch of other countries together, as she too had already been to Japan, and it was mostly on the backburner for her.  Plus, by this time, I had stated that I wanted my first real foray into Asia to be Korea, holding loyal to my actual heritage, although that notion kind of went down the toilet when a European cruise we took, ported in Kusadasi, Turkey, which is technically on the Asia side of the country.  Fail.

Anyway, what I’m getting to is the fact that the time has finally come: I’m going to Japan.

All it took was a global pandemic and the country to close their borders for airfares to the glorious country to drop to make pulling the trigger a no-brainer, especially since I could cash in some SkyMiles to outright cover one of our fares, bringing our overall cost to laughable numbers.  But regardless, our tickets have been purchased and our dates set, and soon, I will be fulfilling the 20-year weeaboo boyhood dream of visiting the land of the rising sun.

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New Father Brogging, #009

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today was quite the day, and not in a particularly positive manner.  I had a day in which I was mostly stressed out on account of the fact that I just felt as if I were kind of losing myself because I just didn’t have any time for myself, because I have to spend so much time in the day doing the same things over and over again, all pertaining to the obvious care of an infant child. 

Obviously I know what I signed up for, and that this was to be expected, so it leads to a tremendous amount of guilt over the fact that I felt such feelings in the first place, so then I try to compensate for my selfishness by trying harder, but then getting similar results and triggers that compounds my frustration, creating this unfortunate cycle of feeling exasperated.

Currently, my child is dealing with a lot of reflux issues, which is pretty common for babies similar to mine, so on a day like today, I’d been thrown up on several times.  I do not fault my kid, as she is still a baby and has little control over these such things, but it is disheartening to get thrown up on all the same.  Additionally, she’s in this current state where she’s either actively eating, or is fussy unless she’s being held.  In either state, she requires hands-on attention, and when either mythical wife or I are providing such hands-on attention, we have no capabilities of doing anything else really.

I’ve become somewhat adept at doing some things one-handed to where I can at least kind of dick around on my phone while nursing or trying to coax a baby to relaxation, or I can watch television, and I’m surprised at how fast we’re going through things on Netflix these days.

But what I can’t do are the perpetually mounting tasks, daily chores and routine dog relief while on baby duty, much less anything I want to do for my own gratification, and as I watch the minutes tick away into hours, and then suddenly it’s only a few hours left before the day’s end, and all of this starts all over again, and then I mentally feel defeated, and that I’m losing myself because I just can’t find the time to do anything at all, whether it’s necessary tasks or personal ones.  Either I feel like the chores are going to overwhelm me, or I won’t get to do anything for myself ever again, and both lead to me feeling negative.

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Let’s talk about the AEW TNT Championship Belt

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was in high school, some of my friends had this backyard wrestling fed, that I occasionally participated in from time to time.  My “ring name” was The Yellow Meanie, which was a play on the fat blue haired blob in ECW who went under the name The Blue Meanie, except this was more racist in the obvious sense.

One day, for no other reason than boredom and an idea for our own amusement, I took an old weight belt, some cardboard, packing tape, spray paint and most importantly, an empty box of Popeye’s fried chicken, and I created the Popeye’s Championship Belt.  It symbolized absolutely nothing at all, but regardless I brought it into our backyard wrestling federation and began “defending” it, and cutting promos about how important and prestigious it was.

That kind of logic, is basically what comes to mind when thinking about All Elite Wrestling’s new don’t-call-it-a-mid-card championship belt, the TNT Championship; yes, named after the network in which AEW airs its one and only program, Dynamite.

They’ve literally named a flagship championship after a television station, as if they didn’t seem remotely aware that networks can change, whether the network themselves re-brands or re-identifies, or the network changes directions, decides they don’t want professional ‘rasslin on their network anymore, and dumps them off to Spike TV or Destination America. 

Additionally, they’ve designed the belt to the specific current TNT logo, again, ignoring the fact that in the last ten years, the TNT logo has changed twice prior, and could very well change again in coming years, as Turner is such a volatile company that’s always knocking on the door of being acquired by FOX every year, resulting in endless rounds of layoffs that many people I know in Atlanta have been victimized or threatened by but that’s another story.

