Tag: old man

One of those my age is catching up with me moments

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I participated in this hot chicken tenders eating contest, because it was hosted by Willy’s, basically my favorite eatery in the entire city of Atlanta metropolitan area.  This is the same company in which I became the self-proclaimed Burrito King™ of Atlanta when I won a promotion they had where I had to visit and make a transaction at all 28 Willy’s locations within a 30-day span which I accomplished in four.

Well, the Willy who created my favorite burrito joint got into hot chicken, and has been slowly expanding his restaurant portfolio into the hot chicken game, opening a location of one of his new ventures not terribly far from where I am.  And then I saw that there would be a hot chicken tender eating contest, and I thought to myself, no better way to flex on the small world of Willy’s than to go and win another contest.

After all, being Korean gives me a natural +10 in spicy food tolerance, and what the fuck do white people know about spicy food anyway, so I figured it would be a layup to roll in, crush three hot chicken tenders in the span of six minutes and walk away with a little bit of swag.  Honestly, the photo on their wall of winners was probably the most important prize of all, because when it comes to fat guy accolades, showing my superiority at spice tolerance is something that I wouldn’t mind flexing on all the pleebs who can’t handle heat.

Anyway, I came, went and saw, and much like I knew I could, crushed the three hot chicken tenders in six minutes and walked away a winner.  This wasn’t a contest where there was a last man standing, but basically series of waves, where 10 people take the challenge on at a time.  Six people bounced in the first wave, and I was a part of the second wave where another five people dropped out from the heat.  I didn’t stick around for the third wave, because I had already proven my point.

Howlin’ Willy’s hot chicken was definitely among the higher tiers of spicy I’ve ever had in my life, but I will maintain that it was still not the spiciest thing I’d ever eaten either; that distinction goes to some nuclear pork I had in Seoul, where mythical then-gf and I had to tap and waste the food, and the retribution was fairly immediate.  But as for Willy’s, I definitely felt the heat through the challenge, but I was able to make it through without much difficulty.  The heat was slow acting, but after it burns, it burns off quickly, and before I left the shopping center, I was already back to feeling fine.

That is until the remainder of the day progressed, and I started to get hit with what I’m guessing was the mother of heartburn.  I don’t really know, because I really didn’t know what heartburn was supposed to feel like.  It wasn’t like indigestion pain, but just this really dull ache in my stomach that made me want to stop whatever it was I was doing, and just put myself into a position where I could apply pressure to my gut or be in a folded position where the pressure would alleviate.

Effectively, the rest of my day was ruined, because I couldn’t really get comfortable, and it impacted my ability to be present with my kids and physically competent to operate at a normal level.  I crushed a bunch of Tums hoping it would help, and I don’t think it really did.  After the kids were down, I ran to the store to get some Pepto, since the thought of something coating my insides was an appealing one, and by the time I went to bed, I probably downed a quarter of the bottle.

I’d never felt more relieved when the indigestion did hit, because it was finally giving my body the opportunity to purge the hot chicken from my body and not to get too graphic but boy did it feel as hot evacuating the body as it did burning my mouth earlier in the day.

Fortunately, a night’s sleep seemed to cure what ailed me, but before going to bed, I expressed that I felt a lot of regret for participating in a fairly meaningless contest, even if it was held by Willy’s.  The prizes were minimal, but the punishment I put onto my 40+ year old body was pretty vicious.

At first, I was just wondering if this was just my body reacting to ghost pepper, something I don’t really think I’d ever had before.  But the reality is more likely that this was a stark reminder of how I’m not the 25-year old that could eat whatever I wanted and shrug it off within hours.  Lesson learned that this was a situation where I could’ve been smarter and erred on the side of not punishing my body for a pretty useless reason.  Even for Willy’s, no matter how much of a fan I am of the brand.

Because swearing is so cool

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously, it is not lost on me that I do swear in my own writing and spoken vernacular from time to time, but it doesn’t change the reality that my attitude on it is that it’s still not cool when done to an excess, and especially when profanity is used mostly for the sake of it.  I think it loses meaning when it’s done too much, and I like to think that when I do it in my own writing or spoken word, it’s because I’m fired up about something, trying to be funny for ironic effect, and not just saying it because I have nothing else better to say.

That being said, I don’t particularly remember what I was doing, where I was or how I heard it, but I recently heard a song that was clearly a sampling of Eiffel 65’s Blue Da ba dee back from 1998.  Looking it up, it’s I’m Good (Blue) by David Guetta and Bebe Rexha, figures that I no particular qualm with, I like Guetta’s music, and I like Rexha’s general persona, and as a song, it’s not bad and I think it pays decent credit to the original song.

