Tag: angst

I try to not talk about work too much

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But I’m fairly sure that I’m about to embark on the roughest patch of my professional career as of today.  For how long?  That has yet to be determined, but if the past year has been any indication, it’s probably not going to end as soon as I’d hope it would.

The funny thing is that back in November, I almost drafted a post about how it felt like I was doing less work but making more money after my promotion in September.  How I didn’t really feel like I felt like I knew what I was doing in my new managerial role, and that I felt a little bit of labor guilt on how I was doing actual less labor, but going to more meetings, and delegating tasks, but I was in fact, making more money in the process.

But almost as if channeling Murphy’s Law, as quick as I began having these thoughts, things began changing very fast, and a long-looming black cloud over my career had begun pouring its initial drops of rain onto the landscape, and a few weeks later, here I am, feeling like I’m about to be starting the roughest patch of my professional career.

Obviously, I’m not going to go too in-depth with the context of everything, because one, nobody really cares at the end of the day, and two, work is one of those topics that I try to be deliberately vague and keep some things private if possible.

But long story short, since I’ve found that this situation is often times best described and explained through analogies: my entire team of graphic designers, copyrighters and coordinators have been mandated to change to this new suite of internally-made software, despite the fact that our current existing process is a perfectly well-oiled machine and has warranted the slightest need for change.

Except all of the software is garbage; hastily-made, constantly being updated and tinkered with while trying to be test driven at the same time, making it nearly impossible to really beta test.  Furthermore, the entire project is being helmed by an IT guy, who unfortunately sits at a higher paygrade than I do, and subsequently has the pull to force this onto us, without anyone really knowing why an IT guy has any say on how a creative department operates on a day-to-day basis.

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Forever questions

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The afternoon after I wrote my last post, I got home from work and I went into the backyard with the dog for some routine ball time.  In between throws, I scoured the ground and all the numerous patches of clover, looking for a four-leaf clover.  I know that at my old house, the backyard was rife with four-leafers, but it never took away from the happiness from finding one, with the hopes that somewhere in the world, the magic of the luck of a four-leaf clover could be cashed in, in some capacity.  And given the intensive dread that existed at that time concerning my family, I felt really, really hopeful that I could find just one more four-leaf clover in my new backyard.

I couldn’t.  Even after nearly 45 minutes of looking for a four-leaf clover, there were none to be found in my new house.  Even the dog was tired of running for the ball at that point.  There simply wasn’t one that I could find.

But it’s not that it would have mattered anyways.  About an hour or so later, I received a phone call from my sister, who let me know that her husband, my brother-in-law and father to my niece and nephew had passed away two hours earlier, well before I had begun my search for a four-leaf clover.

Even now, I replay the conversation in my head, and it brings tears to my eyes every time, hearing details of his last moments, and how he seemingly held on just long enough for his kids to make it to the hospital so he could say goodbye to them.  It’s difficult to even type out these words and keep my composure, thinking about it.

The thing is, all this happened right on the day in which my vacation was starting.  My first flight out was just hours away after getting off the phone with my sister, and I felt trapped in this unwinnable bubble that whatever I did was going to be the wrong decision.  Despite the fact that my sister insisted that I go anyway and try to have the best time I could given the circumstances, I still felt like an asshole embarking on an international vacation when someone important to my family had just died.  Sure, I know my sister, and I knew my brother-in-law well enough to know that they’d both have wanted me to go, but it still didn’t entirely feel right.

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Life is complicated

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I specifically earmarked this particular day to write about how I was about to embark on a vacation back to Korea, with a brief stop in the Philippines, and how excited I was.  It was exciting to be going back to the Motherland, because I had such an amazing time when I went for the first time last year, and I was really pumped up about this time going with mythical gf, since she’s such a Koreeb, and it would be fun to kind of witness the excitement of a first visit through her eyes as well.

This is a trip that had been planned for the better part of the entire 2017 year, where lots of money, planning and more money had gone into nailing down travel and lodging in order to get the optimal prices at the optimal times in order to accommodate both our work schedules and allotted vacation times.  But it was done a long time ago, and since then, it’s always been the constant milestone to look forward to, the thing we’ve been counting down the months, then the weeks, and then the days, up until today, when we eventually embark.