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Patrick Ewing just cannot stop getting owned

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Unfortunate: Patrick Ewing tests positive for coronavirus

To think that when Patrick Ewing had to deal with the renewed spotlight of how much Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls owned him over and over again throughout his career thanks to ESPN’s The Last Dance documentary, he probably didn’t imagine things could get any worse.

But then, last Friday it’s announced that he has tested positive for coronavirus.

Boom.

Admittedly, I was a Knicks fan growing up and I loved the hell out of Patrick Ewing.  His jersey was the first sports jersey I’d ever gotten in my life.  I even had a poster of Patrick Ewing in my room, and I always picked the Knicks in NBA Jam.

But there’s no real way to debate the fact that throughout his career, and now his life, Patrick Ewing is just a guy that just can’t stop getting owned.

After winning a National Championship for Georgetown in 1984 (his second attempt mind you, his first try was thwarted by of course, Michael Jordan), this rest of his career is just a cautionary montage of him getting owned over and over again.  Drafted first overall by the New York Knicks in 1985, Ewing definitely revitalized the franchise and the Knicks were almost never not relevant in the playoff picture throughout his entire time on the squad, but the unfortunate fate was that Ewing and the Knicks never won a championship.

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Shad for father of the year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This story breaks my heart.  Shad Gaspard, former WWE performer, has gone missing after being swept out to sea by a rip current in Venice Beach.  The last thing he did was to instruct rescuers to get his 10-year old son first, before a wave crashed down on him and submerged him.  His son was successfully rescued, but at this point Gaspard has been missing for over 24 hours.

I hate writing it out, but after this much time, the outlook does not look positive.  Open water is about as frightening as being lost in the woods, but at least in the woods, it’s entirely possible to remain stationary and hope someone can find out; out in the ocean is like trying to hit a moving target.  We can all hope for the best, until something definitive emerges.

It’s ironic, because while in the WWE, Gaspard was in a criminal tag team called Cryme Tyme, which was even for the standards back then, tasteless and racist, but being the pros that he and JTG were, made it work, and got over with the fans.  They never achieved any notable success, because the team simply wasn’t really given a chance to achieve any success, but they can at least take credit for being entertaining whenever they were on screen.

Eventually, they were bid best wishes on their future endeavors (read: WWE speak for fired), but the two remained active on the independent scene.  One of the more notable stories to emerge post-WWE was when Cryme Tyme actively prevented actual crime time, when in Orlando, Gaspard himself foiled a robbery attempt by beating the shit out of a would-be gunman at a gas station, and detaining him in a chokehold until the police arrived.

But the thing is, in spite of their tasteless WWE personas, Gaspard was anything but the degenerate thug he was portrayed to be and it turns out that he was some pretty heroic father of the year material, ultimately.  My heart breaks hearing this story, and can only wish for miracles for Gaspard’s wife and son.

Even gainz take a backseat to safety

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because of the timing that I’m raising a child now, I don’t think I’ve gotten nearly the cabin fever or feel that I’m missing out on as much as other people are when it comes to staying at home and doing my best to social distance.  Sure, I miss going out to eat, and occasionally getting in my car and going somewhere frivolous, but with a newborn in play, it’s not like I’d be doing such regardless of if there were a pandemic or not.

One of the few things that I do miss like crazy, is the gym.  For obvious reasons, the gym in my workplace is closed, and even if I wanted to pay another business, most regular gyms are closed as well.

For nearly the last 13 years, I can say definitively, that I’ve gone to the gym at least once a week, for at least 98% of that time frame.  I can probably count on one hand the number of times I went longer than two weeks without hitting a gym at some point, and it gives me great satisfaction in not being too overly sore from working out on a regular basis, because my body had become pretty primed to the feeling of lifting weights regularly.

But with Georgia (foolishly) reopening, gyms have been given the green light to open up for business as well, as long as “proper” social distancing protocols are put into place.  For a while, LA Fitness had opted to stay closed, regardless of the green light, and I kind of respected them as a company for doing such, even though I had less than fond memories of when I was a member for several years myself.

However, even LA Fitness decided to want to make money again, and has begun opening up their Georgia gyms as well.

Regardless, this is where I have to say that even though gyms are now once again open, and I could theoretically get back into a gym and start lifting weights again, the gym is about the last fucking place on the planet that I’d want to go to in the middle of this pandemic.

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