Tag: angst

I clearly give off a fuck off aura

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, there was an all-hands meeting at work.  I went down to the conference room early so that I could have my choice of seat, and I chose this chair next to wall, but in the front row so it looked like I wasn’t a complete degenerate, planning on dicking around on my phone throughout the entire meeting.  After all, appearance is everything, so I’m often told professionally.

As the clock ticked closer to the start of the meeting, and seats began filling up, the seat immediately next to mine remained unclaimed, regardless of how full up the room was getting.  By the time the meeting started, there were at least 10-15 people who were standing against a wall, while the seat right next to me remained vacant.

In fact, not only was the seat next to me vacant, the two seats immediately behind me were also empty, creating this perfect three-seat halo around me of empty seats.  Had this happened on an airplane, I’d be over the moon, because that’s like the broke boy first class, getting a bunch of seats around you left open.

However, this was not an airplane, but a conference room where everyone had free choice on where they wanted to occupy for the duration of the next hour, the fact remained that three open chairs immediately surrounding me remained open, with numerous people preferring to remain standing, as opposed to sitting near me.

The low-hanging fruit is that I clearly must smell bad, or emanate an odor that is unsavory to people I do not know, but among my friends and those people who actually take the time to get to know me, most have no problem sitting in close proximity to me, so I’m (hopefully) able to take the stinky hypothesis off the table.

So the only logical conclusion at this point is that I have fuck-off aura, that is as potent and overpowering as an anime or video game character, at compelling people to stay the fuck away from me.  Not that I necessarily mind the space that people give me, it gets to the point where I begin to ponder about the appearance of everyone fucking-off from me, and unfortunately perception is reality, and it probably does me little good to look like a person that everyone else wants to stay away from.

I do not apologize or feel the need to disclaim that I have the male equivalent of resting bitch face, and that I look pissed off as my neutral state of existence.  There are times in which such is the case, but even when I feel as if I’m having a good day, I understand that the expression on my face is that of experiencing the absolutely shitty state of transportation in Santorini, Greece.  But people, including my own mother and mythical wife, often implore me to fake it and smile every now and then, which isn’t necessarily bad advice, but faking it, and faking a less miserable expression is tiring and requires more effort and fucks than I’m willing to give, especially in this day and age.

This was not an isolated incident as well.  I have all sorts of memories in my life where relative strangers typically have demonstrated a noticeable aversion to sitting near me, and this isn’t even the only incident off the top of my head in my own office.

There was once a team meeting, that was especially packed on this particular day, and every single seat was taken, except for the one right next to me.  I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself at the notion that even within my own team, my fuck-off aura struck again, and the only seat to remain empty was the one next to me, and this was among a lot of company who kind of knew me, as we were in the same department.

And to add insult to injury, one of the few people in my company that I am not particularly fond of, they meandered into the meeting late, as is customary for the narcissistic asshole they are, but they did a quick scan of the room to look for a seat, and they put themselves into a situation where they were seen scanning, which meant that they had to take something if it were available, and so I had to end up sitting next to my least favorite colleague for the next 40 minutes, all because my fuck-off aura put us into this scenario.

Like I said, incidents like this have happened numerous times in my life, but it just so happens that it happened to a degree where I finally had the motivation to actually sit down and write about it.  And also like I said, I refuse to apologize and ask for forgiveness for looking mean and scary, and if people are unwilling to put their biases aside, then they really can go fuck off.

Dad Brog (#165): Can’t even see the end of the tunnel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As is often the case with a lot of the time I write under the Dad Brog tag, things are going a little rough these days.  In fact, it’s like the difficulty of my life is currently sitting at a 9 on a scale of 7, and I’m having a hard time of accepting that this is just kind of going to be the state of it, given all the circumstances around me.

Frankly, it’s not so much my children being the source of lot of my general stress and anxiety beyond the usual every day gripes of parenting.  Sure, they can be little shits when they want to, and their listening skills have a tendency to become questionable at times, but in this case, they’re kids.  A six and four year old, being a six and four year old; defiant, rambunctious, playful, but otherwise pretty normal as far as being kids go.

