Tag: angst

I shouldn’t be stressed out about this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is the time of year when the thought of buying gifts is swirling around in the heads of many.  I know that I should really start getting ready to purchase things for the numerous people in my life that I’d want to give gifts to, and at least I can say that I’ve already started drawing up battle plans for things I think I’d like to try and get for others.

Conversely, I’ve been asked by several to provide a list of things that I’d want as gifts.  But no matter how much I try and think about things I want or even try to put together lists of things that I want, I simply can’t, and I struggle tremendously; mostly on account of the fact that when the day is over, I’m just a person who doesn’t have much of want, for well, things.

However that doesn’t change the fact that I’m still pressured to put together a list anyway, because I’m fortunate enough to have people in my life that care about me enough to want to get me things for the holidays, which puts me in a position of where I struggle and get anxious and stressed out because I just can’t think of reasonable things that I want, that aren’t like expensive $400+ power tools or wrestling belts.

Like, I can’t really think of a more stupid reason to get stressed and anxious about, oh, people want to buy me shit, why can’t I think of anything??

And yet, here I am, sitting in front of my computer when I should be working, with like 15 tabs open to various eCommerce sites, trying to think of anything at all that I’d really want.  It’s getting to a point where I try and delve into the things that I still do on a regular basis like run, and then I get choice paralysis, because there’s like 50 gozillion options of compression gear, socks and other things, and then I get frustrated and end up with nothing at all.

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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.

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The precise moment where the Braves fulfilled their destiny

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Top 4th, runners on second and third, nobody out.  The Braves had just taken a 3-2 lead on the Dodgers on a single by third baseman Austin Riley, and were in a prime position to bust the game open and put the Dodgers into a precarious hole.  Instead, in only a way that the bumbling Braves are capable of doing, they turn a scenario that has a high probability to score some runs into one where they commit three outs in mere minutes in a game where every single one of the first four innings felt like Star Wars trilogies in themselves, they took that long.

After Austin Riley got tagged out for the second out of a bang-bang botched run down, and then the Braves completed the colossal fuck up by harmlessly grounding out to end the inning, this is where I knew that the game was effectively over.  I’ve watched enough baseball in my life to recognize that when you give away opportunities to score runs that don’t cross the plate, Murphy’s Law dictates that the opposition will definitively, cash them in instead.  What probably should have been a 5-2 or a 4-2 score to end the 4th inning instead remained at a paltry one-run 3-2 score, which the Dodgers would easily grind away and overcome, while the Braves literally went three-and-out in every single inning except one throughout the remainder of the game.

The fuckup on the basepaths undoubtedly sucked all the wind out of the sails of the Braves, ruined all of their swagger and confidence, and most importantly, planted the undefeatable seeds of impending defeat into their minuscule brains.  The remainder of the game after that tragic sequence was all but a formality, and a contest of when, the Dodgers would eventually take the lead.

Frankly, the only reason why I watched the entire game was that I was hoping that the Dodgers would go to Kenley Jansen to close the game since he’s been pretty awful throughout the season and he would be the best chance for the Braves to maybe make some late-inning heroics as they’ve done numerous times throughout the year, but it turned out that the Dodgers didn’t trust Jansen in this critical game, and instead rode the hot hand of Julio Urias instead to close out the game himself.

Naturally, I’m sure anyone of my zero readers can see through the façade I put forth of being the world’s worst baseball fan when it comes to the Braves, and I spare a lot of words and drivel bemoaning them and deriding them, as if I had the mutant power to tempt fate to prove me wrong with writing, but in reality, there’s nothing more I would’ve wanted than to see the Braves actually not fuck up for a change, defeat the Dodgers and actually go to the World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays of all teams.

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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. 

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When your brain wants you to be sad, you’ll be sad

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I can’t shake it, but I often times find myself feeling sad.  A few weeks ago when I posted about wondering if I needed therapy, it really wasn’t one of those posts where I was trying to be humorous, it was more erring towards legitimate pondering than it was trying to be funny but I understand how it could be misconstrued considering the vast majority of the time on my brog I’m trying to be funny.

