Month: October 2021

100 Days, the sequel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today is a special day in the life of my family.  #2 has made it to day 100 of her existence, and this is an actual occasion in Korean culture, known as baek-il (백일).

Historically, this became a thing back in the olden days when Korea was so ravaged by poverty, famine, disease and Japanese people, the life expectancy of children was so low, that even making it to 100 days was considered monumental.  Sure, the passage of time has changed some things quite drastically, but the occasion has stuck, and baek-ils are acknowledged by Koreans all over to this very day.

Ironically, not much has changed since #1’s own baek-il from last year.  Considering the fact that coronavirus is still very much around and killing people on a daily basis, and that America has basically become a third-world country with an economy that’s surpassed by at this point, multiple countries, there’s a loose comparison to be made about disease and poverty.

That being said, it is, more noteworthy that #2 has survived the first 100 days of her life, than it really should be, but that’s the state of the world we live in.

I know I’ve been using my brog over the last few months at something of a sounding board of how much I’m struggling with two kids, but what I really hope is that in future years whenever I look back through the On This Day plug-in, I’ll re-read a lot of the things I’ve written under fatigue and exasperation, and either shake my head, laugh, or just cringe at the mental frying I went through raising two under two. 

No matter what I say, how frustrated I come off as, and things that I may insinuate under duress, I love my kids and I love my wife, and I will continue to do so no matter what.  Collectively and individually, they are the best things to happen to my life, and even if I lose my shit from time to time, I always come back and always remember that they are my everything.

100 days down, onto the rest of our lives, with only the best things being wished for.

China and Japan being jealous fatties over Squid Game makes me smile

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not sure how theFacebook algorithms got me so good, but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that there was a site actually called Koreaboo and it wasn’t just a slang term that I used amongst my friends.  And obviously a site with such a name would have an obvious bias, but there were some interesting articles that piqued my interest and served as a little bit of fuel for some words to be spit up.

Obviously, when something becomes white hot popular as Netflix’s Squid Game has been, there are all sorts of detractors that come out of the woodwork or go out of their way to go all contrarian on it; I’d be the first to admit that I’ve most definitely done that on all sorts of things that I was late to the party on, so I just decided to shun it instead of embrace it late.

Naturally, since Squid Game game to the world courtesy the entertainment kings of Asia in South Korea, this would draw the skepticism, ire and jealousy from those in other, lesser Asian countries.

China, in spite of their general fear of Korean media, and even going so far as to basically ban K-Pop, citing that Chinese men needed to be more masculine and not as seemingly as fluffy as K-Pop boy band stars, responds to Squid Game, by basically ripping the whole fucking show off in order to create a variety show.

I mean, this was about the least surprising thing in the world as China as a country gives absolutely no fucks when it comes to copyrights and intellectual properties, and counterfeits anything and everything at all, without any shame.  It’s like that internet rule where if it’s ever existed, there’s porn of it on the internet, but if there’s anything that’s ever existed, it has most definitely been ripped off in China.

Titled literally “Squid’s Victory,” it will be something of a variety show or a game show, where people will play kids games for cash prizes.  So unfortunately, there will be no people killing themselves for money, but as the above title card shows, there’s literally zero shame by the Chinese company of ripping off the title card of the Korean Squid Game.  Little else is known yet of Squid’s Victory, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that whatever set the show will take place on will have all sorts of maze-like colorful doors and stairs that is a completely original idea.

And then we have the Japanese, who are of course jealous over the juggernaut that Squid Game, going as far as to proclaim it’s position on Netflix rankings had to be due to some sort of cheating manipulation, and then proclaiming that Japan had the OG lock on the death game genre, which they’re not entirely wrong with, seeing as how Battle Royale came out two decades prior.