However, it’s my third kid, AKA my elderly dad who is undoubtedly the largest source of my general daily angst, frustration and reason why my mood gets tanked faster than anything else.  Frankly, this wouldn’t be classified as a Dad Brog if not for the fact that my own dad has basically turned into a third child for me, and is about as functional and capable as my six and four year olds, with the exception being that a lot of his inability to function has mostly been on account of his own choices, and not because he’s a six or four year old.

I struggle on a regular basis to not let my frustrations boil over and take it out on my dad, but it’s really fucking hard at times when the things I request and ask of him are never absorbed, never honored, and never respected.  And with the recent diagnosis of early signs of dementia, it’s like he’s got a permanent excuse to be inept and completely oblivious to my life or my needs, and that I’m basically expected to be available at his beck and call, because he can always just chalk up forgetfulness on account of signs of dementia.

What frustrates me a ton is the fact that he put himself in a position to let his brain rot and degrade to its current state, by his own life choices over the last 10-15 years or so.  He lived in isolation, he had almost no friends, he didn’t have any real hobbies, and he basically resigned himself to stop bothering to keep learning things in life.  It’s like he was in prison, except on his own volition, based on the life of low stimuli he put himself into and refused to get out of it.

Whenever I boil over from him blowing up my phone on a daily basis, in spite of me telling him to please not call me during work hours unless it’s an emergency, and he keeps calling anyway, because whenever he gets bored, lonely or depressed from the shit life he bestowed upon himself, he dials me up, and it makes my blood pressure immediately elevate at hearing my phone go off because I know it’s most likely going to be my dad, and I wince like OJ Simpson in court whenever I confirm that it is.  But when we do speak, everything I state or ask or more often than I care to admit, chastise, the response always starts with “no, but…”

Pretty much everything I suggest or try and convey is met with no, but, or some other form of pessimistic nihilism, and if anyone has ever wondered why I might have such characteristics, then this is most likely where I am getting it from.  However, the difference is that I’m still clear of mind and often times police myself, and try my best to not have such a tone and scare everyone because I’m like a big fucking chupacabra that scares people really easily apparently.

But I also get a ton of resistance and questioning from everyone else in my life, be it my own children, and people I work with.  My kids question everything, and not always in the good way, but more like when I ask them to do something they don’t want, it’s always met with great resistance, and feet dragging, and complaining.  Any time I try and flag something as (obviously) needing clarification or push back or some factor that’s coming from a place of pursuing efficiency and less wasted time, I’m the one who gets tagged as being difficult, glass half empty, or just plain fucking negative.

People like to label me as overly negative or pessimistic, but the truth of the matter is that I’m surrounded by it, and I’m the asshole if I become a product of my surroundings. 

And this is where I am currently, sick beyond words at how exasperated and exhausted I am of everyone questioning me, complaining to me, resisting me, and just not giving me any modicum of respect.  I don’t feel as if anyone alive these days respects my opinions or my time, and unfortunately I don’t really anticipate much of this is going to change in the indeterminate future.  I see no light at the end of the tunnel, which is a really shitting feeling to feel, but with my life basically being a glorified babysitter and caregiver, there’s pretty much no time for anything else; believe me, there are a lot of things I’d like to do, like set up an old laptop to be a good emulator machine for a lot of retro games I feel like playing, or exploring the potential gold I could be sitting on with some of the CIB video games that I have, but there simply just isn’t enough time left each day for me to do anything that I want, beyond maybe catching up with exercise, going off brogging a rant, or watching 1-3 episodes of Batman the Animated Series, depending on how much sleep I want to sacrifice.

I can’t really go to bed sooner than I do, because one of my kids is a problematic bed wetter, and I try to take them to the bathroom in the middle of the night to empty out their bladder to reduce the chances of a wetting episode, with it being a cautious game of chicken to not go too early in which there’s a lot of time left overnight for a wetting episode to occur, or going too late, and for there to already being a wetting waiting for me to have to fucking clean up in the middle of the night instead of 6:30 in the morning.

