Tag: rage

New Father Brogging, #016

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to the arrival of my daughter, I read a book about new fatherhood, as well as watched a few videos and read some stuff on the internet in regards to new parenthood.  Naturally, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap when it comes to the rigors of being new parents, and they often times make it sound like the sleep deprivation and dirty diapers are the worst things since the Bubonic Plague.

I guess I’ve conditioned myself fairly well throughout the years, to where I can operate on low amounts of sleep and make do with coffee alternatively, so the sleep deprivation wasn’t nearly as hellacious as all accounts make it sound like it’s going to be, and I’ve cleaned so much poop and urine from a lifetime of having pets that poop and urine from my own offspring doesn’t seem remotely close to being disgusting or nauseating.

Needless to say, it’s tempting karma to say raising a child has been anywhere close to easy, because it most certainly has not been, but when it comes to the things that most outlets and resources cite as being the worst things in the early stages, have been basically nothing to me.

I guess I should’ve started reading more books about once the baby has come home, and the things that start to happen after the third of fourth months, because I feel like now, we’re getting to the stage where I’m beginning to become frazzled and unglued at times, because I frankly am not always handling the pressures of trying to placate a wailing baby in the best manners.

Long story short, I didn’t know about sleep regression, and I didn’t really prepare myself to the rigors of teething.  And when they’re hitting simultaneously, resulting in a screaming baby that is in pain and won’t nap, and then they stay up past their nap time and hit their next feeding window and then they’re overtired and mixing in wailing about that and won’t go to sleep and we can’t put her to sleep because then she’ll never be able to go back to sleep when we get to her actual bed time; that’s where I feel like I need to have an arm that’s twelve feet long, because that’s about as much of wrist I want to slit when the shit hits the fan sometimes.

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When politics actually hit home

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Often times, no matter how much bitching and complaining we as ‘Muricans do about politics, when the day is over, not a lot really happens.  A penny tax doesn’t mean people are unable to feed themselves, and when the government talks about some convoluted bill or law that passes, most of the time very little noticeable things actually occur.  Maybe it’s naïve and insular for me to make such blanket statements, but at least in my little world, the things that happen as the result of stalling and bickering in Washington seldom really feel like they affect life on the home front.

In a prior post, I made a remark about how at no point in the history of my life, has it ever felt so physically tangible, the feeling of disappointment and letdown happening to the American people of the United States until more recently.  As stated, no matter how much I may disagree or not like something that’s now law, a lot of the time it doesn’t really impact the daily living of my life or my family.

Until now.

My wife is a teacher.  My child is immunocompromised.  I’ll just state those facts, and if you understand why this is a major problem today maybe you’ll continue reading.  If not, well go fuck off.

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New Father Brogging, #012

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a portable apnea monitor.  As my daughter was premature, we were not given a choice on that she was required to have one in order to be discharged from the NICU.  Understandable initially, as she, like many premature babies had shown the tendency to have episodes of bradycardia (low heart rate), and it was nice to have a safety net at home to know if something were going wrong at any point.

How it worked was that our baby had two nodes strapped to her chest, that fed into an eight-foot cord, which was hooked into the monitor itself, which gave real time pulsing green lights indicative of her heart rate.  At any point if the baby registered more than 20 seconds of a slow heart rate, elevated heart rate, or shallow breathing, a piercing beep would emit from the monitor, along with the illumination of a red light next to whatever icon indicated the event.

The beep was soul-piercing to hear, and the red light was looking at the eye of Sauron.

At first, we’d experience events a few times a day, as we learned as parents on how to be parents and how to hold our child, feed our child and generally handle our kid in the optimum manner to avoid putting her in situations where she’d be at higher risk of triggers.  But as babies tend to do, she began growing rapidly, as mythical wife and I started to gain experience with handling her, and eventually the number of events began reducing to nearly nothing.

As time passed, the necessity of carrying around a box the size and weight of a school textbook and the long, tangly cable that ran with it began to grow increasingly frustrating, especially to me, as we as new parents, wished to expose our child to more of the world, and not just keep her in bassinets or the Mamaroo, but it began to feel like a literal ball and chain.  The number of events were next to nothing, and I was eager to find out when we could be without it.

During a visit to the pediatrician, we were told that two months no events, and then we’re good to go. 

Two months??  I was pretty livid.

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New Father Brogging, #011

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout this week, mythical wife and I have introduced a baby monitor, so that we can put her down at a scheduled time, and still be able to keep eyes and ears on her from elsewhere in the house, while we try to reclaim a little bit of time for ourselves.  At first, it felt almost alien, having some free time back, and initially I used them only to do chores and tasks that tend to fall to the backburner on most days, but then when I’d finish those, I realized that it wasn’t yet 11 pm, and I actually had some free time back on my hands.  It was kind of nice.

Today, my daughter let out the most high-pitched shrieks I’ve ever heard come from her.  Worse off, we heard them first through the baby monitor, so they occurred with neither parent in sight.  I tore up the stairs and into the bedroom to get to my child as fast as possible, and hearing them in person was the most soul-piercing sounds I’d heard in my entire life.  I picked her up out of the bassinet and held her to my chest immediately.  Moments later I was in the most tears I’d been in since her birth, because no parent should want to hear such horrific sounds emanating from their baby.

Fortunately, everything seemed to be fine; maybe she was having a bad dream, or maybe it was the fear of awakening without the use of her arms, since we have her sleep swaddled.  Maybe a combination of both, or maybe she was overheated, since the bedroom tends to warm up throughout the day.  But either way, because nobody can speak baby, we’ll never truly know to why she was in such a frenzied panic, but all I do know is that it was one of the most frightening experiences for me in recent memory, and I’m still admittedly a little shaken up by it, regardless of if everything is fine.

