Tag: rage

2 Under 2: Little reprieve (#046)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At the time I’m writing this, I’m not particularly in a very good place.  As previously posted, mythical wife and I are at the point of #2’s pregnancy where our breath is being held since it’s possible that history could repeat itself and that’s becoming kind of stressful, for all related reasons. 

Meanwhile, in the life with #1, we’re trying to transition her from two naps a day to one, which comes with its own set of challenges to schedule and adaptation, not to mention that she’s clearly teething again, so that’s been kind of stressful for all related reasons.

And then there’s the whole job situation, where my bosses are literally trying to get me fired now, so imagine how it feels going into work each day knowing that you are not wanted there, and invisible plans are already in motion that can result in your termination.  So that’s been kind of stressful.  For all related reasons.

Needless to say, I’m currently in a position where the work week sucks for all obvious reasons, but then the weekends that are supposed to be two days of catching up and relaxation are sparsely any better because trying to navigate a teething toddler through a sleep transition often leads to a wailing baby and me getting frazzled and fried because I can’t afford to have the help of a nanny on weekends, mythical wife is very pregnant and can’t be as physically involved, which all results in not being particularly in a very good place.

I go to bed on Sunday night feeling dejected and worn down, and also completely dreading returning to work the following day for a different set of stressors and anxieties to take place and this is where I realize that I am not particularly in a very good place.

My capacity for any sort of disappointments and let-downs is basically nil, and once again I’m in this headspace where everything is setting me off and pissing me off way more than it probably should.  From the pets in the house, the barking of the dogs, the frustrations of cohabitation, but most of all, the sheer feeling of unreliability of the working world around me, namely the fact that mythical wife and I finally ordered a new treadmill, but it never showed.

It was scheduled for arrival on Sunday, the window for arrival was completely missed, we wasted the entire fucking day held hostage at home expecting an arrival only to discover that it wasn’t going to happen late in the day, and the day was basically a dead end wash in terms of potential productivity or finding something better to do with my wife and child than sit around and wait.

It started this mental snowball of how much the American workforce is unreliable and incompetent, and how much I fucking despise just people who simply cannot manage time.  I’m getting put on a track for firing because I’m potentially missing deadlines, but I never actually factually miss them.  Out in the real world, workers are missing deadlines, failing to fulfill orders or do their jobs well, and this is accepted as the norm.  I know there’s something to be said about not everyone having hair triggers on firing people, but there’s just this fucked up double standard I’m feeling with my own circumstances versus the ones I, and probably everyone else, notice on a regular basis, with incompetent workforces.

I know this is devolving into a rant, but the whole point of all this is that I’m at a yet another unfortunate burnout point, and like most cases, nothing is going to get through this other than time, but at this current juncture, all the lights at the end of the tunnels all come with their own sets of heavy baggage, nor are any one of them definitive and mean any of the other tunnels’ circumstances still don’t happen if I’m not on those trains.

Just need to hope to make it through each day, with a job intact, #1 in good health, and a mythical wife still in good shape with #2 in the oven.  But sometimes such circumstances feels like a bigger challenge than it does at other times.

Well this is awkward

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Imagine going to work where you know your superiors do not want you there and would be happy for you to leave.  For absolutely no reason other than you do not fit in the ideal team in their heads.  So they ride you incessantly, nitpick every little thing you do, second guess every single action you make and generally make every day difficult in some way, shape, or form – with the goal of trying to make you leave.

But finding a new job or transferring to a different team is actually a whole lot harder than people seem to forget, and with a second baby on the way, the upcoming paternity leave is way more valuable and essential at this current juncture than your professional comfort, so you grit your teeth and smile and navigate each day after day, enduring the bullshit with a more important goal in the horizon.

However, since the superiors have failed to grief you until you quit, they have resorted to straight up war: looking for any and every procedural infraction they can find, and writing you up for them, putting you on an official disciplinary probation, where job termination is one of the potential outcomes, and most likely their intended goal at the end of the lengthy journey.

I don’t like to brog about work, because most of the time it’s boring, rarely is it cool, unless it’s a freelance gig that I can actually be proud of.  But the little hypothetical tale detailed above is precisely where I’m at right now, and I’m in a position of where I’m quite upset, angry to even think about describing it, and disgusted beyond belief that I work with people like this.