It would just be great if my life didn’t have to be so fucking insufferably hard, all the god damn time, and frankly it would just be great to have something to look forward to, because there’s a real lack of that in my world these days, and so I’m just kind of going through the motions at times, which is really unfair to my kids.

But for reals though, I really need my life to stop being so sucky more often than it is, and get me back to a position to where there’s more to look forward to in the day, than dreading.

I’ve never had an April that has sucked more than this year’s has

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Even in the most curmudgeon periods of my life, I’ve always kind of held my breath and walked on eggshells whenever it’s come to the month of April.  Seeing as how it’s the month in which my birthday is, I’m always cautiously optimistic that they can’t possibly suck that much, seeing as how there’s a very concrete day in which the world is obligated to not be too much of a dick to me on, and I always hope that the grace of a birthday has a tendency to permeate through as much of the rest of the month as the fates are willing to grace.

Sure, I’ve had some shitty things happen in Aprils before, and history has shown a predisposition for some real bad shit to usually happen around the time of my birthday, but save for large swaths of the world crying, memorializing or mourning the departed, most of the time I can usually rely on my birthdays themselves to not be the worst days in the world.

Throw all that shit out the window this year, because not only was a really fucking sick on my birthday this year, it’s not a far stretch to say that I’ve basically been sick all throughout the month, and the fact that I can’t seem to get back to being 100% healthy has been mentally challenging, frustrating and demoralizing, especially since I feel like I could handle or have handled a lot of the frustrations of the month better than I have, had I had my health to rely upon to be in good standing through it all.

It’s like, #2 and I caught a cold of some sort early on in the month, that I remember taking almost an entire week off from the office and worked remote, and I kind of got better.  But it’s like neither of us truly got fully recovered from that sickness, and by the time I hobbled back home after my week of exile back up in Northern Virginia to clean up my old joint, both my kids had ear infections, and within a week, such had passed onto me, leading to me spending my actual birthday in a lot of pain and misery of having an ear infection that went undiagnosed by the first urgent care I went to because they suck, leading to me to suffer throughout it for several days afterward before I went to get a second opinion, and confirmation that I had some shit going on.

I’ve never had an ear infection in my life before, so let me just say how much it sucks to get one for the first time.  The feeling of a swollen or burst ear drum, the constant throbbing and being able to hear my heartbeat, the sensation that it’s like I permanently have an AirPod in the ear with noise cancellation on, because I’m hard of hearing through it.  And before I got put on antibiotics, the main was just so dull and persistent, and was absolutely handicapping when I wasn’t on some sort of painkillers.

Furthermore, ear infections are usually byproduct of bad colds, and it’s like I’ve had this one, or maybe two colds all month long, and although I mostly feel fine, it’s one of those bugs where it’s left a Chinese Great Wall of mucus in my chest and sinuses, that is taking its dear sweet fucking time in going away, resulting in a lot of aggravated coughing spells, which is wreaking havoc on my sleep and my wife’s sleep, and I haven’t felt like I’ve gotten adequate sleep almost throughout the entire month.  It’s been like an entire decade since I’ve had this kind of phlegmy misery, because I remember how much is sucked back then, and how much it sucks to have it again now.

The bottom line is that I just can’t seem to get healthy, and it sucks that basically the entire month of April has come and gone with me being sick throughout most of it.  And to add insult to injury, there’s been all sorts of bullshit happenings between my dad, the workload at work, my dad, all of the shit I have to do for my dad, the disappointment of trying to accomplish things but relying on the responses and communication of others, and of course, my dad.

As is often the case, I feel as if I’m being pulled from all sides from everyone in my life, leading me to grow frustrated and wish people would just take the reins and run without having to review everything with me first, and that I’m taken for granted on such a monumental level by pretty much everyone in my life.

And because as much as I’d like to memorialize these folks with individual posts but don’t really feel like I have the energy to do it in remotely a time-sensitive manner, some dudes I enjoyed or revered kicked the bucket this month, just to hammer down the notion that April this year sucked goat ball sacks.  But Darrell Sheets from Storage Wars apparently killed himself, with there being tremendous speculation that it came at the urging of a psychotic online bully stalker.

