Tag: famiry

New Father Brogging, #031

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’d become so accustomed to carving out a little bit of time to write every single night throughout the month that I don’t feel right not doing so, even if there’s no more German beers to review, and even if it is Christmas, and even if I’m tired because I’ve been up since the usual 6:30 am, and spent pretty much all day entertaining guests and trying to keep up with families, be it virtual or in-person.

If anything at all, this is precisely what I should have wanted to have happen after writing about beer for 24 straight days, is that it’s kind of conditioned me to want to do some writing, every single day, because when the day is over that’s really what I always aspire to accomplish with my brog, in writing regularly while hopefully not becoming too inane or uninteresting.

So I’ll simply say that as it has been the first Christmas of my daughter, I am in very good spirits that she had a pretty good day, slept well, had good naps, ate very well, and had a tremendous amount of gifts for her.  I am floored by all the love that my family is fortunate to receive and that so many people want to lavish my daughter with gifts and other thoughtful gestures, and I feel very lucky to have so many positive persons in my stratosphere.

It makes me feel unworthy of all the consideration so many of my friends and family have for my family and I, and that I will probably be anxious and insecure with the idea that I can reciprocate such generosities adequately.  I can only hope to be the friend, family or companion to those who think of me back to them, and I would like to be the best person in return to everyone who even has even just good thoughts towards my family and I.

Regardless, in spite of the general mass bemoaning of the kind of year that 2020 has been, it was still extremely important to me that my daughter have a good first Christmas.  Mythical wife is often critical and gives me hell about my general apathy and reluctance to do stuff like putting up trees, decorating the yard, and other festive things around the house, but it wasn’t so difficult to do as much this year, because of our general want to have the best Christmas we could under the circumstances we were given.

And despite the fact that we couldn’t see much of our family and friends this year, and there’s still a laundry list of people that my daughter has yet to meet in person, we still made the best of the hand we were dealt and be it virtual and the few people who do have a pass to come to my home, I think we succeeded in having a pretty good Christmas not just for our child, but just a good one in general.

I hope all future Christmases can be as positive for my wife and daughter as this one has been, if not better.

The only good thing to come out of a season that shouldn’t have been

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Inevitable: Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman wins National League Most Valuable Player

Not bad for a guy who went into the season recovering from coronavirus.  But then again, professional athletes with professional athlete money typically can afford to get the best treatment possible, on the dime of their organizations who see them as working assets to begin with.

But I’m going off track here, shocker.  Freddie Freeman has quietly been one of the better players in all of baseball, almost since the day he arrived, and it’s about time that he was recognized as the MVP all Braves fans knew he was going to receive one day.  Sure, there will be many naysayers, myself included if it had gone to anyone not on the Braves, citing shit like partial season and asterisk season and other bullshit, but because it was awarded to one of the guys I’ve been a fan of since the days of seeing him in the minor leagues as a Myrtle Beach Pelican, I cast all the snark aside and can just be happy for Freddie Freeman.

In a massively shortened, 60 game season, Freeman put up gaudy numbers, hitting 13 home runs as well as slashing .341/.462/.640, which is extremely good.  The Braves themselves went 35-25, and actually didn’t choke in the minus round or the first round of the playoffs, making it all the way to the NLCS, where they gave all Braves fans hope going up 3-1 on the Dodgers before Atlanta-ing away three straight losses and getting eliminated.  But as is often the conciliatory remark, they wouldn’t have gotten to that point in the first place, without the contributions of outstanding performances like Freddie Freeman.

What means the most to me though, is that major awards are given with no care or concern to the people themselves, just solely based on numbers and production.  Freddie Freeman is one of those baseball players that has a squeaky-clean image, is seemingly nice to everyone, and his earliest reputation was built on the fact that he was a massive hugger, who hugged all his teammates, all his coaches and all his peers.  He came out to Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe for two years on his own volition, and was one of those guys that clearly played the game of baseball like it was fun, the way it was originally meant to be for children.