Continue reading “Well this is awkward” →

New Father Brogging, #039

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

27.5 inches.  That’s how high my daughter fell when she climbed out of her pack and play.

I’ve never felt as big of a failure as a parent than this incident, where barely 60 degrees behind me, my daughter managed to climb out of her pack and play and fall onto the kitchen floor, while I was preparing her dinner, chopping green beans.

Given how increasingly mobile she gets on a daily basis, I didn’t stop to consider that with walking would come climbing, and I’ve witnessed her trying to climb things already, so I don’t know why I didn’t even think that she wouldn’t do it in the pack and play, as she’s attempted everywhere else.

But instead, I was blissfully taking for granted that she would be safe in her pack and play, while I was preparing her dinner, and I naively positioned her to where she was not within my line of sight or even my periphery, so that she couldn’t reach and grab things on the counter or on the nearby shelf, not considering that I wouldn’t see her when she inevitably managed to get up and over the side railing of her enclosure.

The thud still resonates in my brain, and the delayed shock at turning and seeing her laying on her back on the floor, her own shock still just registering the fact that she bumped her head and the pain hadn’t kicked in yet.  I picked her up immediately, hoping this would be something that she would no-sell and impress me with pain tolerance that hopefully mirrored my own, but this was for naught, so much as she was really gearing up to let loose some shrieks of pain from having fallen 27.5 inches, roughly somewhere in the neighborhood of her own height.

Fortunately, save for an unsightly bruise, nothing seems to be that bad.  No signs of concussion, no signs of any breaks or serious injury, just a tender bruise for her, and a monumental amount of frustration, defeat and self-loathing for dad.

Obviously, with raising a child and growing up, scrapes, cuts and bruises are going to happen.  But we’ve gone a year without a tremendous number of those, which made me feel like I was probably doing something right, but all it took was a few minutes of taking my head out of the game, and taking safety for granted for all that equity to come crashing down, and me feeling like a horrible fucking parent for having let it happen.

‘Burned out’ doesn’t even come close to describing how I feel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

On any given day, here are the things that I like to accomplish in my free time:

  • Write
  • Run
  • Watch wrestling
  • Watch tv in general
  • Play Fire Emblem Heroes and/or Pokémon Go
  • Do surveys

Coincidentally, that just so happens to be the list of things that I so rarely get to do anymore, on account of the fact that I’m just so endlessly busy, with a plate so perpetually full, that I’ve been feeling on the cusp of anxiety attacks at just how much stuff I feel that I have to do on a regular basis, with practically no help at all.

The fact that I’m writing now is a miracle in itself, and I mentally would really like to accomplish a whole fuckton of writing that’s been backlogging in my brain as well as on the living document I keep a list of topics and things I’d like to write about but the reality is that as much as I love to write, there’s only a certain amount of it I can do daily before the topics begin to run into each other and I put out a bunch of bullshit that I’m not happy with.

Over the last few weeks, my daily schedule hasn’t really changed so much as it’s just had things added to it, as some of them have finite timelines in which they should be accomplished.  However, it’s these extra things that have nickeled and dimed their way into overfilling my plate on a regular basis, and the’ve all been constantly bleeding into all facets of my time not spent working and/or raising a child, that I’ve hit the point where “burned out” doesn’t come close to describing how I feel so much as I just simply feel like I’m drowning.

Continue reading “‘Burned out’ doesn’t even come close to describing how I feel” →

Pour one out for my dead treadmill

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My treadmill died this weekend.  I feel like I’ve lost a limb.

Ever since the start of the coronavirus pandemic really began, one of the first things to obviously go, was, the gym.  Something that I’d been consistently doing for literally ten straight years, and if I were factoring in the sporadic working out I did intermittently while I was freelance, butted up against the time before that when I was working and had a gym membership, then probably 15 straight years.

It was not an easy pill to swallow, but it was made easier by the fact that it also coincided with the birth of my daughter, so frankly I was too busy to even consider working out in the first place anyway.  But once things starting settling down (for the time being), I began to notice that my shirts were starting to feel a little loose in the arms, and tight in the stomach.  Obviously my body was beginning to revert back to a lesser state because I wasn’t exercising at all, and most definitely not aided by the sleep schedule of a new father.

