Tag: angst

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. 😢

Don’t know what to do with free time when I have it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I could’ve written this last night.  Or the night before.  But instead, I’m writing it now, under the challenge of wanting to knock out something before I have to go wake up my child from the first nap of the day, because I’m feeling like I haven’t really accomplished anything productive over the weekends that I pine for during the week, but have no idea what to do when they finally arrive.

So I close my work laptop on Friday afternoon, and spend the rest of the afternoon playing with my daughter until it’s time for her to go to bed.  Bath time, and then bed time, and after she’s asleep, I finally have some free time for myself for a few hours, before I go to bed at a conservative hour because I’m up at 6:30 am every single day and I don’t want to bone myself just because I want to stay up late just because it’s the weekend.

I don’t really do anything at all.  I sit at my laptop watching random YouTube clips of chiropractor cracking, Initial D, and the seemingly endless parade of rehashed Parks & Recreation clips.  Actually, I take that back partially, I watched the first two episodes of WandaVision, which I think it’s too early to tell how I feel about it, except that I’m able to stay in the game with it unlike Legion, but both episodes combined were about 45 minutes once you factor in the 14 minutes of ending credits in the first two episodes.

Before I know it, it’s 11:07 pm, it’s too late for me to watch anything else, but it’s still a hair earlier than I’d rather go to bed, so instead I lay in bed playing Fire Emblem Heroes or doing surveys for pennies on my phone until it’s time to go to bed.

Saturday was a pretty good day, as I like to tie in little excursions amidst caring for my child throughout the day and in between her naps, so that we can all feel like we’re actually leaving our house, even if it the vast majority of places are contactless or curbside pickups.  We tried a new restaurant, ran some errands with no complications, and I heard from a friend that had been on my mind lately.  I felt in such good spirits, I felt as if I should capitalize and buy a lottery ticket, since the Powerball was up to $640M, and why the fuck not.

Baby goes to bed, and then it’s really more of the same – I don’t really know what to do, so I end up sitting at my laptop dicking around, feeling like I should at least watch something, hemming and hawing for way longer than most people typically do, and then watching the last two episodes of Lovecraft Country that I hadn’t seen, except my heart’s not really into it, and I ultimately end up thinking it’s just kind of okay.  Now it’s 11 pm, and I’m thinking of retiring so I don’t kill myself at 6:30 the next morning.

Which brings us to today.  Instead of the one nap I give myself while baby naps (that was done on Saturday), I go ahead and get my every-other-day run out of the way.  I pre-prepare a recipe that mythical wife and I hope will be baby-friendly, and now I’m sitting here thinking that I’ve let a large portion of the weekend go to waste, and musing at the simple fact that I don’t really know what to do with my free time whenever I do have any.  I could watch television or movies and chip into the queues that have bloated to gargantuan proportions, but then I often times get choice paralysis and then end up shutting down from overstimulation, and instead wishing that there were just more 90 Day Fiance or My 600 Lb. Life to watch instead, which are the only shows that I really truly stay up on top of.

But that’s where I’m at now.  I just don’t really know what to do with my free time, and that alone is enough to make me anxious and wordy but not do anything about it.  It just becomes a topic for me to mindlessly brog about to consume 25 minutes in a manner that doesn’t feel like completely a waste.  Then soon will be time to wake up my child, and proceed with her day, and if she’s fussy or cranky, then I’m guiltily counting down the clock until the next nap to when I can have some free time that I don’t know what to do with, and then the cycle continues until it’s time to go to bed and then a larger cycle continues.

It sounds way more depressing than I actually feel, but when I try to look at things objectively, that’s really how it kind of looks.  But at least I hit the Powerball three times, so I’ll get back a whopping $12 on my $20 investment.

The 100 Push-up Year (~ish)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was easy for me to remember, since it happened during last year’s National Championship game, but I started on what I had discovered was the 100 Push-up Challenge, where I had to do 100 push-ups a day for 30 straight days.  It seemed attainable enough, and I’m always game for ways to improve my physical well-being in simple and cost-efficient ways.