There have been loads of grumpy, standoffish tryhards in history that are phenomenal baseball players, but are just kind of dicks as people, who go on to win MVPs and have tremendous individual success.  Sure, those MVPs pave the way for financial success and gain, but it’s always like the bad guys win whenever one of those types takes home an MVP award.

Such is hardly the case for Freddie Freeman winning the MVP award all Braves fans knew he was capable of winning.  It’s like a case of the nice guy actually winning, and the world needs more instances of good people getting great results.  I mean seriously, look at the reaction of this guy when he found out he was the winner; hugs all around first and foremost, and it’s just a guy surrounded by his family, soaking in the elation of baseball’s most prestigious individual award.

There’s really not much else to say about this; this was a season that I personally didn’t think should have taken place from the start, but as the Braves neared the World Series, the obvious hypocrisy of my tone changed, that is until the sore loser emerged from another shortfall from an Atlanta team.  But if there were ever such a thing as an acceptable consolation price to come out of a polarizing season, Freddie Freeman winning the NL MVP was definitely it.  I’m genuinely happy for him, and glad the blowhards in the BBWAA actually got something right for a change.

The best month ever, fin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In spite of the mental troubles I went through earlier in the month, I came to the realization that October truly was, one of the best months ever, as far as my life is concerned.  I have my child, I have my wife, and I have my mother under the same roof throughout the entire month, and I’ve been getting free childcare from my mom while I’ve transitioned back into the rhythm of working virtually. 

Additionally, my fridge has literally never been so full so often, as my mom is basically a machine when it comes to insisting that I be eating more Korean food, and I’m more than happy to oblige as much as my appetite can accommodate.  It’s actually been kind of humorous the pattern of her complaining about the lack of fridge space when it’s she who’s constantly buying more food to re-cram in there. 

But the last weeks have been an enjoyable pattern of me getting to work with piece of mind that my daughter was with her grandma and in the best of hands that aren’t her parents.  The two of them bonded pretty immediately, and it makes my heart swell every time I see them together, both of them smiling and enjoying each other’s company.  My mom bringing a lot of old world parenting to the forefront, with my child responding just fine, as long as she was being cared for and given attention.

The thing is, I had a harrowing thought in my mind throughout the month that I’m not entirely sure if I’ll ever have the opportunity to spend this much time with my mom again in my life.  She’s in good health, and takes pretty good care of her lifestyle, but she is in her 70s now, and we live in a country where basically a plague that preys upon the elderly is still running rampant.  I feel like my child kind of revitalized my mom a little bit to where she was capable of babysitting for her throughout the working weeks, but it was clearly taxing by the end of each day, and I can’t assume that this will be able to be the case again in the future if I were ever to have a second, but I also don’t want to imply that grandma’s biggest value is solely in babysitting, because she’s still a mom to me.

Needless to say, the realization that these are the days that should be treasured the most is what helped me pull my head out of my ass, because there’s no guarantee that I’ll ever have time like this ever again in my life.  It’s been a truly incredible month for the most part, and I’m happy that I was able to capitalize and memorialize a lot of the times with my actual camera, because it was really important to me that my daughter have lots of photo evidence of her time spent with halmoni on dad’s side.  Because she’s been hitting home runs every single day while she’s been here, and as our month winds down to a close, I wanted to write something about it so that I too can look back fondly at this time of my life and remember that in a year where everyone is bemoaning as the worst in history, I had one of the best months ever.

Writing when I don’t feel like writing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My motivation to write lately has been pretty nonexistent lately.  Not necessarily due to depression, quite the contrary, I’ve managed to pull my head out of the darkness a little bit better since my last brog therapy session.  It’s just that I just don’t really have any motivation to write.

