Tag: angst

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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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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2 Under 2: Untitled dad ramblings (#065)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I may have accepted that life might be on hold, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasional bad days.

#2 is getting better in terms of us managing the colic and learning her tendencies, but one thing that hasn’t really changed is her sheer unwillingness to take naps and give us a break from time to time, and the fact that she still exists in three states: sleeping (overnight), eating, or screaming her head off, with the caveat being that the screaming is usually only remedied by having someone holding her 24/7 until she can be brought into another state, eventually

I’m on dad duty for so long that I have no time to do anything else.  And when I say anything else, I mean do more work that I’d be able to do without having to have a baby in my arms, because I’m not fucking Goro from Mortal Kombat and have another pair of arms to be productive with.  My house is a fucking disaster zone full of piles of things that adds to my general stress and anxiety because I’m typically a pretty tidy person and I prefer my home be such as well.

I hardly have time to upkeep personal hygiene and pretty much every shower that I’ve had in the last two months have typically been after midnight, where I’m sacrificing rest time in order to not feel completely unraveled.

I don’t have time to be a good dog owner, and since my dog is 16 and elderly, I have to keep him crated for the vast majority of the day solely because he will pee on everything under the sun if he’s left free to his own devices.  I get mad when if and when he soils his dog beds, but it’s primarily frustration at the fact that I don’t even have time to even be able to take care of a dog’s base needs adequately enough.

I seldom have time to eat, and eat well, and everyone knows cooking at home is typically the key to improved eating habits, but who the fuck has time to cook much less eat it, without having to be hands-on with #2, so mythical wife and I subsist on an unhealthy amount of fast food because it’s all we can tolerate to indulge on when we’re already parked on E and need to eat while we can breathe.

Throughout the last few months, I’ve actually lost weight, I’m below my license weight which was fabricated to make me feel like not a fat fuck, but I’m actually below it now.  However, I know that’s solely based on the fact that I literally haven’t lifted any weights since mid-March of 2020, and I’ve pretty much lost all muscle-mass that I’d cultivated in the decades before coronavirus, and I’m pissed at ‘Murica for not being able to do what it takes to eradicate the pandemic and how it will never end and short of me turning my garage into a gym, there’s no way I’m ever going to reclaim any muscle mass that I’ve lost at this rate, not to mention where the time would be, being a dad of 2 under 2 and all.

Let’s not even talk about hobbies and personal indulgences, and the sheer time I don’t have to be able to do any of those.  One more thing I’d add to the list of unsolicited advice for new dads, would be to think of all the things you hope to accomplish in a day, and then count at day’s end just how many of them you didn’t get to.  Hobbies, are probably at the top of the list, followed probably by anything you wanted to do that utilized arms not handcuffed to an infant.  I’ve watched a lot of television over the last weeks, which isn’t the worst thing in the world and is something that I ordinarily would like to do, but the thing is I do it because it’s something I can do while holding an infant but when the day is over I’d rather be writing because that’s my passion hobby that I always want to be doing if I were ever to have free time where I wasn’t joined at the hip to my infant.

It’s not lost on me that the time I’m taking to write this could’ve been spent writing about anything else at all instead of another frustrated rambling of an overwhelmed dad, but as I often say, I want to remember everything, including the negative, about fatherhood, because it’s always important to be able to look back and learn from the past, even if they’re not always the most positive of things.

And unlike a lot of things where I have to write from memory and retroactively try to mentally get back to places, this is something that’s written fairly live and current, and I think it’s important to chronicle these emotions and frustrations and not let them simply evaporate until they bubble back up in the near future, and the words come out completely differently. 

Weekends suck because I don’t have the free time that I have to pay for in order to do absolutely anything other than being a hands-on dad.  Funny how that works out: free time, costing a fuck ton of money.

2 Under 2: Reconsideration of the worst (#064)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last year, I came to the determination that among the worst things ever as a new parent, was if you were unfortunate enough to have a child that required an apnea monitor.  At first, it is welcoming, as it is a literal safety net for new parents, to monitor the heart and oxygen rates of newborn children, but after a while, it transforms into an obtrusive ball and chain, that your child is required to be affixed to until they reach medical clearance for removal.