But as its often said, life doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and an infinite number of things exist all around us at any given time.  I don’t really know to segue to it in a smoother transition, but based on the title of this post alone, it should be expected that an unfortunate turn is bound to happen.  But there’s a medical issue in my family and to cut to the chase, there is an uncertainty on the amount of time this person has left. 

As far as I’m concerned, this could not possibly have happened at any worse of a time, but naturally I am not the actual person concerned.  But it doesn’t make it suck any less that a life hangs in the uncertain balance, and I’m in a trapped feeling position of not knowing what I can do, because life isn’t about me, there are others involved, and every choice affects others in a variety of manners.

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Writing when it feels like there’s not a lot to write about

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like the subject says, I haven’t really felt like there’s been a lot to write about.  It’s times like these when I sit down and try to clear out all the noise in the world and in my head and just see what happens when I open up a Word doc and just start typing.

Usually, I surf a large variety of news sites, local and worldly to see if anything piques my interest.  Then it devolves into sports sites and op-ed outlets, just to see if there’s anything that triggers any sort of writable tangent.  Failing any of that, it’s the happenings in my own fairly ordinary and nondescript life, wondering if there’s anything worth talking about, or anything I actually want to put something down into writing.

My life, hasn’t been particularly interesting for a while.  My days and weeks consist of the same things often, and I’m occasionally fretting over the fact that I feel like I don’t make enough money which kind of puts a damper on some of my ambitions when it comes to things I want to do, or travels I want to indulge in.  I think about spending habits, spending plans and how to shave down the credit card debt that I’ve built back up throughout the moving process, and it frequently feels like an endless cycle that just chews up time and often doesn’t actually pan out like it should.

Like in my current state, I feel like I’d need like 6-8 months to really wipe out a lot of my debt while not having to starve in the process.  I’m sure that some additional sacrifices could be made to reduce my costs a little further, but it just doesn’t feel like it would be enough to warrant the inconveniences.  But really though, 6-8 months?  That’s literally from half to two-thirds of an entire year.  I’m not getting any younger, and the whole concept of getting older is another can of worms that has been on my mind increasingly these days, and I just feel like if I made more money outright, things might improve for the better, overall.

But then I feel like I’m kind of in a rut where my skillset doesn’t command as much money as I hope it would, and I give a lot of contemplation to my own career.  I really like where I work and the team I’m on and the people I work with, but again, money.  I make enough to pay my mortgage and pay my bills, but with the new house, I’m also paying more for a mortgage than I have before, and it’s still an adjustment knowing how much of a larger percentage of my incoming funds are going right back out the door paying for my property.

And we can’t talk about money and not talk about the correlation with time, and then the endless debate of money versus time.  I certainly value my time, and often times more than money, but at the same time, there are certain things that cannot be accomplished without the need for money.  And then it rotates in this perpetual cycle of feeling like I have enough of either, and then I begin to wonder if I may be bordering on the lines of a slight depression.  Which is a maybe.

It would be nice to just win a substantial lottery.  That just might actually make things improve for the better, contrary to the notions that huge influxes of money have accomplished in ruining several people out there.

But really, I can’t really complain that much about my life in some regards.  My life itself isn’t at all terrible, aside from the fairly minor gripes I have that I’m not unaware that there are worse people out there that would love to have my gripes versus their own more substantial issues.

I think I feel like what drags me down is my empathy for others, to where I always feel like the problems of others become problems for me.  I don’t think it’s untrue either, because there are people out there that are close to me going through some rough patches, and I feel helpless that there’s nothing that either I or anyone else can seemingly do about them, and I empathize for their sadness and grief with my own.  Obviously, I won’t get into the business of others, but they are substantial problems, and I’ve come to the realization of the increasing difficulties of life that come with getting older, and that things just might not get better any time soon for the people all around me.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the shitty cesspool of a world we live in, full of rotten corrupt people, politicians, terrorists and mentally deranged people who somehow all seem to have way too large caches of firearms.

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The Dragon*Con post, 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As some might recall, I skipped Dragon*Con in 2016, citing that I felt like I needed a break from the event as a whole, cold turkey full stop.  Mythical gf and I deliberately scheduled an out-of-country cruise vacation on that very same period of time so that we could eliminate all doubts and remove all temptations to participate in anything, and I have zero regrets for doing what we did then.