And although there wasn’t as much scandal behind a 91-year old man with dementia passing, Roger Sweet, the creator of He-Man passed as well, and this is one of those situations where there’s no hyperbole when I say a piece of my childhood just died, because I lived, died and breathed He-Man and the Masters of the Universe growing up, and it is truly sad to learn that that creator of such an iconic property of my childhood has left us.

Needless to say, this April has sucked colossally, and I’m relieved to see it nearing its end.  I try to not put too much stock into arbitrary windows of time, because there’s no guarantee May will be better than April for no other reason than it not being April anymore, but this past month has sucked so much that I’m willing to set my pessimism aside for just a little bit and hope that May doesn’t blow half as much as April of this year has.

More than anything, I just want my health back, and for my ear to stop ringing and to be able to hear like a normal functional adult again.  I feel like if I’m at least physically healthy, it will only help in enduring any other bullshit that might come along and is immediately made worse by my not feeling well.

I still want a re-do on my birthday though.  I haven’t opened any of the gifts I received yet, because I’ve been in such a negative headspace, that I don’t want the good intentions of any presents to be soiled by my negative headspace.

Crashing out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had just gotten home.  I was exhausted, in a lot of pain, and completely drained of just about everything needed in order to be a functional adult.  However, I decided to go get the mail before I went inside because I’m the only one in my house who ever gets the mail unless someone is expecting something, otherwise it will pile up and look like nobody lives in the property which I’m always paranoid of because I used to live in the hood and I know of all the little things to do to help reduce your property from becoming a target.

It was while I was trudging down my driveway did I see my shadow stretched out to look like a 17-foot slenderman, that I had the thought of how appropriate that visual is, because that’s probably what I should look like based on how much people in the world pull and tug and rely and lean so much on me, despite the fact that I really wish that such wasn’t the case and that everyone around me would just step up and make some fucking decisions on their own without needing me at all sometimes.

I came into my home, and was pretty quickly greeted by my eldest.  She welcomed me home, and I could already feel the tears welling up in my eyes.  #2 came shortly and by then I was already struggling to hide the fact that I was already crying.  My perfect little daughters, sometimes my sole reason for existing, wanting to show me things they drew, crafts they made at school.  #1 said to me before I got on the stairs, you should go rest now.

Great idea, I said to her.  I went into the bedroom, changed into sleep clothes, and plopped down in bed.  I couldn’t really stop crying and I have no idea when I actually fell asleep, but it was a miserable night’s sleep, waking up numerous times due to the pain from what I would eventually discover was a bad ear infection which wasn’t a surprise considering both my kids had it the week prior, in spite of urgent care brushing it off like it was nothing when I went to go see someone about it on my fucking ruined birthday.

Either way, it was about 10 hours in which I was in bed, sleep or not asleep, or whatever I’d call the fugue-like state of bizarre dreams, pain and tossing and turning because of the pain, and it was at around 5 am in which I decided to punt on trying to get any more sleep, and to get up and prepare for the day that I didn’t want to deal with after the one I had just gone through, but life and the passage through time stops for nobody, and I still had my kids to take care of and if I don’t do it pretty much nobody else will, so on with the show all the same.

As is the popular saying these days, I had really crashed out.  Ironic a little bit, because I had taken all of Wednesday off of work to spend the day with my dad to deal with a lot of dad stuff in order to not crash out when stacking it on with working remotely, but a crash out still occurred regardless, but not necessarily due to just my dad per say, as much as it was a moment in the day in which I had a number of duties and obligations concurrently swirling over my head, and I succumbed to the feeling of how much pressure there was on me.

Continue reading “Crashing out” →

The craziest part about all these distractions

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago as I was doomscrolling, I saw this one meme.  At this point, I can’t remember what it was about, whether it was Iran getting bombed, the rise of shitty gas prices (again), a bunch of dumb white guy CEOs biting into hamburgers, or whatever, but it went like, The craziest part about X is that [orange fuckface in the white house] is named in the Epstein Files over 3,000 times.