The real salt emerges when pondering why Squid Game is so popular globally, while films like Battle Royale really only won over weebs and convention nerds, which is a pretty easy question to answer, because the quality of the writing, the acting, and simply the plot itself was just far superior when comparing the two stories.  Firstly, live-action Japanese actors can’t act for shit, and as entertaining of a film Battle Royale was, the acting is pretty terrible save for Takeshi Kitano himself.  Then the fleshed out plot of Squid Game, centralized around the despair people feel when they’re economically facing drowning in poverty is something that people can relate to a whole lot better than getting randomly selected in a government lottery to have to fight to their death without any choice.  And of course, there’s the obvious medium, where just everyone can access Squid Game, and unless you purchased a VCD or a region-free DVD on eBay, there was no real way to watch Battle Royale.

Regardless, seeing the jealousy bubble up from entire countries over the success of Squid Game is very amusing to me, and now that Korea has set the bar so high, it’s going to be amusing to see what all these lesser countries do to try and get a piece of the yellow fever for Asian media that the rest of the world is starting to get, thanks to Korea.

You’re welcome, China, Japan and all you other 개새끼 countries.

2 Under 2: How can I lose myself when I’m already lost (#067)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

What I’ve been doing recently is that I have decided that between the time in which #2 goes to bed which I’m really hoping is closer to 11 pm and not 12 am, and no later than 1:00 am, that is declared me time.  Time in which I will not be job searching, not researching potential cars, and I will not be doing absolutely anything at all unless it is self-serving solely for me, which is to say that it’s become the only time in the world I’m granting myself to actually do some fucking writing.

The good news is that it is providing me some time to actually do some writing, even if it is coming at the cost of the sleep that I most certainly would benefit from getting more of as well.

However, the bad news is that so far, it’s often times the time in which I’m in not the best of head spaces when I finally sit down in my office and have two fucking seconds where I’m not handcuffed to a child or doing something that pertains to the kids.  But on the flip side, I frankly think my writing is sometimes better when there’s a little (or a lot of) anger behind it, because fewer truths come out than when raging on the keyboard.

One thing that was often suggested to me when I was becoming a new parent, was the importance of keeping hobbies and having time to unwind, so that you don’t lose yourself or your personal identity to being just a parent.

Thinking back to all the times I’ve heard or been told such a bullshit suggestion, I’m inclined to believe that these people either don’t have kids, or weren’t in similar circumstances in which I’m in, with two kids under the age of two, while both myself and mythical wife work full-time jobs and have no immediately available family or support system remotely close by to lend a helping hand, all while being in the middle of a fucking pandemic.

Needless to say, I’m not “losing myself,” because I’m already fucking long past the state lines of where my general life has been left behind and lost.  I have absolutely zero time for myself, every single day of the week, and the only reprieves I have are maybe an hour every weekday, where there’s a small overlap where the nanny reprieves me of duty from #1, and #2 is still sleeping, and then the late night time at the end of the day in which I should be catching up on sleep but instead I’m so pissed and resentful at my lack of personal time that I’m hate-staying up until 1:00 am.

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The 2021 MLB Playoffs post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Part of the challenge of trying to write posts from the past is that sometimes, there are particular topics that end up being more time sensitive than others, on account of the fact that they’re things like sports or live events to which if too much time passes, then the impetus for the original posts could become invalidated, and therefore useless to try to even bother writing about, retroactively.

That being said, I’m skipping the queue a little bit, and ultimately just going to make a singular post about the 2021 MLB Playoffs, because zero people who read my shit will give two shits about baseball playoffs, and the likelihood of me revisiting this topic with the time that I don’t have is pretty much not going to happen, but I wanted to put down some words that were going through my head before time passes and then I won’t be able to.

At the time I’m writing this, the National and American Leagues have both advanced to their respective championship series.  The Boston Red Sox vs. the Houston Astros in the American League, and in the National League, a rematch from last year – the Braves vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers.  In fact, the Braves have a 2-0 series lead on the Dodgers, to which where me simply acknowledging such a fact is condemnation for a repeat of last year, where the Braves Atlanta’d away their favor, and watched as the Dodgers went onto win a very winnable World Series.