It’s just that my beef with it is the melody that repeats itself like what feels like 28 times:

‘Cause I’m good yeah, I’m feelin’ alright
Baby, I’mma have the best fuckin’ night of my life“

And so I’m hearing a big ass F-bomb over and over again seemingly, and each time I hear it, I feel like I lose a little bit more respect for the song each time, because I’m wondering to myself if it’s even so necessary to have it in the first place.  Yes, I know how old man this probably makes me sound, but frankly the excessive use of it makes me feel like the appeal of the song erodes each time it’s blurted out.

Which sucks too, because much like the original, I like the musical theme of the song, but this is definitely not something I can play around my kids, because much like me, I’m sure they’ll only hear FUCKIN over and over again, and knowing my luck this will be the one single word they decide to repeat.

Like I know that the rules of society change, and that a lot of standard profanity isn’t as incendiary as it used to be, at least in compared to a number of terms and slurs that have more bigoted meanings behind them, but there’s just something so sad and pathetic about having to hear the same f-bomb over and over again, and thinking that something like a song, as a whole, can still be considered to be remotely of high quality when it just sounds like it’s trying to make itself sound dumb by virtue of spamming cuss words because cussing is so cool to begin with

An introduction to One Piece, via Netflix

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that there was probably a small overlap towards the tail end of my weeby, anime watching days and when One Piece was introduced to the world, I never saw a single episode, read any manga, or actually learned a single thing about the entire franchise.

In itself that’s kind of a hard thing to do, given my general involvement in the anime, convention and nerdy communities, but over the years, no matter how big the property got, I never learned a single thing about it.

I knew solely based on artwork it had to do with pirates and the main character appeared to be some doofy looking guy with real gangly limbs.  But other than that, I had absolutely zero knowledge of the stories or any inkling of what the plot could be about.

Honestly, I never thought about watching it when the live action dropped on Netflix, because I figured my lack of familiarity of the anime would lessen my enjoyment perhaps.  That, and at any given point I have like 62 other shows and movies on a list that is my backlog that I should be tackling first.

But then it came to my attention that one of the key actors of the show was portrayed by the son of the late great Sonny Chiba.  The Son of Chiba.  Apparently he goes by the name Makenyu or something, but there’s no hiding the fact that it is Sonny Chiba’s boy in this show.  Honestly, I didn’t know he had a son, but considering his age and the fact that Chiba is about the manliest man of the east in history it shouldn’t be any surprise.  Regardless, it was enough to pique my curiosity and the circumstances lined up to where I figured I’d give the live One Piece a shot.

And I have to say, it was a rather pleasant debut season.  The story is pretty single, and they do a good job of rotating in various antagonists and delving into each character’s backgrounds at a pace that doesn’t feel dragged out.

The characters are all mostly delightful in the sense that it’s like at any given point their weaknesses are covered by another’s strengths and everyone gets some time to shine.  Luffy’s optimism and positivity is infectious, and it’s fun watching the growth of the Straw Hat Pirates coming together.

Son of Chiba is a badass as Roronoa Zoro, and I appreciate that in spite of how strong he’s portrayed there’s a tremendous amount of growth still with his character, and frankly such could be said about all of them.  Netflix did a decent job of ordering a sampler season that accomplished everything from a storyline, character development and wrapping it all up fairly nicely to not leave it hanging.

Needless to say, I’m a fan of the property, and I look forward to a future season(s).  If I had more time in my life, I’d considering turning to clock back to 2002 and delving into the anime and all of the films the series was able to spawn.  But for what it’s worth, for someone who had absolutely zero knowledge of One Piece, I think the Netflix series does a good job of being able to create interest and make new fans.

Dad Brog (#120): the 2023 Famiry Disney Trip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Typically, I imagine a lot of people look forward to taking a week off and going down to Disney World with their families.  But a lot of people also aren’t stodgy curmudgeons who is always financially paranoid and also knows just how much work two toddlers are regardless of how many adults are going to be involved in the trip, so personally it’s not so much that I was gleefully looking forward to taking a week off at the Happiest Place on Earth™ as much as I was just mentally trying to psych myself up for the sheer amount of, lift, that would entail on a trip as such.

I mean, two of the things that are basically atop of my general pet peeve list these days are crowds and being up against a clock, and Disney trips are typically nothing but dealing with gargantuan crowds and always being up against a clock since there are fast passes, lightning lanes, genie passes or whatever else that puts clocks on top of everyone’s heads.  Not to mention despite the fact that the weather is just now finally starting to cool off in Georgia, we head down to Florida, where it’s still going to be 90F+ every day, along with the daily Florida rains to contend with, and it’s like asking myself, why do we keep coming back to Florida over and over again?

