Tag: famiry

Dad Brog (#113): I melted

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After our little famiry trip to the beach, it appears everyone but me has seemed to have caught something. Mythical wife was laid out in bed for most of the day, and our au pair was feeling below average throughout the day as well.

Prior to dinner, mythical wife comes downstairs and explains to the kids that mama isn’t feeling well. #1 rushes off to get her (toy) doctor kit, and my heart melts at the sweet and considerate gesture and the urgency she demonstrated at wanting to help.  I stop what I’m doing and assist her in making sure to get the stethoscope, thermometer and of course the syringe because mama needs medicine too, of course.

I love my kids so much, and it’s little things like this that break me into pieces at the thought that perhaps I am doing an okay job of parenting, after all.

How did the Ford Bronco become such the white peoples’ car?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few days, I had a pretty white span of existence.  Sure, this doesn’t help detract from the narrative that I’m a Americanized banana of a twinkie kind of Asian person, but as the circumstances have it, my family and I spent a few days on the road, stopping in Savannah and for the first time in my life, visiting Hilton Head Island, which is about one of the whitest places in the country.

Seriously, thinking back to the time spent in HHI, I genuinely can’t recall seeing more than one other person of color, and that person was also Asian which is to say that I don’t remember seeing a single black person while out there.

We stayed at a bougie resort for a few days, and lounged in the pool, went to the beach and even went to the Salty Dog Café, which I’m only aware of its existence because of an old neighbor of mine growing up always seemed to have a lot of Salty Dog Café apparel.  For the record, the dining experience was pleasant on the water of a relaxed beach community, but the food and the prices were not quite as satisfactory and I could be content with the rest of my life if I never experienced them again.

But overall, it was a pleasant trip spent with my family and I got to watch my children have a lot of fun in the pool, in our suite, on the beach and chowing down on all sorts of junk food we typically don’t always make available to them at home, and in spite of the shade I spout about HHI being a really white place, it’s also a really nice place, and I’d definitely be open to going there again in the future, and hopefully for longer.

However, to get to the point of this post, as the subject goes, I’m very curious to how the new Ford Bronco seems to have become the official car of white people across the country now.  When Ford announced that they were reviving the name and creating a new vehicle to resurrect the car, I couldn’t possibly have been more indifferent.  In fact, I was more perplexed and wincing over such news, because to me, the Ford Bronco has forever been tainted and etched with death and scandal since OJ Simpson led the LAPD on the most televised chase in history after he “didn’t” murder his wife.

Apparently such reaction and recollection didn’t resonate with the white people of America, because since they started rolling off the line, Ford Broncos have been snapped up and are being driven like crazy by white people all over the place.  Seriously, I haven’t seen a single Bronco driver on the road that isn’t white, and they’re often times being driven with the arrogant mentality of “I have one and you don’t,” because of the sheer demand for these murderer cars.

And I can’t help but be curious to why the Ford Bronco has caught on with white people with such enthusiasm, when I can’t shake the association of the car’s reputation of being what a tried-but-not-found-guilty murderer drove notoriously.  And then be further curious to what kind of message it sends that not only is the Ford Bronco more popular than it’s ever been in history, it’s apparently solely within the white community itself.

All shade aside, it really is fascinating that it’s so rabidly popular.  Aside from the whole, being OJ Simpson’s car, the Bronco is still a Ford product, and I will probably never not think of all Ford products being cheap, plastic turds with questionable build quality and reliability.  Even when I was on the market for a new car a while back, and told myself to wipe the slate clean with all makes and models, Ford was the first maker to get slapped back onto the blacklist after test-driving the option I had earmarked as a potential car, because it felt cheap, performed like shit, and was blown out of the water by every other option.

Continue reading “How did the Ford Bronco become such the white peoples’ car?” →

I’ll tell you how I’m going to become rich

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My sister made a recommendation to our family group chat about a film she saw; Happy Cleaners on Amazon Prime Video.  Just from the title alone and given the context of my very Korean family, I knew that this was definitely going to be about the Korean Story, and that it was going to fuck with my emotions.  I watched the trailer and yup, it was about the Korean Story and the trailer alone did succeed at fucking with my emotions.

Make no mistake, in spite of the title of the film, this was going to be anything but happy.  I anticipated that like so many Korean stories, this was going to be depressing, thought-provoking, probably relatable and leave me feeling like I’ll probably want to cry from having my emotional heartstrings yanked around.  Sounds like a great idea to watch right?

But because I’m a sucker for my nationality, I went ahead and watched it anyway, in spite of all the red flags of getting aboard an emotional roller coaster.

And of course, Happy Cleaners was everything I anticipated it would be, and I ended the film in a lower emotional state than which I started at.  Not only was it about an entirely too relatable Korean family much like my own, the plot of the film doesn’t really have much lateral movement, and unsurprisingly starts depressing, and ends in a more depressing state than the beginning.