For whatever reason, this stuck with me, and I really began to actually think about recognize about all the shit going on in the country and across the world, that really are just a whole bunch of distractions to the fact that the sitting president of the United States has been named countless times in the Epstein Files.  And of course, not a single fucking soul is doing anything about it, and as much as I want to love my country of birth, I just end up hating it a little bit more each time I think about it and am reminded of such.

A few years ago, I felt like I had one of those life’s revelations that in spite of the constitutional right to have information, the media really does go out of their way to steer people away from thinking about bigger issues, and at the time, there was a big hullabaloo about the Washington Redskins finally agreeing to change their name, conveniently at a time where the country was in turmoil over coronavirus, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and just the ‘usual’ state of civil unrest.

That was probably the first time I really noticed and recognized a scenario of mass distraction like that, and despite the fact that I was like 40 years old, it felt like one of those naïve moments of realizing that the world isn’t quite as innocent and altruistic as we might want to believe it is. 

We are truly never too old to learn and realize new things.

Either way, that’s kind of where I’m at these days, feeling frustrated, disappointed, and generally mad at my country for being so simple-minded and easily distracted to bigger things.  Obviously, I knew nothing major was really going to come out of the initial release of Epstein Files, because Washington is a spineless and gutless swamp full of people with all the cards who would absolutely not narc on each other, and would sooner eat their young than to act in a manner that positions themselves contrary to the mutation of whatever direction-wing that the right has transformed into these days.

It’s almost flabbergasting the lengths that the current administration has gone to in order to get people not talking about the Epstein Files, and that the actual president of the country is named literal thousands of times in it, which is absolutely not a good thing, considering the context of just about everything else in them.  Like, the United States basically started a war, with Iran, in order to get people to avert their eyes somewhere else.  And then predictably, war-like conditions always result in a spike of gas prices, and for the people lucky enough to remain blind to World War 3, they definitely wouldn’t miss the escalation of gas prices on the homefront, and then they’re busy being miserable about that.

But honestly, it’s the fucking noise about the McDonald’s CEO and the wimpy bite he did, and the ensuing chatter and bullshit that has emerged from that, that has me feeling the most enraged.  Because there’s literally an unearthed horrific global pedophilia ring that was just revealed, but people would rather expend their energy debating and analyzing some rich asshole taking a bite out of a hamburger.

As much as I loathe all of the fucks in Washington that are keeping our entire country as the cesspool it’s been downgraded to, I have just as much vitriol and disdain for all the people in the country that fall for such elementary distraction tactics.

I digress though.  This is a topic that I really didn’t want to expend any energy on, because politics are all shit and I hate them, but it’s like when I’m on social media, and I see things that I want to comment on, where I can utilize the template of “the craziest thing about X is that [orange fuckface] is in the Epstein Files,” but I don’t want to deal with the rebuttals and responses of anyone who does live on that side of the fence, because their stupidity would undoubtedly be detrimental to my general state of mental health.

So to my safe little brog that nobody reads, where I can pop off about whatever topic I want, without there being any real chance for any recourse, even ones as inflammatory as politics are.

When it rains, it pours

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This past weekend wasn’t particularly the best, and it’s almost comical at all the nonsense that occurred over it that has put me into this semi-dilapidated mood that I’m actually applauding myself for holding it together and not go into complete crash out mode.

Friday started off bumpy on account of #2 being sick, still recovering from one of those stomach ailments that kids pass around like candy, and it’s still to be determined on if it’s going to hit me at some point soon, seeing as how it’s pretty formulaic in how the bugs incubate for 48-72 hrs. before blowing out, but at least she was on the mend, and obviously kept home from school.

I saw my dad on Friday, where we watched Team Korea get obliterated by the Dominican Republic, or at least the first three innings before it was very obvious things were not going to go the way we wanted, but that wasn’t a bad thing at all, as much as it was something to be expected.  It was good to see my dad and spend some time with him, but seeing him on a Friday was deliberate in the sense that I had no intention of seeing him over the actual weekend days, because I knew I’d be busy.

