Tag: motherland

Ichiro is going to kill someone someday

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

You heard it here first: Ichiro Suzuki, the baseball player, is going to kill someone.  Be it his wife, his father, his mother, or even himself – there will be death by his hands in some way, shape, or form, one of these days.

ESPN has been getting a lot of praise recently for this story they just dropped about the tumultuous winter of 2017, where the 44-year old Ichiro was not sure whether or not his professional baseball career was over or not.  But because he’s this machine-like creature of habit, trained and conditioned since he was a kid to play baseball, he doesn’t know what else to do, other than train and prepare for the next season, regardless of his employment status or not.  Completely on his own, no less, away from his wife and his parents, whom it’s revealed he has a completely fractured and broken relationship with the dad that put him on the path that made Ichiro into Ichiro.

During the span in which the article is being written, Ichiro is signed by the MLB team in which his career started, the Seattle Mariners, and the prodigal son is returning home, for what is in all likelihood his final season.

But it’s the journey of uncertainty in which Ichiro embarks on that really makes me question his grasp on reality, and paints a picture of a kind of sad existence of a person whom has achieved greatness and immortality in the world of baseball, but is apparently completely out of touch and a total stranger to what the real world outside of baseball is actually like.

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I want to eat at the Midnight Diner

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A show I’ve been enjoying a lot lately has been Netflix’s Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories.  It’s apparent that I’m very favorable to slice of life types of shows, and at just ten episodes that aren’t even a full 30 minutes, it’s the perfect kind of show for me to watch an episode here and there, or watch several in a row, and walk away from the screen feeling moderately pleased with life.   There’s no really other way to describe it other than the fact that it’s a light show that puts me in a good mood while watching it.

There’s one particular episode that I enjoyed a lot, that revolved around the budding relationship between a Japanese physicist and a girl from Korea working in Tokyo, and how their shared love for fried rice omelets is the link that brings them together.  It deals with the taboo perspective of Korean-Japanese relationships, and how easy it is to criticize and pass judgment from the sidelines as opposed to those who are capable of seeing past them.  And all in like 25 minutes, which means the characters are introduced, a conflict is established, and then the episode winds down, giving me more time to do other things, which usually ends up watching another two episodes of Midnight Diner.

Anyway, aside from simply enjoying the show, I look at the Midnight Diner itself, as the kinds of places I love discovering and going to.  And I haven’t even been to Japan.  But anywhere, really, whether it’s in the United States or any other place in the world I’ve visited.  I love charming little eateries, where the cooks are masters of their small menus, and only hit home runs. 

However, when I do visit Tokyo one of these days, I hope like hell I’ll find a place like the Midnight Diner, and it would probably be the highlight of my trip if I actually did find one just like it.  I don’t stay up too late these days, but I’d be more than willing to capitalize on some jet lag and try to find a place open 12-7 am if were anything like the show’s place.

It’s a great show for those who like slice of life anthologies, or just want to watch something very quick, short and relaxing.  I know I’ll be disappointed when I finish the series, and have to go back to the drawing board to find something as simply enjoyable as Midnight Diner.

The year in writing post, circa 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As is often times the case when it comes to life, 2017 had its ups and 2017 had its downs. As much as people bemoaned just how tragic and shitty 2016 was, I honestly cannot say that I personally felt that 2017 was tremendously better.  As I said, the year had its up and there were some most certainly good things that occurred during the last calendar year, but 2017 had no shortage of bad things that happened to people in general, people close to me, and people directly in my own life.

There may not have been as many notable celebrity deaths that have sent the internet abuzz with fake sympathy, bogus empathy and all the hollow fuck thoughts and prayers on the planet that were often the root of the angst towards 2016, but there was still no doubt that a lot of crappy things occurred regardless.  At least with death, it’s definitive and final, and the repercussions are only as impactful to mostly immediate families and occasional organizational legacies.  But take for example shit like the white supremacist uprising that plagued Charlottesville earlier in the year; this is very real, scary shit that’s easily hidden behind the façades of normal society, and can rise and hide on a moment’s notice.