In short, I succeeded in doing 100 push-ups in 30 days, realized some physical shortcomings in how sore I got from the start but then finding some marginal gains throughout the month, and I was pretty pleased by the free gainz gotten from what was basically a fairly basic exercise regimen for a month.

Naturally as the creature of habit that I am, I decided to why stop at 30 days, and just soldered on to see if I could make it an entire year of doing 100 push-ups every single day.  The last thing I wanted to do was to stop cold turkey, and if I ever decided to pick it up again, end up being sore as shit all over again, so why put myself in a position for that to ever be the case?

So, one year later, and I can successfully say that I did my 100 push-ups (almost) every single day.  I unfortunately have to add that almost, because there were some days in which I slipped up and simply forgot to do them, or worse off, I started doing them, but then didn’t finish all 100, to which I still count as a loss.

The funny thing is, even in the hectic period that was the birth of my child, I still did my 100 push-ups, on the cold hard floor of the hospital in the recovery room of my wife.  Newborn baby or not, I was still determined to not let the challenge rest, as long as I could still remember to do it.  It wasn’t until after the baby was home, and then I was adapting to the brave new world of being a new father, working from home, and staying there because of coronavirus, did I have the occasional slip-up and simply forget and fail to do my push-ups.

  • Statistically, my first slip-up happened on March 13, 60 days after starting 100 push-ups a day
  • The longest continuous stretch of push-ups was 132 days, starting on May 23, and ending on October 3
  • On November 5 and 6 were the only consecutive days in which I failed, and worse off, both were days in which I did 60 push-ups earlier in the day, but then forgot to the remaining 40 later on

Overall, I had nine days in which I failed to do 100 push-ups, so in the grand spectrum of the year, I had a winning percentage of .975 which is pretty outstanding, but in the grand spectrum of high-expectations Asian father, it was still pretty unacceptable to have anything short of 100%.

For the first few months, I alternated between doing flat palm push-ups and dumbbell push-ups, but eventually I scrapped the dumbbell ones, because I didn’t feel they were giving me enough variation and I thought they were easier than flat palm, and frankly to me easy = less effective.

Throughout the year, I’d also change my intervals periodically, going from 34, 34, 33 to 50, 50, and every few days do like 10 sets of 10, or four sets of 25.  But towards the end, and up to the last few days, I’ve been doing 70 and 30, just to really push myself by doing 70 in a row, which never ever really got easy at any point.

Frankly, doing 100 push-ups a day was never easy, and if it wasn’t physically tiring, it was just a pain in the ass to do on some days in which I just didn’t feel like doing them.  But what really got me through it a lot of the times why I’m using the image above, was I’d think about that scene in Unbreakable Kimmy Schimdt, where she talks about how anyone can endure anything for ten seconds, and tell myself that anyone can endure ten push-ups, so when I’d count my push-ups, I’d do loops of ten, while mentally keeping track of how many tens I’d do before stopping.

Some days it worked better than others.

Ultimately, what I had hoped was that this would be a great exercise to do to supplement my gym routine, but seeing as how I have not been to the gym since March 10, 2020, I have no real idea how the physical results have been.  I’ve lost weight despite not at all dieting throughout the year, which means I’ve lost muscle mass, which is obvious because some of the shirts that were flatteringly snug in the arms aren’t even close anymore.  Frankly, the push-ups have been the only thing that have probably kept my arms from atrophying entirely over the year, and I impatiently wait the day in which I can actually go back to a gym and lift some weights again.

Either way, (almost) one entire year of doing push-ups every single day.  Not sure how this would have transpired if we weren’t in a pandemic, and my days probably would have had a lot more variables and outside-the-home happenings, but regardless, I succeeded in doing push-ups every single day at a 97% clip.  Not too bad, and one of the few things that’s kept me relatively physically active.

And for lack of wanting to regress, I’ll probably keep going, as best as I can.

I want a machete

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Actually, I should rephrase that headline: I am getting a machete.