All the same, regardless of the random lunch time hour in which I drove up to him, I still got annihilated in traffic since Atlanta’s rush hour is 7 am to 3 am, and there’s pretty much no time in the day where there’s not red on the Google map somewhere.  I had also intended to give blood, because I’m altruistic like that and am not the least bit influenced by the $40 gift card incentive + free t-shirt, but the donation center I went to didn’t have a chair available for me, so there was an L there too, so although it was good to get in a visit with my dad, the productive things I wanted to accomplish additionally fell through.

As for the weekend itself, it was pretty much spent almost entirely deep cleaning my house, which left me feeling some things, because I absolutely want to have a clean home, and prior to the cleaning, it was in a state of such disarray, it fed into a lot of my general unhappiness and cluttered state of mind, because I was always in a situation where nobody but me was willing to lift a finger to put any effort into maintaining the home. 

But when the cleanliness of the home was reliant on someone else, everything gets done, but on their terms and not necessarily collaboratively with me, and I do feel a sense of bitterness that I don’t feel like my own household respects me enough to want to give a fuck about the home for my sake, until they need to give a fuck for their own purposes.

I’m talking about mass de-cluttering, filling up the entire bin with shit getting thrown out, shampooing carpets and clearing counters and shelves, and I’m glad that a lot of this shit finally got accomplished, but at the same time, I’m annoyed that this never gets done when I want to have an orderly home, and only gets done when it’s on someone else’s terms.

Such, were the resentful thoughts swirling through my head, as I worked basically sun up to sun down each Saturday and Sunday.

Except Sunday, I did have a little reprieve and a hard stop, on account of a localcar wrestling show that I was going to hit up with some of my friends.  It was a fun show, and I dropped a little cash to meet Shotzi Blackheart, since I’ve long been a fan of her and her work, and I was thinking to myself, for all the hard work and negative thoughts of the weekend, this was a pleasant way to wind things down.

But then when I’m pulling into my driveway, I’m looking at my car (I had taken the third car), and I can’t help but think it looks off-kilter.  I pull closer, and I see that the rear passenger tire is completely flat, and I’m like wtf.  My knee-jerk reaction is fear that the tire was slashed or something malicious, but cooler heads prevailed, and as I was examining the tire, I could see the silver of a nail that I had picked up, at some point on Friday, as it hadn’t been driven at all on Saturday, and over the span of the last 43 hours, it completely bled out.

Again, I have to applaud myself for keeping somewhat calm in spite of the obnoxiously inconvenient revelation, but we also had company over, and I didn’t want to be in a state of distress in front of a bunch of my wife’s friends.  But fortunately, the tire wasn’t in such a state where it couldn’t inflate, and I quickly deduced a plan to play some car Tetris the following day between mythical wife and au pair, and I could take my car to a local joint and hopefully get a patch, since the location looked like it might still be able to be patched.

However, those plans were derailed in the middle of the night as it became quickly apparent that #1 had caught the dreaded tummy bugs from her sister, and they had incubated and blown up, and at like 2:20 in the morning, I wake up to find my child standing next to my bed in discomfort, and I have to heap praise onto my eldest for keeping it together long enough to prepare for the unfortunate vomit party that began shortly afterward.  #2 just exploded like the kid from The Exorcist, in contrast, but the silver lining is that we did not have a repeat with #1.

Obviously, she was not going to school in the morning, but this did put a wrinkle in my hopes to get my car fixed.  And at 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the morning, it’s hard to have much coherent thought on pivoting, but I was ready to punt on car repairs for a day, because obviously my kid was a higher priority.

Fortunately, mythical wife called in, and with enough coverage between adults and kids, I was able to field the tire issue.  The drive there was tense, seeing as how I had a tire actively leaking air, and I could hear it hissing before I got into the car, but thankfully I made it to the Costco where I got my tires, dreading that they’d tell me that my 2-month old tire needed to be replaced for some bullshit reason.

After dropping off my car, I thought this would be the perfect time to treat myself after all the nonsense that I’d been going through, and get an iced coffee, since Costco food court iced coffee is surprisingly delicious, like maybe two tiers beneath a Tim Horton’s ice capp.  But naturally, for whatever reason, their machine was down or gone, but the point remains that I could not get what I was hoping to get.