The thing is, I have no real reason to be feeling sad, too.  Sure, my paternity leave is over and I’m back to a job I’m often times feeling very lukewarm towards, but the reality is that I have a job, my mom is staying at my house and alleviating mythical wife and I of our biggest concern, which is childcare during the work days, and there’s a small sliver of normalcy starting to come back into our lives.  My child is healthy, often happy, and there are no adequate words to describe the happiness and joy that she brings to me, but whenever I get settled down and have the time and capacity to get into my own head, I can’t help but feel sad from time to time, and I really have no reason to be.

I think I’m generally unsatisfied with certain aspects of my life and it’s silly to think that I feel like a lot of things would improve if I were to win the lottery or find some way to take financial concerns off the table entirely, and whenever I get into my own head, these pessimistic and worrisome thoughts tend to permeate into my head and leave me feeling more blue than I really have any right to be.

I’ve been asking myself lately what I think would make me happy, and the answers that come up are often times further into the realm of impossibility, like being able to take my child out to certain places, because the world is fucking dangerous still because America can’t get their collective head out of their asses and put some fucking masks on for 2-3 months and eradicate coronavirus instead of waiting for a vaccine that large swaths of the country won’t take anyway because they’re anti-vaxxer dumb fucks. 

And then there are more realistic things, like wanting to make things with my hands, but that requires tools, materials, space, to which those require time, money, time and money, to which those are commodities in which I do not have a lot of to expend, because no matter what, my child will always come first.  By no means do I harbor any resentment towards my child for such reality, I wouldn’t have it any other way, but in the fleeting amounts of spare time that I do have, I feel like I want to do things that I just don’t really have the means to indulge in, at least not without a bunch of prerequisites.

In a perfect world, I have a workshop space, where I can create and do and build and explore things.  But in order to have that, I need to have money, to which I’m not struggling to pay bills or have a fairly normal life as it is, but I don’t want to take out loans for things that don’t add any true value outside of personal gratification, so this is where it would be nice to just win a lottery or something, just to jump start a lot of personal projects and to oh, quit my job while in the process.

But back to the point, I occasionally feel irrationally sad, and it doesn’t take a lot to trigger it sometimes.  It’s times like that in which I ponder on if I should seek therapy, which isn’t that easy of a decision for me to make, because my work insurance doesn’t cover any, and I wonder if I have the financial means to go out of pocket on it.  I’m not saying I want medication, quite the contrary, I barely like taking ibuprofen when I have a headache, but I don’t think it would hurt to know why my brain sometimes insists that I be sad, when I really shouldn’t have any reason for it.  My life is pretty good in spite of the dumpster fire ‘Murica is these days, but when the brain wants to be sad, it’s going to be sad.

New Father Brogging, #024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today marks seven months since my daughter was born.  Since then, she’s over doubled her birth weight and creeping closer and closer to ten inches grown.  She’s gone from being a NICU baby that struggled to feed from a bottle to being a strong independent infant that doesn’t need mom or dad to hold the bottle for her to wolf down a full feed in eight minutes.  She’s now eating solids, and has been a very good eater thus far, consuming pretty much everything we’ve put in front of her.

It’s difficult for me sometimes, to not get emotional over every little step she takes and the growth that we watch happening right in front of our very eyes.

But last night was a particularly difficult pill to swallow, as it was the first night in which mythical wife and I both slept apart from our child, as we have begun the transition into having her sleep in her own room.  Monitored, obviously, but sleeping in a room outside of ours.  The reality is that she has basically outgrown the Snoo bassinet that carried her throughout the first six months of her life, and she needs room to turn and maneuver, otherwise it leads to a very grumpy and unhappy fussy baby.  Combined with teething, it led to what was basically the worst sleeping week of our lives over the last week and change.

Gradually working in her crib for naps has proven to be working that she can sleep in the crib, and it’s proven that the crib and its space is proving beneficial to our child’s sleep, so we finally pulled the trigger and had a few test nights where she stayed in the crib overnight, while I slept on the futon in the room as a safety net.  It only took two nights to really prove that she was up for it, and as of last night, we had her sleep in her own room by herself for the first time.