Regardless, I don’t want to be a total curmudgeon that brings down those all around me, so I did my best to be optimistic that things were going to be okay, and I deliberately planned absolutely nothing at all for myself, since trips like these really are for my kids above all else.  Because if I had any real allusions that I would have any actual time for anything that I wanted to do, I would be cranky in the very likely chance that they did not occur.

Overall, it was probably for the best that I went into the trip with such gameplan, because by simply rolling with the general agenda that mythical wife had set up and just reacting to what was in front of me, I can say that I think the trip went well, I didn’t burn out too much, and most importantly, I think my kids had a really great time, and I can take some really positive and core memories out of the trip as a whole.

Sure there were a few moments where I get fried where I feel like I’m the only one watching the kids while everyone around me is constantly shopping or indulging themselves while the girls grow restless and cranky and I’m the only one seemingly caring, but frankly this is often the case regardless of if we’re in Disney or Florida or anywhere really.

It’s the moments where I’m with my kids and I see them getting enjoyment or having fun in ways that aren’t available to them back at home, that make trips like these worth it, no matter how much angst or frustration I deal with at any other point during them.  Seeing my kids’ faces light up when they meet their favorite (current) Disney princess, or they get to eat something that we normally don’t let them eat at home, these are the true core memories that emerge from a trip while any of the fleeting frustration or grumpiness about daily changing sleeping arrangements get dumped into forgotten memories by the end of the trip.

But my god, I think the pinnacle of this trip for me, was seeing just how mind-blown and enthralled both of my girls were, when they experienced the big slide at our resort.  I had no real intention of letting either of them go down it, thinking they were too young or too small to handle it.  I figured the baby slide that was like 6 feet and a gentle, straight slope would be the highlight of their trip, and they seemed to like it fine, going down it like 30 times each, with me catching them at the bottom of it every time.

Then I noticed that some kids not much bigger or older than #1 coming down the big slide, and I’m asking the lifeguard if there was any age or size restrictions on it, to which they responded that there weren’t, other than kids like mine needing life jackets for safety reasons.  I stood at the bottom of the slide watching kids come down, and sure enough it wasn’t long before not just #1, but #2 wanted to try the slide, so it was the moment of truth to see if they could handle it or not, since we had the au pair who could catch them at the bottom while I took them up top.

Surely, one or both of my kids would be traumatized, or be that kid at the water park who puts on the hand brakes and gets themselves stuck and makes a scene, right??  I let #1 down the slide first, and she did a little bit of braking for herself, but otherwise went down the slide without any other incident.  #2, I had more concern for, being smaller and fragile, but when I set her on her way, watching her go down the slide, the smile on her face, man, was totally one of those things where if I could bottle that kind of joy and enjoyment and sell it to others, I would be rich three times over.

After sliding down myself to get my kids’ opinions on the slide, they were absolutely beside themselves and practically begging to get back up the stairs and go down the slide again, and again, and again, to which the au pair and I obliged and took turns at taking them up while the other caught them at the bottom.

After the 6th or 7th trip down the slide, I’m asking myself, why bother with exorbitant admission into the parks, when they’ve clearly found the highlight of their trip from one of our resort’s amenities?

Either way, that was probably my favorite memory of this year’s Disney trip.  I know that in future years, things will continue to get easier as my kids grow, and their sleeping arrangements change and settle, and we’ll need less and less assistance, but I can still say that this year’s trip wasn’t nearly as exhaustingly clunky as the one prior.

But of course, nothing can go too smooth, and despite the fact that the travel was going fairly smooth, it naturally came crashing to a literal stop, as it wasn’t until we started getting closer to Atlanta did we start to hit catastrophic traffic not just once, but two times, once in fucking McDonough, which is basically like the Gwinnett County that’s south of the city instead of north of it, and then naturally there’s a great big old nothing-caused turd of standstill traffic traversing through the actual City of Atlanta.

And I still don’t know what it was, although I suspect it might’ve been an excess of sun exposure, but I got waylaid pretty hard at the very end of the trip, dealing with a fever and body aches on the drive back, as well as throughout the weekend concluding our trip.

Overall, I’d say the trip was still pretty good though.  Several good memories were made with my family, and fewer things snap me out of grumpy moods than seeing my girls being filled with joy.  One of these years I’ll actually get to enjoy Food & Wine again, but I wouldn’t trade fun time with my kids for anything, so no regrets with forfeiting something I’ve done countless times already for the comfort and safety of my kids.