Yes, that last one is about the first world of first world problems there could be, but hey, I’d been going through a lot of shit over the last few days, and I just wanted some fucking coffee.  Fortunately, the tire was an easy patch and without incident, and one of the two major red flags that I had to deal with was immediately wrapped up.

Either way, to add insult to injury, the headline of this post wasn’t just a figure of speech, because amidst all this bullshit, the weather decided to go full Georgia fake spring meme, and spontaneously drop into the 30s and 20s as the day progressed, with thunderstorms and freezing rain, so it quite literally was pouring during the worst events of this post.

I may have barfed out 1300 words summarizing how obnoxious the last few days have been, but again I want to pat myself on the back for at least having the gumption to not take it out on others, and not let it affect my blood pressure too much, but I’d be lying if it weren’t mentally, and physically taxing, seeing as how I’ve been getting even less sleep than ordinarily, in order to take care of sick children.

But it was just too much nonsense to not summarize and make brog content out of it, and here we are.

Nobody is more impressed with mediocrity than me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A day ago, I got my renewed passport in the mail.  I was very impressed at the turnaround on this, seeing as how I had applied for it a mere two weeks prior.  I’d been sitting on an email reminder to renew my passport from several months ago, but mythical wife and I had been kicking the idea around to go abroad for a vacation sometime within the next year, and the last thing I wanted was to have a passport on the cusp of expiration, and it causing all sorts of preventable complication later down the line.

A little over a year ago, I applied and received passports for both of my kids, and much like my own initial passport from eons ago, it was quite the nerve-wracking process of making sure I had birth certificates, proofs of residence, clothes, boots, motorcycle, etc.  In fact, when I got my very first one, I had to actually go into Washington DC to the passport office due to some reason I can’t remember, and even that was for a temporary, one-year only passport, all so I could go to fucking Toronto, of all places.

Either way, passports for my kids was like a turnaround of four months, and I’m proud of myself for having the wherewithal to have started as early as I did, so that they would be done for the cruise that we went on just months after receiving them.

When I expressed to my friends at how pleased I was that I got my renewed passport in just two weeks, like most of the shit I say to the group chat with most of my friends, it was met with silence, and then eventually some of my wiser guys blurting out that it’s not impressive since renewals are usually faster than getting brand new passports.

Yes, that may be the case, as I recall my last renewal taking maybe 6-8 weeks, but this was fucking two.  Even the passport office dot gov website had predicted a turnaround of like, end of March, which would still be more than sufficient to my potential summer needs, but then I started getting status update emails that already had tracking numbers and an expected delivery date of February 20.

I made a joke to my friends that we could all agree that just about everything in Washington is a putrid wasteland of process, corruption and bullshit, but whatever’s going on at Passport Services, I had just gotten a renewal done and delivered in just two weeks.  But like I said, crickets.

What I’m getting at is that it’s apparent that there’s nobody in the world more impressed with mediocrity than me.  I’m so nihilistic, so jaded, and so pessimistic about the state of America and the rest of the world, that when people in the world simply perform to their baseline job descriptions, I’m fucking over the moon.

Yeah, I know that my generally droll outlook isn’t necessarily the best looking or something to be proud of, but I can’t help it.  I get so disappointed when people fail to meet my expectations, the only seemingly adequate defense mechanism to adopt is to assume utter incompetence across the board, to where when people deliver mediocrity, my mind is blown away and it brings me great joy that there are occasionally competent people in the world.

And anyone who actually does go above and beyond for me, well, I had Yelp Elite status for like the better part of eight years because I was ready and willing to review a million stars to any businesses that impressed me with such.

Needless to say, while my friends might not be impressed with a two-week turnaround for a passport renewal, I was quite elated and impressed by it.  Maybe some robots have taken over working at Passport Services, because everything else in Washington DC is steaming hot bullshit, and I can’t imagine any possible other alternative to a task being done so exceptionally, than if it were done by artificial intelligence.