I’m not particularly fond of doing any sort of yard work or landscaping.  The idea of having a nice-looking property is, nice, but I don’t particularly want to put forth the effort in doing it myself, and I don’t particularly want to pay what I feel is outlandish rates and be locked into contracts with a landscaping company to have someone else do it for me.  So it usually ends up with me doing the bare minimum to have a remotely passable yard, as in the grass remains cut, and the edges are barely maintained, but there’s not much in terms of fresh mulch, neat little accents or any of the small things that make yards look pretty.

But when things become what I think are necessity, then I guess I’ll go ahead and put a little more effort into things.  I have some shrubs that really need to be tamed, because I’ve literally watched squirrels use them as a springboard onto my physical home and for those that know me, I fucking hate squirrels, and the idea of them infiltrating my home now makes me feel homicidal, so I need to nip this in the butt before it becomes problematic.

Furthermore, my property is adjacent to county-owned land, so in some regards it’s nice to not have a neighbor on one side of my house, but in the other hand, the county doesn’t particularly do a good job of maintaining public land, so there’s a good bit of brush and wild growth that has encroached onto my property that needs to be tamed as well.

Needless to say, it’s more work than a trimmer and blower would be capable of doing, but I don’t want to spend the money to get some power tools for what is basically amounting to a single job.  Frankly, in my mind, a good afternoon with a machete is what I really need, so I went online and ordered, a machete.

It’ll be interesting when it gets here, because I’ve never actually used a machete for its intended purpose, and only known of them for fantastical scenarios of killing zombies.  In my mind, it’ll be a gratifying, satisfying and a stress-reliever of an activity, hacking away at wild plants and shrubs, while at the same time bringing order to my property and gaining land back from the county.

But I know there’s an equally strong chance that I am underestimating the whole task, and that ten minutes in, I’ll find that a machete isn’t that efficient, or that there are some plants that are far too thick for a machete to be of much use, and I’ll be exasperated and disappointed with the results, throw in the towel, and end up springing for some power tool(s), and just be behind on my anticipated timeline of getting this task done.

I won’t know until I try though. The machete is en route, and pretty soon we’ll see if it’s everything I hoped it would be, or if I’m going to regret making this decision, and be angsty about the time and money wasted.

New Father Brogging, #028

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Originally, I thought about writing about how teething was the worst thing ever when it came to raising a baby for the first time, but I’m pretty sure my new dad brogs #28, 27 and 26 were probably about the subject of teething, so I figured I’d lay off that topic for a minute.  But it was going to lead up to how parenting for the first time genuinely feels like a bell curve of difficulty, as so many other parents have told mythical wife and I that “it gets easier!” in time, but I’m pretty sure that the people telling us this had long forgotten what the teething experience was like.

Frankly, the first two months or so of parenting weren’t really at all that difficult except for knowing that your sleep habits become more like fragmented shifts, and that your entire life is spent on your tiptoes making sure that your baby is breathing, eating and alive more or less.  But during the daytime, my kid was mostly asleep in the Mamaroo next to me while I worked remotely, and I still have fond memories of simply turning my head and seeing my pride and joy blissfully sleeping while I was trying to maneuver through my work days and pretend like I give a shit.

Once the first sleep regressions hit, the stress ramped up, but settled down fairly soon, once new routine had been established.  As I often say, routine and repetitions are the lynchpins to success, and it very much applies to parenting as well, because once you establish and reinforce, things get easy, that is, until it’s time to scrap everything and start all over again, which I’ve learned is basically the basis of raising a child.

Teething though, that’s stuff of nightmares, made worse by the simple fact that the timeline of it is basically several years, based on the pace in which a child’s teeth begin to come in and grow.  Sure, as they age their pain tolerance begins to develop, but man those first few teeth, and the pain and suffering they put my child through, lord almighty, I’d do just about anything to take that kind of agony away from my kid.  And that’s only four teeth out of the estimate 20 that kids usually have.