Car Week: Is there anything dumber than putting Instagram handles on your car?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it’s a symptom of getting older, cars coming out of the box better, or a byproduct of where I live these days, but I hardly see any slammed (modified) cars anymore these days.  This isn’t to say they don’t exist anymore, I still see large groups of them every now and then on the roads or in a parking lot, but they’re clearly organized and don’t put themselves in the public eye as perhaps I once recollect, in Northern Virginia, where a stock Honda Civic or Acura Integra was about as rare as seeing a Ferrari in the wild.

But for the few instances where I see a noticeably slammed car on the road, I’ve also observed a trend that these car owners do that I’ve found quite puzzling, which is putting an Instagram handle on their rides.

Now it’s presumptuous to say that all people in slammed, riced-out cars are doing questionable, often times illegal vehicular behaviors, but let’s not kid ourselves either.  Whether it’s speeding, practicing power slides on public streets, burnouts in parking lots to illegal mods, emission-altering exhausts to tinted windows too dark, it’s usually people in slammed, riced-out cars doing it.

That being said, why in the world would people who occasionally exhibit in misdemeanor activity willingly put an additional identifier on their car that they can be possibly tracked down in the event that they’re seen doing dumbass shit?

Like I really don’t understand it; if you’re making videos doing burnouts or street racing or participating in a flash mob of other tricked out cars, and then putting it on your Instagram, doesn’t that make it even easier for cops to track and identify you?  Or say some rando is walking through a parking lot, sees your ‘gram, checks it out, and there’s videos of you racing or practicing donuts in a parking lot; and this rando just so happens to be a police, or reports your shit to the police, and now there’s an APB out for your ride.

Whatever though, even if these clowns had the wherewithal to sign up everything with dummy info, covers their plates before videoing themselves, and have gone through the trouble to minimize prosecution before putting their Instagram handles on their cars, they’re still pathetic in my opinion.  So attention-starved and narcissistic that they willingly go to the trouble to put an Instagram handle on their cars so that random strangers might possibly check them out online.

I’d really love to know the numbers of police busting people for car-related dumbass-ery on account of being able to track them from Instagram handles on their cars, because any number higher than zero validates the notion that it’s not really a particularly smart idea to advertise yourselves on your cars when you’re participating in some questionable public behavior.

I think I’m done gambling for a while

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I took a whirlwind, 24-hour trip to Las Vegas this past weekend, primarily to bear witness to one of my closest friends getting married.  I deliberately made the trip short, because I’m stingy with my PTO at work, mythical wife couldn’t come with me, and frankly there’s nothing good to come out of me having too much time in Las Vegas.  I’m already uncomfortable in my financial life these days, and trips like Vegas can be colossal hazards to anyone’s personal finances.

Still, short as the trip was, I made sure to tackle some of the things that I missed out on during my last trip during Labor Day, like hitting up Ellis Island, and visiting Sayulita’s, where I needed to try for myself one of the monster big ass burritos that I’d seen from their social media presence. 

And let me tell you something about this burrito pictured here, it was without question the largest burrito I’ve ever encountered in my life, and this wasn’t the biggest one on their menu too.  I waffled on the idea of going there, since I was still full from the post-wedding dinner that I got to indulge in, but I knew that if I didn’t go there, I’d be left with no real other food options except the one Shake Shack in McCarron Harry Reid which would be slammed packed from other travelers left with no other option, plus I would just simply regret not going when I was already in the city.  So I went, and even thought it was $20 after tax and tip, it definitely is more than $20 worth of food.

I wasn’t hungry at the time, but I ate a quarter of it before my flight, because I didn’t want to get hungry mid-redeye flight, and be that asshole unwrapping a monster burrito on an airplane and letting its aroma get all over the place.  After I got home and took a little bit of a recovery nap, I ate 3/4 of what was left before I felt like I was going to burst, and later in the day, I finished it off, and then I literally didn’t have to eat again for the rest of the day.

And it was fantastic, and every bit worth the trip off the beaten tourist path to go try them out.  Would definitely drop them a five-star rating on Yelp if I weren’t low-key salty about them not making me Elite status again for 2023.

But anyway, to get to the point of the title of this post, I think I’m done gambling for a while.  Not solely because I didn’t have a particularly good gambling trip in the small opportunities I had to gamble (I got pretty decimated, so much for wedding luck), it’s just that I frankly don’t have the bankrolls or the means to build the bankrolls I’d need in order to gamble as I’d like to in Las Vegas anymore.