I’m not finding a lot of things on the internet that are inspiring me to write, and maybe I’m still in a state of having writer’s rust when it comes to consistent brogging since I got my site back up months ago.  The point is, I just haven’t felt like I’ve had any real inspiration to write, and I don’t particularly feel motivated to write about things out of thin air either.

Regardless, the anxiety of letting too much time pass between posts is greater than the anxiety of feeling like I don’t have anything to write about, so in order to try and fill the airtime, I’m doing something I used to do whenever it was that I felt like I had nothing to write about: sit in front of a blank canvas and just start writing and see what words I can barf out.

Life lately has been somewhat steady over the last few weeks, especially since my mom is living with me for a few more weeks, and I have the peace of mind knowing that my daughter is in good hands while I hole up in my office for work; I’m actually utilizing my dedicated office space in order to take my job more seriously, as I probably really wasn’t during the first few weeks of quarantining, especially since I had a newborn baby that’s now a 7+ month old infant now.

My entire team has been told that we’re basically going to be working from home until at the very earliest, January 31st of 2021, and frankly even that seems like a dubious milestone in my opinion, because I think when the day is over, schools are what are going to be driving the decisions of all companies on whether or not they’re going to make employees come back to the offices or not.  Child care is low-key the main thing that is going to determine whether or not businesses large or small will be going back to offices any time soon, and even that, is going to be determined by the availability of a vaccine, since ‘Muricans can’t stop being so selfish for two months to effectively quarantine and let coronavirus burn out on its own.

But whatever, for better or worse, I’m working from home for the remainder of this year, and into the start of next.  Regardless of the state of work in that time, I can always have peace of mind knowing that I am always going to be home with my child, even if she will be with the nanny that we’re going to have to hire part-time in order to have eyes on her while I take my job seriously.

Continue reading “Writing when I don’t feel like writing” →

Everything is inadequate

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The following are health bars from Left 4 Dead 2.  The way the game works, the only time a player will be at 100 is at the very start of a game, and once they take any modicum of damage that brings them down from 100, you will never see 100 again, no matter how many health packs you use.  It’s kind of an appropriate analogy to life itself, that once damaged, it will never be unblemished, no matter how much repair and fixing goes into it.

Note the partial bars that are to the right of the solid colored bars.  These are what the zbs community refers to as “decaying health” or “pill health.”  It’s health that counts towards your overall hit points, but also ticks down over time, unlike the solid bar health.  In spite of the tropes and memes about L4D out there, you can take pills as often as you can find them in order to keep your health high, but it will always be temporary and degrading over time.

L4D health bars are a good analogy to how I feel my life is going these days, and often times why I feel like I could use some therapy.  I’m long past the point where I’m probably closer to 50 than I am 100, and much like in L4D, I don’t think I’ll ever see 100 again any time soon.  Right now, if I had to guess, my solid bar probably maxes out at 60, and if I ever want to be any higher than that, I’ll have to down a jar of pills to get up into the 90s, but that time will be temporary, fleeting, and will come back down naturally over time.

I realize that this makes me sound like I’m thinking that I need a lot of medication to get through my days, which couldn’t be any further from the truth, but from an emotional standpoint, I definitely could be in much better shape and I can’t really figure out why I’m in such a dark space in my head so often lately, when I really shouldn’t be.

But today, I am frustrated, sleep deprived and completely over basically everything and I feel like this is the culmination of weeks of a thousand cuts and I’m having a day where I want pretty much nothing but to be left the fuck alone and to have a little bit of time to myself. 

Continue reading “Everything is inadequate” →

Things that have happened since the brog’s been down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shortly after my brog went down in April 2016, I started a document, bulleting things that want to potentially write about, in the event that the site would be back up within like a month or two.  Obviously that never happened, but it didn’t really stop me from adding to the list on a regular basis, even if it continued for nearly four years.