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Among others, fuck the Lakers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Of the numerous things that has pushed me from disenchanted to faith broken with America has been the recent events of how the Personal Paycheck Program, or what most people know as “the small business relief” program, was abused like a child on a Lifetime network special, and ultimately ran out of money, leaving countless small business owners across America dead in the water.

For clarification, what had happened was that a ton of notable, recognizable and most importantly, large businesses, began declaring themselves as small businesses, and began applying for the PPP loans left and right, and the next thing we know is that companies such as Ruths Chris Steakhouse, Shake Shack, Ritz Carlton hotels and W Hotels, among countless large businesses were receiving millions of dollars in relief loans, and eventually the entire PPP program literally ran out of money and said fuck it and fuck you to the rest of all the applicants that were actual small businesses whom the program really was designed for.

Basically, they all gamed the system because America is not the smartest kid in the class in spite of what Americans might believe, and the criteria and literature behind the loan qualifications had more holes than a Baked Potato in Charge Twitter rant, and big businesses were more than happy to capitalize.  Most franchised businesses began applying as individual applicants to qualify and then suddenly Potbelly Sandwich Shop has amassed $10M in loans despite the fact that they’re literally a publicly traded company, while the local sub shop in your neighborhood can’t even get a form letter of rejection, because the US Postal Service is under fire, and there’s no money for fucking postage.

However, among the elites that have received PPP money, one of the ones that ticked a nerve with me was the Los Angeles Lakers basketball organization, which received $4.6M in loans from the program.

The Lakers, an NBA team, which like most professional sport teams, practically prints money, applied for, and received money reserved for small businesses.

Fuck the Lakers.  They’re literally a franchise valued at over $3 billion dollars, and they’ve got the audacity to cry poor and apply for a PPP loan?  To say bullshit on this is about an understatement as saying coronavirus is just a really bad flu.

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Can white folks let the body get cold before they start picking at it???

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It wasn’t even a month ago when I saw Bong Joon-ho’s coup de grace, Parasite.  It was one of the best movies I’d seen in a long time, and I say that not just because I want to support films made in the Motherland, but because it was also just a good movie.  The plot was fairly simply and linear, the acting was superb, and I’m no cinematography buff, but the visual storytelling was at times, breathtaking.

If white people weren’t so fucking white, then there’s an off-chance that Parasite should win the Oscar for Best Picture, but let’s be real here; it’ll probably go to Marriage Story or The Irishman, because they’re in English, and all of Hollywood is trying to get in bed with Netflix these days.

But speaking of white people, one of the more infuriating pieces of news I’ve heard lately was that the rights to an adaptation of Parasite were won by HBO.

And let’s be real here, the phrase “adaptation” is a gentler, whiter way of saying “replace all the gooks with American-speaking whiteys”

All I know is that I lost my shit when I read this article about Parasite already being prepared for adaptation.  And knee-jerk reactions is probably about 75% of the shit I write about on my brog in the first place, but they’re usually coming from the most passionate, heart-felt emotions.

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I try not to wish death unto others

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As we get older, sometimes we try to be a little more cognizant of the things we say, even in knee-jerk reactions or the heat of moments.  When I was a moody teenager who hated everything, I was pretty quick to wish death unto others, for the most minor and inconsequential of circumstances.  Cut me off in traffic?  I hope you blow a flat and crash to your death.  Take my parking space?  I hope you become collateral damage to an MS-13 drive-by.  Beat me in Street Fighter by chip damage?  I hope you have heart attack and keel over you fat cheap fuck.

Yeah, death is a little bit extreme when it comes to momentary lapses in judgment of gauging the value of life.  I’d really be kind of disappointed if I ever wished death unto another human being, and then it actually happened.  And although the chances of such are microscopically minuscule and would obviously be the perfect storm of freak circumstances and not because I mentally wished it upon them, it really does make me think twice about even absent-mindedly, wishing death unto others, especially for overall trivial matters.

These days, I just wish diarrhea unto people who piss me off.  Like, really bad liquid shits, that alter an afternoon, or ruin a night’s sleep; just a temporary dull pain with inconvenient side effects.  It seems like an adequate amount of comeuppance to mentally wish to inflict on other human beings who piss me off.  Take too long to order at Willy’s?  Clog up the self-checkout at Publix?  Aggressively whip around four lanes of traffic to ultimately end up one car length ahead of me?   Be the shitheads sitting in row 25+ on a flight that rushes up to row 23 to get off ten seconds sooner, and ruin the entire deplaning process?  Yeah, I wish diarrhea unto all these asshole motherfuckers.  The more severe shits depending on how insufferable their actions are.  One really bad episode, or nuclear shits that come back several times.

However, there are admittedly still some instances where my frustration bubbles over, and I still fantasize about some horrific death occurring, as much as I don’t really want to admit it.  One is very specific, to when the perfect storm of human beings all spawning on every single toilet in the gym/office when I really have to go; seriously I rarely feel as enraged as I do when I feel the need to relieve myself, but every single stall in the numerous bathroom options I have are all occupied, regardless of the fact that it’s sometimes very early in the morning at times in which I deliberately choose to workout, banking on the early time reducing the amount of people that are present.

The last time this happened, I wanted to a meteor to fall onto the building.  If I can’t use a crapper, then nobody should. 🙁

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