To say that my excitement for the Braves having a 2-0 on the defending world champions is non-existent would be an understatement.  Last year proved that there is absolutely no reason to be excited for the Braves to actually succeed, as they pissed away both a 3-1 series lead, as well as killed all momentum for my theory of baby luck, and even though I could say baby luck is most certainly in play again this year, I learned my lesson last year to hold hopes that any Atlanta team could hold true to any superstition other than their inexplicable ability to choke no matter the circumstances.

Frankly, it’s a Christmas miracle and simply the crapshoot logic of divisions, rules and alignment that the Braves are here in the first place, and part of why everything is just so hilarious with the way things are standing right now.

The Braves won 88 games, which makes them literally the worst team in the entire playoff picture.  The Red Sox, Yankees, Cardinals and Dodgers, who were all the wild card teams who had to scrap for the ability to play in a play-in game to see who got to get into the real playoffs, all had more than 88 wins.  In fact, the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners who both missed the playoffs had 90 wins, but by virtue of the fact that the Braves played in the most putrid NL East division, and won it with 88 wins, they avoided the play-in game, and most hilariously, are considered the “higher” seed in the match-up against the 106-win Dodgers in the NLCS where they did their job and capitalized on the opening two games at home in Smyrna.

Now one thing I would stated that’s now been invalidated by the passage of time, is that the St. Louis Cardinals made the playoffs, and they are whom I would’ve bet the farm on going al the way, because as much as I hate the Cards, they’re just that one charmed team that always goes all the way if they can just get their toe into the door.  But they ran into the aforementioned 106-win Dodgers team, but not for lack of effort, considering the Cardinals deadlocked the Dodgers pretty much the entire game and it took a walk-off to send them packing.

I’m actually not that surprised that the Braves beat the Brewers in the NLDS.  If there were any team that I would’ve wanted the Braves to match up against, it would’ve been the Brewers, and most definitely not the Giants or Dodgers.  Had it been either of those two teams, the Braves would’ve been bounced from the first round like they do every other time they’ve made it into the playoffs.

And back to present time, where the Braves are up 2-0 on the Dodgers, and I still have 0% faith that they’re actually going to seal the deal, mostly on account of the fresh history of last year.  Furthermore, with the Red Sox and the Astros duking it out in the AL, MLB is salivating over the potential narrative of the Dodgers versus either one of those teams in the World Series, considering both teams were basically found out to have cheated against the Dodgers in prior World Series in 2017 and 2018.  

With the potential revenge storyline on the table, I wouldn’t put it past MLB to low-key sabotage the NLCS in favor of the Dodgers, and maybe we’ll see some more wonky check-swing strikeouts called by the umpires against the Braves, or maybe we’ll just see the Braves be the Braves and just implode on their own.  Either way, no matter that nobody will admit it, the Dodgers being in the World Series is what will be decided to be best for business, and what I’d expect to be the case by the end of next week when the pennants should be decided.

What job searching feels like these days

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s an anecdote where a hungry lion leaps into a herd of gazelle, ready to hunt.  But the lion can’t seem to focus on a single target and is overwhelmed by the mass variety of options around them and runs around in circles, allowing all of the gazelle to escape.  And so the lion goes hungry and takes an L for all their troubles with no payoff.

That’s basically pretty precisely what job searching feels like to me now.  It doesn’t help that I’m at this stage of my career and life where I don’t really know precisely what it is I want to do, whether or not I want to continue to try and climb up a ladder that I’m more disgusted and jaded with more often than not, or if I just want to seek out a more menial job that might pay well but have little room for advancement, but would provide me a steady paycheck, financial stability, and the ability to be more available to my budding family.

Furthermore, I’m in this pool of indecision on whether or not I should be looking at actual companies in the Atlanta area, or if I should be seeking out one of the supposed thousands of remote jobs out there in the new, coronavirus-aided working world, where I might consider taking some cuts for the right to work 100% remote.