It was hard to not feel emotional going to sleep myself, watching her on a monitor, instead of knowing she were mere feet away, and I would be seconds away from swooping in to get her if there were any sort of discomfort or need to physically pick her up.  I had some unpleasant flashbacks to the NICU days, where mythical wife and I only had the comfort of a webcam that had limited times in which it would be on, instead of 24/7 real-life accessibility as we’ve had over the last seven months.

Ultimately, we know this is for the best, and is the natural progression of growth for children.  Obviously, she was never going to be sleeping in the same room with us forever, and it was only a matter of time before she’d eventually be in her own room.  This was always part of the plan.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that it makes me all sad and emo-ey knowing my child is growing so fast and it feels like it’s only a matter of time before she’s asking me for $100 at a time so she can buy some frivolous crap, or will eventually be asking me for advice on which insurance plan she should be picking at work.

Seven months have flown by, and it’s going to be hard to not feel a little choked up when I have to pack up and move our $1,200 bassinet out of our bedroom and into storage.  As much as I’ll be glad to never stub my toes on the legs of it again soon, I’m going to miss like hell, the days of our sweet little warm baby sleeping right next to our bed.

New Father Brogging, #023

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

tommen jumping

This gif is precisely how I feel after my kid wakes up at 9:30 pm, 12 am, and 3 am to scream bloody murder for an hour each time.  Although we’ve narrowed the possible causes to a bad case of reflux or teething syndrome, it definitely seems to be more the latter, given the related symptoms going on.

At no point did any book, parent or any other resource tell me that teething was going to be this bad.  Teething is absolutely the worst thing that’s happened throughout my foray into parenthood, and there aren’t many ways to describe how much I’ve grown to hate the misery it puts me, mythical wife, and our child.

If teething were a person, and you locked me in a room with it, the baked potato and Adolf Hitler, and then gave me a gun with two bullets, I’d shoot teething twice.  I’d rank teething higher than coronavirus and Atlanta morning radio, as in things that absolutely suck.  I would rather have an entire week of one-on-two you-suck-at-your-job meetings than a single night of the hell that teething put me through the night prior.

Seriously, I could go on, but there aren’t enough words to express just how much I hate teething now.  Obviously it’s of no fault of my precious kid herself, but damn does it chap my ass to how much things are sucking, and having no expectation or warning that teething was going to be this bad.

There is no more feeling of being helpless and defeated than your kid wailing in agony at their little infant teef, drilling and boring upward to try and be out in the world, and us as parents who have little to no ability to do anything about it.  We’ve tried teething rings and other little aides, and as much as I don’t want to have to, we even tried infant Tylenol to try and dull the pain, but nothing seems to be working other than snuggling her until she tires herself out back to sleep, which usually takes anywhere from 45-60 minutes, which at 3 in the morning is about as appealing as getting on I-75 the morning when the baked potato is in town.

And this has been going on, off-and-on over the last few days, which now that both mythical wife and I are both back to working, is very much discouraging.  We already get less sleep than either of us would really want to be getting, but the one thing we’ve always been able to rely on throughout the last six month is that our kid has been a very good night sleeper, capable of sleeping through the entire night.  But now that’s been compromised, and we’re very much feeling frazzled and defeated on a nightly basis, as we have no time to really wind down and relax, without the anxiousness of worrying about if/when she’ll wake up unexpectedly, and we’ll be greeted via monitor of angry cries and screaming.

Suffice to say, teething has really been the worst thing about new parenting there has been.  I know that all babies are different, but as far as ours is concerned, I don’t think anything has been as painstakingly crushing as the teething experience has been.  I know this storm too, will eventually pass, and it’ll hopefully be back to some semblance of normalcy again, but until then, it’s a nightmare every single night.  And the fact that she’ll have like 30 teeth give or take to grow in, it’s only a matter of time before we realize that this will either happen frequently, or mercifully only in bunches.