But we’re not going to talk about that kind of minutiae of new parenting, as recently was something of a high stress point in my life as a new dad. 

A few months ago, we introduced my daughter to eggs.  It was not a particularly good introduction, as we were met with projectile vomiting, runny diarrhea, and all sorts of skin breakouts.  Embarrassingly, it took more than a day for us to realize the outlier in her diet that suddenly caused all of this, but once we identified that it could potentially be eggs, we immediately took them off the table.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #028” →

A sad reminder of how much I miss the gym

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A week ago, I ran 13.1 miles to fulfill the obligations of the Disney Dine & Dash Wine & Dine Half Marathon that mythical wife and I signed up for months ago.  We were itching for redemption to run it this year, as we had to bow out the year prior with lots of sour grapes on how runDisney handled it, because of a little unexpectedly quick turn around on pregnancy, but we signed up for it in 2020, thinking we would have our opportunity to redeem ourselves as well as introduce our little one to her first Disney trip.

Among other things ruined on account of coronavirus, this too was denied to us again for a second year, but we opted to stay registered and run our half marathons virtually.

Mind you, in spite of having obligations of a half marathon, I’ve basically been living on auto-pilot for large swaths of the year, and I hadn’t really done any proper distance training leading up.  I run regularly, but only around three miles per run, mostly for maintenance and health purposes, and not necessarily with a distance goal in mind.  Regardless, because I was planning on doing run/walk, I was still confident that I would be able to pound out 13.1 miles without killing myself.

Sure, some preparation probably would have made things easier, but I did just that, and finished my half marathon’s distance without dying.  I admittedly hit a wall a little faster than I had hoped, and by mile 10 I was running out of gas pretty quickly, and my right calf was telling me that it was very unhappy with my choices in life, but I still finished, and under my goal time of 2 hours and 30 minutes to boot.

I figured I would be in pretty rough shape afterward, seeing as how such was usually the case whenever I’d done any prior 10K or 10-milers in the past, with training, but the following day, it was nothing more than the atypical tender quads and achy ankles, leading me to be quite satisfied that I wasn’t a complete train wreck of a physical specimen after having not been to the gym in literally eight months.

A day ago, as is something that always has to be done this time of year, I went outside and raked leaves, as I have three very large trees on my property, and therefore have a metric fuckton of leaves to have to rake.  It was a massive pain the ass last year, as I had but a cheap wire rake that I had procured from Amazon, so I decided to not be a cheapskate and get myself a real, effective rake, even if it meant that I had to leave my house and go to a Home Depot to buy one. 

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New Father Brogging, #026

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife and I were playing some games online with our friends because we’re still very much immersed in pandemic ‘Murica and this is how things are done these days in order to be safe, and as we’re in between games, the topic of conversation goes towards what television shows everyone is watching.  Talking about The Mandalorian and Utopia among other shows, and how some of us might like them, or if they’re not any good at all, etc.

But mythical wife and I haven’t really seen or finished any of them, because we don’t have time.  Story of parenthood now.

We then start talking about video games; mythical wife and I just started playing Man of Medan, and gotten maybe three hours into the game, before we realized it was midnight which might as well have been 3 am for new parents like us, but reality sunk in that we weren’t sure when the next time we’d have a chance to play more of the game, because we just don’t have time, the perpetual story of parenthood now.

Even playing Jackbox games with friends for an evening means not having the opportunity to do another thing that we may or may not have wanted to do with what limited free time we have available to us, because as the story of being new parents go, you just don’t have much of it, because the primary meat of our time is spent raising our infant child and putting her needs first and foremost above everything else.

I do not have a single iota of regret for having a child and I love my daughter more than anything else in history, but as the objective of these new dad brogs go, is to express the realities and genuine thoughts that I have going through my own personal journey as a first-time father, and the reality is that I just don’t have a lot of time, like ever, for myself anymore, and that part is something that’s always going to be a tough pill to swallow, especially in conjunction to our lives pre-children, where we’d sometimes have nothing but time to sit around and literally do nothing at times.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #026” →