Psychos who open fire on open-air concerts doesn’t change the frightfully abundant amounts of assault weaponry in the United States, and people still can’t stop arguing over conduct during the National Anthem and whether we have rights, or the rights to practice rights and other redundant arguments that just feed into the flames of people being miserable.

Frankly, given the direction that the world is headed, I couldn’t imagine death sounds like a terrible thing to more nihilistic types, dreading what the world is turning into as time passes.  I don’t imagine I’m the only one who thinks that society is most certainly not going in the right direction and that things probably are not going to be any better in five years, in line with that old Jimmy Carter speech.

But that’s a shitty thing for me to say, because death is most certainly no laughing matter, and the world has seen its share of it this year, as it does every single year.  Whether it’s numerous lives decimated by natural disasters like the hurricanes that ravaged Texas and Puerto Rico to the massacres by the hands of terrorists, domestic and foreign alike.  Or the casualties of the unfortunate hands that life deals out to unlucky people who are taken from the world by cancer or other indiscriminate ailments.

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Forever questions

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The afternoon after I wrote my last post, I got home from work and I went into the backyard with the dog for some routine ball time.  In between throws, I scoured the ground and all the numerous patches of clover, looking for a four-leaf clover.  I know that at my old house, the backyard was rife with four-leafers, but it never took away from the happiness from finding one, with the hopes that somewhere in the world, the magic of the luck of a four-leaf clover could be cashed in, in some capacity.  And given the intensive dread that existed at that time concerning my family, I felt really, really hopeful that I could find just one more four-leaf clover in my new backyard.

I couldn’t.  Even after nearly 45 minutes of looking for a four-leaf clover, there were none to be found in my new house.  Even the dog was tired of running for the ball at that point.  There simply wasn’t one that I could find.

But it’s not that it would have mattered anyways.  About an hour or so later, I received a phone call from my sister, who let me know that her husband, my brother-in-law and father to my niece and nephew had passed away two hours earlier, well before I had begun my search for a four-leaf clover.

Even now, I replay the conversation in my head, and it brings tears to my eyes every time, hearing details of his last moments, and how he seemingly held on just long enough for his kids to make it to the hospital so he could say goodbye to them.  It’s difficult to even type out these words and keep my composure, thinking about it.

The thing is, all this happened right on the day in which my vacation was starting.  My first flight out was just hours away after getting off the phone with my sister, and I felt trapped in this unwinnable bubble that whatever I did was going to be the wrong decision.  Despite the fact that my sister insisted that I go anyway and try to have the best time I could given the circumstances, I still felt like an asshole embarking on an international vacation when someone important to my family had just died.  Sure, I know my sister, and I knew my brother-in-law well enough to know that they’d both have wanted me to go, but it still didn’t entirely feel right.

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Photos: Seoul, Korea / Manila, Philippines Vacation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: this is a photo dump of the vacation that mythical then-gf and I took to Korea and the Philippines, by virtue of gaming the layover system on a trip to Manila and staying in Seoul as long as possible.

As enjoyable as the trip was overall, it was still a difficult time, as my family was going through a particularly difficult time, culminating with my brother-in-law’s battle with sarcoma coming to an end, just days before the trip.  But still, mythical then-gf and I made the best of our travels, and I did enjoy getting to see Seoul through her eyes, in spite of the blustery cold, and then our brief adventures in Manila, where I lost my phone in an Uber like an idiot, but thankfully got it back, but not before it took a huge dump on one of our sparing days there.

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Life is complicated

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I specifically earmarked this particular day to write about how I was about to embark on a vacation back to Korea, with a brief stop in the Philippines, and how excited I was.  It was exciting to be going back to the Motherland, because I had such an amazing time when I went for the first time last year, and I was really pumped up about this time going with mythical gf, since she’s such a Koreeb, and it would be fun to kind of witness the excitement of a first visit through her eyes as well.

This is a trip that had been planned for the better part of the entire 2017 year, where lots of money, planning and more money had gone into nailing down travel and lodging in order to get the optimal prices at the optimal times in order to accommodate both our work schedules and allotted vacation times.  But it was done a long time ago, and since then, it’s always been the constant milestone to look forward to, the thing we’ve been counting down the months, then the weeks, and then the days, up until today, when we eventually embark.