To make matters worse, there’s a character in the film who’s named Danny, and he’s a Korean-American who has the weight of the world on his shoulders to the point where he can’t achieve any objectives and is working two menial jobs in order to survive.  He’s a classic underachiever, and I’m triggered because after just watching Beef, whose main character is also an underachieving struggling Korean-American named Danny, I feel like the world is trying to tell me something unpleasant.

Frankly, as much as I want to support Asians and specifically Korean or Korean-American filmmakers and storytellers, I’m just kind of over everyone’s rendition of the Korean Story.  Yes, Korean immigrants have historically had it really poor throughout the passage of time, but in most cases in everywhere in the world, when people immigrate to other countries, they’re usually going to struggle unless they learn the native language and/or get the education of the country they’re moving to. 

In most cases of the Korean Story, Korean immigrants get straight to work after arrival, seldom really try to become fluent in English, don’t bother getting an American education, and put all of their eggs and pressure onto their kids to succeed, and there just ain’t that much need for one million Korean doctors or lawyers and there aren’t that many scholarships to be had at all of the Ivy League schools combined.  Instead we’ve got hundreds to thousands of Korean storytellers all telling the same stories of their family’s struggles of surviving in America, with minimal variation.

So I’ll tell you all how I’m going to make my fortune: by writing the Korean story that isn’t the Korean Story.  Even if it’s fictitious and unrelatable to the 1.7 million Koreans in America, maybe it can just be a good exercise in escapism for all of us instead of needing yet another film of book or television special about how Korean lives suck in America.  It won’t be as exploitatively parodying like fucking Kim’s Convenience, and it wouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Happy Cleaners or Beef.

It can just be a story about a Korean family that succeeds at coming to America, embarking on and succeeding at achieving their American dream.  By learning English, re-learning an American education, and breaking out of the mold of working at liquor stores or dry cleaners or shitty food franchises, they become contributing members of society not completely insulated in their cultural silo.  Their kids grow up without the pressures of their entire bloodline on their shoulders, and they too become successful adults who are both well-cultured and well-educated and succeed in life.

Surely this narrative has happened somewhere in the culture, but without the angst of feeling cursed by the Korean Story, those that live it probably just haven’t gotten around to writing it out to where it could become a piece of Korean media that doesn’t make me want to jump off a bridge.

So I should just do it myself.  I’m sure I’d become filthy rich from all the Koreans who want to seek that escapism, and I’ll know I really made it if I could then get all the white guilters to get on board with it and ingest my story so that they can seem tolerant of foreigners, and then the rest will follow suite like dominoes.

Just got to have time away from parenting to get right on that though, so I guess in about 5-6 years I can pursue my destiny, hopefully.

Dad Brog #106: the Girls’ first Disney Cruise

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For #1’s third birthday, mythical wife made the decision that we should go on a Disney cruise.  I’m usually so drowning in dad life that I don’t really have much capacity to think about vacations and trips, and I’m pretty much down to go along with any of mythical wife’s ideas as long as it doesn’t tank us financially and I have the capability to take the time off of work for it, and this was no exception.

It would be a daunting task taking a three-year old and an 20-month old, but we were also being accompanied by my mother in-law as well as our au pair, so with an adult-to-kid ratio of 2:1, it seemed more plausible.

Overall, despite the fact that there were points of the trip where everyone, including myself, hit burnout points of exasperation in dealing with a kid or kids, I would still say it was a positive and memorable trip as a whole.  Sure, it’s not something I like to admit that I lose my cool at times, but the combination of my kids being so drastically out of their routines, not napping, the choppy rocking of a vessel that I had expected to be a little smoother, and piss-poor air conditioning all over led to some instances where it was easy to boil over and get pretty annoyed at circumstances, but that’s basically what parenting is sometimes, having expectations that don’t get met, and being flustered as a result.

Countless times throughout the trip one or both of my kids would be fussy and intolerably cranky, and when this occurred, it just sandbagged everything around us.  I didn’t want to be the parents of the loudest kids in the room, which fortunately rarely occurred, but at the same time I’d like it of my kids behaved like angels all the time, which is the utmost pipedream for parents all over.

A thought I had is that my kids have been raised with such structure and routine, that putting them in an environment such as a vacation cruise, where their settings and beds are different, the food is richer and restrictions have been relaxed, and they’re basically not on a very structured schedule anymore, leads to what felt like chaos.

It was these moments of frustration and despair that I began to think about all the other parents I know, who have basically stated that they don’t feel that it’s worth taking their kids to Disney or any Disney-related things like cruises, until they were like 8-10 years old, where they might be a little more manageable than basically two toddlers.

But on that same token, I’m grateful and glad that my kids can already say they’ve been outside of the United States, and although they won’t really remember much, I’m happy that my girls have stepped foot in Mexico and been outside the country, which is something that I really couldn’t say until I was an adult.