I stated that I hated the apnea monitor more than the former elected president.  That I wouldn’t wish an apnea monitor on my worst enemy’s children.  That there couldn’t be anything worse for new children and their parents.

But then I had a child who suffered from colic.

I had a revelation during one of the numerous times in which my wife and I were trying to soothe our second child from one of her daily colic attacks where she’s screaming her lungs out bloody murder, and there’s literally nothing we can do about it other than to hold her and try and bring her down which typically results in nothing but colossal failure.

I basically said that dealing with a kid with an apnea monitor was preferable to having a child who gets colic.  And I meant every word of it.

At least with the monitor, we learned how to control the triggers and recognize behaviors that could result in an event beep; it’s just that we were mandated to go two straight months without any events before we could get the green light to remove it, and as the days churned on, it began to feel like a tightrope act in tip toeing towards the finish line, but we succeeded.

But with colic, there’s no hard time to strive for, there’s no definitive end to when babies grow out of colic.  Some grow out of it as early as three months, but #2 has just passed the three month mark, and still is susceptible to colic attacks with the most minimal trite triggers.  And when she begins screaming her lungs out, it’s nothing but feeling defeat, and feeling like failures as parents.

Without question, I most definitely rank colic as being worse than the apnea monitor.  With the monitor, there was always a visible light at the end of the tunnel, but with colic, despite the existence of modern healthcare, nobody’s still been able to figure out what causes it, how to soothe it, or any sort of avoidance.  There is no light at the end of the tunnel, because we have no earthly idea of when she’s just kind of going to grow out of it, but for what it’s worth, I most definitely would feel and empathize for any other parents who have to suffer from having colicky babies themselves.

2 Under 2: Hold please (#063)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve resigned myself to the notion that until #2 gets onto some modicum of a sleep schedule, then my personal life is more or less on hold.  0-120 minutes a night to not be on either double baby duty, baby duty of one plus work, or work plus two kids?  That’s life as it is right now.  And the sooner I try to expect to have some free time in which I can actually sit down, relax, and not have to be on high baby alert, the better things might be.

Because that’s probably what’s been the greatest source of my angst and frustration over the last few weeks, is that I want to do things, but in almost all of the time, I just simply don’t have the time to do such.  But if I can mentally accept that there will be no time for me for a little bit longer, then it’s slightly an easier pill to swallow.

Sure, I still feel overwhelmed and miserable when I’m in the way-too-frequent scenario of where my wife is unavailable, I’m on both kids at the same time, and I’m getting blown up by my work email.  That happens way more than I wish it would, but tis the season in my particular line of work.

Salvation is, however, the fact that I am less than two weeks from starting my paternity leave, eliminating one of the biggest roadblocks to parenting for a substantial chunk of time, and I will get the opportunity to be nothing but a dad, instead of dad + corporate bitch, which I believe will take a tremendous load of anxiety off of my docket.

I have a few major objectives I’d like to approach while I’m on leave this time around, but one of the things that I plan on getting on sooner rather than later will begin some sort of sleep training with #2, as I had done with #1, which I like to credit as laying down the groundwork for her outstanding sleep habits to this very day.

And once #2 starts to get on some semblance of a nap schedule and a formalized bed time, things can really only go up from there.  Because this current operation of basically surviving infanthood has been pretty brutal due to the compounding of responsibilities, but as most people describe parenthood, things tend to get easier for a little while before the cycle of difficulty begins spinning as the years progress.

But until those supposed things begins getting easier, I just have to accept that I won’t really have the time to do so many me things, be it running, watching wrestling or other television, and even writing, as much as that one hurts me so.  I still jot down notes and reminders of the things I’d like to touch on, and I’ve gotten to where I don’t discount the Notes function in my phone if I’m feeling so driven.

This is parenthood, in a nutshell, where sacrifice isn’t merely a choice, but often times a necessity, in order to keep things moving with some degree of harmony.