But as its often said, life doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and an infinite number of things exist all around us at any given time.  I don’t really know to segue to it in a smoother transition, but based on the title of this post alone, it should be expected that an unfortunate turn is bound to happen.  But there’s a medical issue in my family and to cut to the chase, there is an uncertainty on the amount of time this person has left. 

As far as I’m concerned, this could not possibly have happened at any worse of a time, but naturally I am not the actual person concerned.  But it doesn’t make it suck any less that a life hangs in the uncertain balance, and I’m in a trapped feeling position of not knowing what I can do, because life isn’t about me, there are others involved, and every choice affects others in a variety of manners.

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Writing when it feels like there’s not a lot to write about

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like the subject says, I haven’t really felt like there’s been a lot to write about.  It’s times like these when I sit down and try to clear out all the noise in the world and in my head and just see what happens when I open up a Word doc and just start typing.

Usually, I surf a large variety of news sites, local and worldly to see if anything piques my interest.  Then it devolves into sports sites and op-ed outlets, just to see if there’s anything that triggers any sort of writable tangent.  Failing any of that, it’s the happenings in my own fairly ordinary and nondescript life, wondering if there’s anything worth talking about, or anything I actually want to put something down into writing.

My life, hasn’t been particularly interesting for a while.  My days and weeks consist of the same things often, and I’m occasionally fretting over the fact that I feel like I don’t make enough money which kind of puts a damper on some of my ambitions when it comes to things I want to do, or travels I want to indulge in.  I think about spending habits, spending plans and how to shave down the credit card debt that I’ve built back up throughout the moving process, and it frequently feels like an endless cycle that just chews up time and often doesn’t actually pan out like it should.

Like in my current state, I feel like I’d need like 6-8 months to really wipe out a lot of my debt while not having to starve in the process.  I’m sure that some additional sacrifices could be made to reduce my costs a little further, but it just doesn’t feel like it would be enough to warrant the inconveniences.  But really though, 6-8 months?  That’s literally from half to two-thirds of an entire year.  I’m not getting any younger, and the whole concept of getting older is another can of worms that has been on my mind increasingly these days, and I just feel like if I made more money outright, things might improve for the better, overall.

But then I feel like I’m kind of in a rut where my skillset doesn’t command as much money as I hope it would, and I give a lot of contemplation to my own career.  I really like where I work and the team I’m on and the people I work with, but again, money.  I make enough to pay my mortgage and pay my bills, but with the new house, I’m also paying more for a mortgage than I have before, and it’s still an adjustment knowing how much of a larger percentage of my incoming funds are going right back out the door paying for my property.

And we can’t talk about money and not talk about the correlation with time, and then the endless debate of money versus time.  I certainly value my time, and often times more than money, but at the same time, there are certain things that cannot be accomplished without the need for money.  And then it rotates in this perpetual cycle of feeling like I have enough of either, and then I begin to wonder if I may be bordering on the lines of a slight depression.  Which is a maybe.

It would be nice to just win a substantial lottery.  That just might actually make things improve for the better, contrary to the notions that huge influxes of money have accomplished in ruining several people out there.

But really, I can’t really complain that much about my life in some regards.  My life itself isn’t at all terrible, aside from the fairly minor gripes I have that I’m not unaware that there are worse people out there that would love to have my gripes versus their own more substantial issues.

I think I feel like what drags me down is my empathy for others, to where I always feel like the problems of others become problems for me.  I don’t think it’s untrue either, because there are people out there that are close to me going through some rough patches, and I feel helpless that there’s nothing that either I or anyone else can seemingly do about them, and I empathize for their sadness and grief with my own.  Obviously, I won’t get into the business of others, but they are substantial problems, and I’ve come to the realization of the increasing difficulties of life that come with getting older, and that things just might not get better any time soon for the people all around me.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the shitty cesspool of a world we live in, full of rotten corrupt people, politicians, terrorists and mentally deranged people who somehow all seem to have way too large caches of firearms.

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