What it all amounts to is me sitting in front of my computer with very finite amounts of time dictated by the sleeping/eating/awake times of my children, trying to find adequate jobs to apply for, much less even hope for callbacks, and hope that I have a modicum of capability to weed, vet and find potential without completely killing my career.

Needless to say, I’m often times feeling overwhelmed and dejected by the whole process, and I’m beginning to understand why there are services out there now where you pay to set up a profile and have someone else pimp your name out there for you.  There’s just so much variety and options in the searching fields now between numerous search engines, job boards and social media services, and that’s not even including the wealth of options out there that are remote.

And much like the lion that gets overwhelmed and owned by the gazelle and indecision, I’m left feeling dejected and a little hopeless that my search during my leave will bear not fruit, and I’ll be relegated to going back to work at a job that I’ve grown to loathe over the last few years.  Sure, I’m fortunate to have that to fall back onto, but in not even a perfect world, change is still the priority objective.

I don’t even know how to start writing again or where to even begin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like the title to this post says, I’m just like, have no idea on what to do in front of a blank document anymore.  I feel like a stereotypical author character in a story who’s got writer’s block, and is staring at a blank word document, with the cursor blinking over and over again, before they resort to more coffee and/or more alcohol, sometimes both.  Most recently demonstrated by Finn Wittrock in the most recent season of American Horror Story.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about, quite the contrary, it’s just that I have so many things I’d like to write about, somewhere around 15-16 notes that I took as things I’d like to write about, but it’s been so long since I did any sort of writing or had any modicum of time to do any writing, that I’m just in this state of disbelief and paralysis of not knowing what to do, which is why I’m ironically writing nonsense to try and get myself in the mood to write the usual array of niche-topic bullshit that I tend to write about in my blog outside of bitching about how hard parenting can be sometimes.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that as long as #2 has no set schedule or routine as she is still but an infant under three months old and cannot be set to such just yet, that I will have no time or no capacity for anything really self-serving or hobbies like writing, that require some time, silence and setting, because I’m really that much of a head case that likes to have such just to write about professional wrestling, baseball, veiled social commentary or any of the rando crap that I write about.  

But now that I’m on official paternity leave, I feel that it is important to try and carve out a sliver of time here and there to try and give myself a little bit of reprieve from dad mode, because I know I’m getting short with life in general because I’ve been going too hard too long and without any substantial breaks, and it’s going to do nobody any good if I continue to go on like this without any bit of self-care periodically.

So, I’m going to try and shoe-horn in some writing time in the coming weeks, on top of all of the other things I’d like to accomplish while I’m on leave, like yard work, refinancing my house, possibly researching a bigger car while my current one still has a lot of value, casual job searching, and occasionally getting in a run periodically so my physical being doesn’t deteriorate like Sim City roads and rails when you have to take too much tax dollars away from their budgets.

I will probably sticky this post and supplant the very deliberate sticky of the tragic passing of Sonny Chiba post I made that I’m still upset over, and probably retroactively back-post all the writing of things that I wanted to write about that might still warrant some writing about, and that is if it’s not too late to write about some of the things that might’ve been a little on the more time sensitive spectrum.  

Which are always fun-not-fun to write about, because there’s very little chance that I’ll be in the same mental states to write about things when the impetus to want to write about them in the first place might be as much as 3-4 weeks old, or if I already know what fallout/aftermath of particular events might have been.

But that’s the kind of person I am, where I’m staunch and stubborn and if I wanted to write about it at some point, there’s high chance that I’m going to write about it now, and either pretend like it was done live, or hope nobody notices, but most likely the latter since I have zero readers in the first place and I probably don’t need to disclaim this anyway but whatever.

2 Under 2: The First Disney Trip (#066)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Going to Disney World with the kids was definitely something that was going to be inevitable, given its place as far as mythical wife and I are concerned.  A wedding in central Florida where the wife was to be one of the bridesmaids accelerated the trip, and no matter how ready or not we were, the time had arrived to take the girls down to Orlando for a lengthy trip that was chock full of memories, lessons, trials and tribulations, as far as I was concerned.

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