Eventually, I reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, so I dusted off the treadmill that my mother-in-law bequeathed to us, and began running on it.  I remember the first time I really did a lengthy jog on it, I did probably about 40 minutes at a light pace, and I felt absolutely incredible afterward.  I was soaking in sweat but my body felt alive again, and I most definitely felt elation at the endorphins that were popping anew in my system for the first time in a long time.

Needless to say, running, and running on the treadmill has been the only real substantial exercise I’ve been doing since like, April of last year, and it’s been the only real saving grace to my rapidly shrinking and deteriorating physical state, since I haven’t lifted weights in quite literally, almost an entire year.

My angst and rage at the legions of ignorant fucks who couldn’t be bothered to wear masks and eradicate all this bullshit in just a month and that ‘Murica is still in this fucking predicament to where I still can’t work out, knows no end.

Anyway, I eventually settled into a pretty good every-other-day running routine, and I always feel pretty good after running, because as I’ve always stated as one of my personal exercise mantras, is that time is never wasted when exercising.

But a few days ago, I noticed that my treadmill was starting to make a really loud sound.  Typically I wear my AirPods and am often times watching shit on the WWE Network, so I can’t really hear the ambient noise of the treadmill, but when I was winding down, it was noticeably loud.  I chalked it up as an anomaly, and hoped it would be gone the next time I ran.

It wasn’t.  I popped open the mechanical panel, to see if there was anything obvious about why it was making such noise.  Nothing seemed amiss, and I ran it on a low setting, with the panel open to see if there was any loose parts.  If anything at all, it sounded like body noise that was causing things, which I guess with the aging, vibrating, and the fact that I probably run with an elephant’s stride, shit had jarred around throughout its age.

I closed up the panel and decided to just run anyway, and brace occasionally on the console, to see if I could settle the noise down.  It seemed to be okay at first; but then three minutes into my run, everything just kind of clunked to a stop, and I’m surprised I didn’t hurt myself in the process being brought down from 6.5 mph to 0.

I got off the treadmill and watched it abruptly reset and made a noise, reset and make a noise.  Obviously, something was wrong with it, so I pulled the plug.

As far as I can tell, the treadmill was dead.  I haven’t ran since.

Obviously, I’m at a crossroads where I definitely want a new treadmill to replace the dead one, but I’m not sure if I want a fairly inexpensive direct replacement of what just died, which would probably run me around 300-400, but mythical wife is really suggesting that we spring for something way nicer.  But at the same time, I want to believe that maybe 2021 will be a year in which with vaccinations, I might be able to return to a gym, to which in those instances, my running at home will definitely reduce dramatically as I would be working out at gyms again, to which why would I want to have an expensive treadmill collecting dust?

I don’t know, really.  For the time being, I’m going to have to resort to running outdoors again, but I’m at the mercy of the elements, and the fact that there are still occasionally fucks without masks out there, and I definitely don’t want to catch their coronaHIV while I’m just trying to exercise.

But I’m super sad that my treadmill died. 😢

Love him or hate him, Tom Brady is a winner

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that I’ve been paying that much attention to the NFL this season other than the ironically entertaining aspects of a season that I maintain probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place; if it were up to me, the upcoming Superb Owl would be the Washington Redskins Football Team versus the Buffalo Bills, so that we could have a repeat of 1991, but a team with an idiotic interim name and a 7-9 record would, give the Buffalo Bills a loss in the Superb Owl, for old times’ sake, and the season would end in an ironic combination of some things change, some things stay the same.

Instead, we have the heavily favored Chiefs, which in itself is a little difficult to comprehend, because for the longest time the Chefs (yes the Chefs) were that one team that always made it to the playoffs, but would always get bounced in the second round, usually losing to like the Steelers or Broncos, and nobody would ever really take them seriously as legitimate contenders, especially since Andy Reid took over, and that guys manages timeouts like he manages cheeseburgers, which is to say he devours them all, and then there’s nothing left at the end.

And opposing the Chefs, is a team that hasn’t sniffed a championship since 2002, but at the very helm of it is a guy that has sniffed more than his share of Lombardi trophies in his time, in none other than Tom. Period. Brady. Period.