I used to be able to stretch $500 to last a whole weekend in the past, but that amount barely kept me in the game for a single day this past trip.  Table minimums have risen across the entire Strip, and pretty much at no point does a table drop beneath a $15 minimum at any casino I’ve been to, from Harrah’s to Bally’s Horseshoe to Cosmopolitan to the Venetian.  And after like, noon, those “low” limits vanish and it’s basically $25 minimums anywhere and everywhere from there on.

Nice, manageable $10 minimums are an extinct relic on the Strip now, and that means a $100 buy in here or there just doesn’t last as long as they used to, not to mention that even at a $15 minimum, they’re harder to manage and round off to nice increments of hundos, and obviously such is done deliberately to more expediently part money away from us gambling schmucks in the first place.

Lower, more appealing to my broke ass limits are still available, off-Strip and places like Ellis Island, but other than my brother, it’s hard to convince anyone at all to go to Ellis Island with me.  I think I’ve talked about the place so much it’s to the point where people want to deliberately shun it just to troll me, that and the fact that for whatever reason, people just can’t seem to want to ever wander off the Strip in the first place.

The bottom line is that it’s gotten to the point where I can’t really afford to gamble in Las Vegas anymore.  At least at this juncture of my life, where nearly all of my earnings goes towards my kids and bills and there’s practically nothing left for me to do anything.  But it’s still a little demoralizing, because I really do enjoy gambling and being in Las Vegas, but aside from rising minimums and my cash flow not rising commensurate to keep up, the place has changed a lot since the days in which I’d make 3-4 trips a year, and after this past trip, I think I can safely say that my itch to Vegas it up in all applicable ways, is kind of gone.

But never say never, who knows how things will change in the passage of time.  Maybe I’ll make more money one day, and not all of it is hoovered up by responsibilities, or maybe but not likely Vegas will drop their minimums and bank on getting more action.  Or maybe I’ll come across some more gambling videos with supposed unbeatable, low-risk grind methods in roulette or craps that will reignite the itch.  Until then, we’ll see how long it takes for me to get back out there next.

The birthday post, circa 2023

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I always get kind of bluesy around my birthday.  It’s like in one hand, I don’t make a big deal about advertising it, but at the same time, I want others to know about it and maybe be nice to me for a day, but then again I almost feel more comfortable if people didn’t know and didn’t treat me any differently.  Like nobody at work knows it’s my birthday (at least I think) and I just want to go through my normal day without drawing any attention.

I think what it really comes down to is the fact that I’m not really comfortable being a center of attention, and that’s typically what happens for a lot of people on their birthdays.  It just makes me feel kind of cringey and awkward, and wondering who is coming out of the woodwork on social media to wish my a happy birthday because they mean it, or they feel obligated to do it because, and just how genuine it is.

Growing up, birthdays never really meant much to my family beyond a certain age, and it’s evident that I’ve gotten my general ambivalence and weirdness about them from my parents, who never did anything for their respective birthdays during my upbringing, so it kind of stopped being a big deal to me around then, regardless of the fact that I’ve tried sporadically to breathe some life into my birthday throughout my adult years.

I’ve also met and have people in my life whom I share the birthday or are close to others, and it’s by no fault of anyone else, I just want to avoid the possibility of being envious of others and the things they do, by trying not to make a big deal of mine in the first place.  It’s like I’m happier and more amenable to celebrate the birthdays of others than my own, regardless of the date or proximity to the date.

Maybe it’s the feeling of anticipation of a birthday, and the kind of melancholy disappointment of when it’s passed and in the rear view, and knowing that it’s going to be another year before we can hope for our specific day to come back, and hope that it’s also good.

Or maybe it’s the dreading of growing older, and now that I’m 41, I’m still sometimes wondering what I’m doing with my life, and wondering if what I’m doing is good, successful, and has a promising future ahead of it, or if I’ve put my life kind of on hold while I put all my importance on raising my children, because when it really comes down to it, they’re the most important things in my life, and raising them well still takes precedence over everything else.

Honestly, I don’t really know what the point of this post is, or if there’s even one at all.  It’s my birthday, and I just felt like writing about it, even if it’s not particularly the most exciting, promising, or positive-feeling post I could possibly make.

There’s not much in the world that I have a want for, physically.  Not even any more wrestling blets, because I pretty much have everything at this point.  I guess I just want a general sense and feeling of comfort and happiness, and if I can just have a day where I can not get too stressed out, have a good workout, have some Willy’s, and spend some happy time with my kids and wife, then I don’t think I can really ask for much else.

So here’s 41 years old, hardly feels that much different than the last few years, but I suppose that’s what life is going to be like until I can look forward to a better retirement portfolio or registering for AARP.