At first, it was a pretty nitty-gritty list, straight to the point and pretty succinct at what I wanted to remember.  But by the time 2018 rolled around, I noticed some patterns and categories in which things caught my attention and warranted notation, and so some categories started to take place.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to share all of this, but for whatever reason I’m following through with it, and basically this is going to be little more than a massive bulleted list of things that happened between mid-2016 through mid-2020, with probably not a lot of context, but likely some snark and veiled commentary peppered throughout.

2016

  • Pokemon Go came, lit the world on fire for 15 minutes, and then flamed out harder than the FOX Fantastic Four films
  • I became The Burrito King of Atlanta, winning Willy’s Road Trip promotion by visiting 27 Willy’s locations in four days
  • Kobe Bryant retired from professional basketball, but not before dropping 60 in his final game
  • The Golden State Warriors won 73 games and passed the ’96 Bulls’ unbreakable record, but then lost in the NBA finals like chumps
  • The Atlanta Braves retired Turner Field for whiter pastures, by sucking hardcore and losing 93 games
  • Hulk Hogan killed Gawker
  • Went on a European cruise vacation with mythical then-gf, visiting Italy, Turkey, Croatia and Greece
  • Went to Korea for the first time in my life, with my mom
  • The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking a 108-year long drought and endless memes
  • An orange baked potato reality television personality inexplicably won the presidency of the United States of America
  • A fuckton of people died from senseless gun violence

Continue reading “Things that have happened since the brog’s been down” →

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
photo courtesy: Matt Altmix

As excited as I am to have my brog back up and running, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about how absolutely none of this happens if not for my brother.  For pretty much as long as I’ve known him, he’s been the rock in which my internet presence has always existed upon, and he’s literally hosted almost every iteration of my site(s) going on three decades now.

Back in like 2000, before my original webhost expired, he volunteered to host a mirror of my original site.  Eventually the subscription lapsed, and then the mirror became the primary.  As a joke, he purchased the domain needelsischeating.net to also point to my site, but then because I was poor and stupid, I let my domain lapse, get cybersquatted by eBay, and then needelsischeating.net became my primary domain.  Eventually, I would register totfc.net, which for those of you who don’t know, stands for TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN because when it comes to actual blogging, I firmly believe that is what I am, and it would become the domain I’ve had since, and my brother hosted it the entire time, all the way from when it was a catch-all site for a lot of all my internet bullshit, to when in 2010, I switched it to a WordPress, because I realized that the brogging was really the only thing I actually cared about.

It was a sad few years when the brog went down, because life gets in the way, and he had moved from North Carolina to Louisiana and then finally to Bratislava, and naturally, servers need to physically move as well.  And he had things going on in his life, as I had things going on in mine, as does everyone, so getting the site back up definitely sat on the back burner for all of us.

But with my daughter on the way and eventually having arrived, I always felt that I wanted to have my brog back up, because one, it was a logical and desired project for me to work on while I was out on paternity leave, but two, given the fact that I’ve definitely got plenty to say about being a new dad, and raising a baby in the midst of a pandemic, I really wanted to have an outlet in which I could actually share my thoughts, emotions and experiences to anyone who might want to stumble across and find my blatherings one day, if not my daughter herself, hopefully when she’s like 23, grown-up and capable of understanding and comprehending the words I’ve slapped onto the internet.  I mean, I’ve been brogging for 20 years now, who’s to say I won’t be doing it when she’s that old?

And as he always does, my brother came through, and took the time to dust off all my old shit, put it back up online, and put me into a position to where I could resurrect the brog.  I could’ve just picked back up from where I last left off, but I figured now was as good of time as any to try and at least remain somewhat in the present in terms of platform, and almost all of my free time over the last three months have been spent working away at this task, which brings us back to today.

I love him more than Floridians love Publix chicken tender subs, Philadelphians love Wawa, and more than he loves Bojangles.  And I want him, and all of my zero readers to know that, that I treasure his brotherhood, friendship and companionship, and that I thank him every single day for being the brother I never had, and hosting my decades of internet nonsense that really doesn’t mean anything to anyone except for me.