Just about anyone with a sports pulse knew of the general story of how Tom Brady left the New England Patriots, and instead of retirement, he just kind of inexplicably signs with, of all the teams in the NFL, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  A team that had gone 59-101 over the last decade, and was coming off of three straight losing seasons, with two of them placing last in the pitiful NFC South division.

For a guy that literally had nothing left to prove, as he already has six Superb Owl championships, an underwear model wife, and lord knows how much money earned in his career, another season for a cellar-dweller like the Bucs seemed like a really sad way to end his career, and likely injured on the way out as a shit team usually can’t protect their QB.

But I guess Brady really wanted to prove that he could win without Bill Belichick, and put to rest permanently the answer to the question of who really was the talent behind the Patriots’ success throughout the last 20 years, and seeing as how one has reached the Superb Owl, while the other didn’t even make the playoffs, I guess the answer is pretty abundantly clear now, but it really shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Love him or hate him, Tom Brady truly is the GOAT of football.  It doesn’t even matter if the Bucs win the Superb Owl or not, although me personally I can’t say that I kind of would be rooting for Brady, despite the fact that I’m most definitely no fan of the Bucs, but I’ve never really had any issue with Brady, and I respect the greatness.  But he’s already proven his point and one that really was inconsequential in the grand spectrum of things but was clearly still very important to him to stamp his claim over Belichick as the real reason for the Patriots’ success.

But really, I just kind of sadistically enjoy how everyone fucking hates Tom Brady so much, but it’s like he feeds off the hate and burning rage that his existence incites within haters, and it only makes him that much more effective.  Patrick Mahomes is a legend in his own right, being someone who was capable of lifting the once-hapless Chefs into becoming the respectable defending champion Chiefs, but in two weeks’ time, he’ll be going up against the literal god of professional football, and he’ll be back to square one at having his own thing to prove.

In the end, I don’t really care who wins, because the NFL is kind of a sad sack of an organization, and I resent just how much pull and influence it has on the entire, well country.  Which is why I’d like to see Tom Brady hoist up yet another Superb Owl Lombardi, because it’s the closest thing to a giant middle finger to all the haters there possibly could be.

It’s a good thing my machete came in

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because boy, do I have some anger I’d like to take out on some unruly shrubs and wild growth that need to be scaled back anyway.

I don’t really like to brog about my job, because it seems so cliché and there used to be this off-chance concern that someone who doesn’t know me could piece two and two together, identify where I worked, and do something unpleasant with that information.  But I keep things rather vague enough to where that aspect of it has gone away, not to mention the fact that I have like, zero readers, so I don’t have to worry in that regard anyway, but it still remains pretty cliché to bitch about work.

Regardless, let me tell you a story about how I am rather displeased with my job these days, and this is a very specific reason to add to the lengthy list of things I’m keeping documented for if and when the time comes to where I ever can bounce out of there.

I asked my bosses (because I have 1.5 bosses, as in one person who is the actual boss whom I shall refer to as “boss,” and the spineless puppet husk under them who is technically my actual boss, whom I shall refer to as “puppet”) if I could have next week off, as I believed I had a week of vacation left, and was feeling pretty burned out from the combination of being a first-time father on a 24/7 daddy schedule, combined with an unnecessarily, artificially busy holiday month.

Boss said sure, I felt a little bit of relief and satisfaction at knowing that I might finally get a little bit of time to relax and to not be so, on, with a combination of work and baby duty.

A couple of days later, I get an email from puppet, saying “they thought I had used all my vacation, but could be mistaken, please give me a list of dates you took off,” which is pretty easy, because I only had three substantial breaks throughout the year, given the fact that because of coronavirus, I’ve been working from home since March.  I took a week off prior to the start of my paternity leave to extend my time, and I took three days off back in May when I was really fried from being a first-time dad, and I took two days off to celebrate my first-ever wedding anniversary.

I cited the week off as vacation time, and declared the five other days as the sick/personal time that all employees are entitled to get.  Puppet responds back to me that they’re “fairly certain” that salaried employees (like me) sick/personal time doesn’t act in the same manner in which it works for hourly employees (which I used to be), which is basically auxiliary vacation time, if you’re not prone to getting sick.

They’re going to check with HR.

Continue reading “It’s a good thing my machete came in” →