However, I would be lying to myself if I didn’t feel a little bit melancholy about the notion of deviating from what was something of a yearly tradition, where large chunks of my friends gather, and it’s a pretty comprehensive experience of catching up with people, taking a ton of pictures and imbibing in a whole lot of alcohol.  As much as I relished in the opportunity to take a break, I kind of knew that I would be back the following year; I accomplished my goal of wanting to feel like I missed out, which renewed my sense of wanting to go back.

Life works in interesting ways sometimes, and we don’t always get to have a say in what happens when.  And as much as I was actually back to looking forward to Dragon*Con again this year, some things I’m not going to get into happened at a fairly conflicting time, and really derailed the experience as a whole.  Needless to say, not only was Dragon*Con something that got pushed into the backseat, I’ll admit that it was something that was practically impossible for me to enjoy throughout the weekend.

I’ll often say that writing is an efficient form of therapy for me, and sometimes it takes seeing thoughts formed into words and slapped onto a word processor for me to gain some clarity, but such is very true as far as my overall feelings of the con itself.  I’m trying my best to remain as objective as possible without letting my personal life overlap with anything else, but the reality is that everything is relative, and life doesn’t take a backseat just because something is planned, and life doesn’t stop when it comes to day-to-day living them out. 

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Impending misery

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I unplugged, packed up and moved my PC, I didn’t think much of it.  I have two other laptops that I use that satiate standard needs that there was no real rush to getting my system back up and running in any timely fashion.  So, for the better part of the last month, my PC had been sitting dormant, a black box surrounded by wound up cords and monitors.

So naturally, the moment I needed to retrieve something important off of my PC, it would be at this moment that I’d discover that the hard drive inside of it seems to have died.  Now I’ve dealt with hard drive failures in the past, and it’s never particularly pleasant, but the timing of this one combined with the fact that this wasn’t a hand-me-down machine like several of those before this one, but one I purchased myself with hopes that I could ride it for a good bit, which I did, has made this particular hard drive failure a particularly hard pill to swallow.

Not to mention that pretty much everything important to me, from photography, sensitive documents, websites, writing and all of my work samples and professional information were on it.  Not just from the last six years that I’ve had this PC, but from many more years before it, all transferred and preserved throughout my time of owning computers in general.

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The adaptation period, I suppose

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last night, I couldn’t sleep.  Not because I took a nap earlier in the day or because I drank too much caffeine, my brain was simply too actively thinking to the point of where it was compromising my ability to fall asleep.  The selling of my house and the subsequent reconfiguration of life was undoubtedly a substantial change, but with the change has come some new lines of thinking as the result of the murky waters of what new paths lie ahead of me in the course of my life.

The one very particular thing that my brain was wrestling with throughout the evening was, something that I haven’t really given that much thought to in the past, other than cursory ideas that never were taken very seriously, resulting myself to fall back into my content little bubble of routine.  I’m talking about my career, as a graphic designer.  Lately, I feel like I’ve been tapping at the ceiling of my current career path, and unless I want to resign myself to staying dormant and padding years doing what I do, I can do that, but then the result of such a choice leads to a lot of fairly time-consuming and not necessarily very lofty end games, that I’d question if I’d be content with when I’m well into my 40s and 50s.

It’s not so much the career I’ve been feeling some discontent with, it’s also the money that comes along with what I do.  Honestly, I’ve never really been that driven by money; I know what I like to make in order to live comfortably within my means, but I’m also not blind to the working world around me, and that there are plenty of other designers with specializations more attuned to the current creative market, that make noticeably more money than I do, albeit with an equally proportionate higher risk of job security than I have.  But there are plenty of those in the creative marketplace that make more money than I do, and up until recently, I’ve been fine with that.

But I think I’ve been content over the last 13 years living in a household where the combined income was one that was pretty well into the upper-middle class echelon, and now that I’m basically on my own now, such numbers don’t look nearly as promising or conveying potential for loan repayment when it comes to planning for the future, like another house.  Suddenly, I’m feeling like my earning capabilities aren’t just inadequate, but not necessarily conducive to saving at a rate that would make the future not feel like too far away.

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