And no matter how much my kids might have acted like pills at times, one of the consistent things was that the sight of any Disney princess or seeing Minnie or Donald Duck, immediately snapped them out of their angst and into awe-struck children who were all smiles and hugs when given the opportunity to meet them.

I had the foresight to go ahead and plunk down for the unlimited photo package, and I would highly recommend it to really anyone who takes a Disney cruise and has the expectation of wanting at least 5-6 good photos from the on-site photographers, because that’s the threshold in which it basically pays for itself.  My party ended up with 142 photos, which are basically the best souvenirs I could ask for.

Overall, this was a vast improvement over the vacation experience from two years ago where I was taking a 16- and a 2-month old to Disney World and absolutely everything in the world was a colossal undertaking, and I know that as the kids age these things will become easier.  I had high expectations for the Magic based on my experience on the Fantasy, and they fell short because of all the differences I was unaware of.

But damn, after this vacation, I could use a vacation.  I love my kids, but I’m completely incapable of relaxation when I have to be a dad.  I wanted to at least one opportunity to run a train on the breakfast buffet at Cabana’s, but that didn’t happen because of needing to tend to my kids’ needs first, and the fact that the lines and demand for it was way harsher than I had expected, and it was impossible to get in line.

But at least I was able to get another La Parka lucha libre mask when #2 and I spent a few hours walking around Cozumel on our one shore day.  Shit was so cheap that I didn’t feel right trying to haggle with the locals, even though I used to enjoy such in the past.

Year three of forever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And just like that, my eldest is three years old.  As many of us parents like to opine and ponder, where has the time gone?

It’s surreal to think that three years ago, #1 showed up five weeks early, and spent nearly the first month of her life in the hospital’s NICU.  Hooked up to machines and tubes until her body was strong enough for her to be allowed to come home, where she spent another seven weeks tethered to a portable heart rate monitor.

Eventually the monitor would go, she kept growing like a weed, we stopped referring to her as “adjusted age” and it’s been a veritable roller coaster throughout the last three years of watching her grow, learn, develop and transform from the frail tiny preemie into the little threenager that’s full of opinions, emotions, energy and bursting with lifeWhy this is important and warranting a thoughtful blathering beyond the obvious every day and every birthday is important, is that three is the age in which I feel like I can recall beginning to have my own memories and really feeling like my own human being.

I have fuzzy memories of playing in the living room of my old house, which was something that was pretty rare in later years of life, because we had a family room in which most activities would take place, but looking back at these memories that might’ve been the family room back then.

I was playing wiffleball with my dad, more specifically I was throwing a ball as hard as my little kid body could muster, but no matter what I threw, my dad would catch it.  I remember thinking how incredible it was, and that he could catch absolutely anything in the world and being amazed an in awe of my own dad.

As it’s supremely important to be a fixture of my children’s lives, I can only hope that as I continue to play and spend time with my kids every day, that memories of playing and hanging out with dad and mom start taking root and becoming the things that both my kids will reminisce and wax poetic about it in their own lives when they become teens and adults of their own.

Hopefully, #1 will remember dad making her birthday cake for her, because she still can’t eat eggs, and there was absolutely no way I was going to let her birthday pass without a cake.  So I found a recipe for an eggless cake and did my best to make it, and although I don’t think I’ll be getting any Paul Hollywood handshakes for it, she seemed to like it, and that is all that mattered.

But man, three years.  Born in perilous conditions, made worse by a global pandemic, and here she is, healthy, strong and smart as a whip, reading and using the bathroom on her own.  Although she’ll always be a baby to me, she’s a far cry from the baby she was once.

Next thing I know, I’ll blink and she’ll be getting ready for high school, her first job, and if she chooses, moving out and going to college.  Hopefully then, I’ll still be completely smitten with her and her sister, and just as in love with being their dad then as I am now.

Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My fantastic mother-in-law signed me up for some virtual races that give medals for Christmas, but among them was a run called F*CK 2022.  The medal of the run is a middle finger which of course I’m cool with, but what got my brain churning was the idea that there being a race with this theme, there has to be some overwhelming sentiment that 2022 was anything but a good year.

Which brings us to the question in the subject of this post, was 2022 a bad year?

Honest question, because I’ve been living in a pretty small bubble since 2022, and my exposure to the news and happenings of the world outside of it are more limited than ever, and I’ve become one of those grownups who lets theFacebook feed me curated news and really only hear of things from that, Apple News and the shit that my friends talk about in a group chat. 

I don’t watch any television beyond the specific things I want to watch, which most certainly does not include any form of television news and I don’t venture out on the internet to all the news websites and Atlanta-centric sites I used to, so I’m going blind to even local things.

In the past, I felt it was important to be well informed and knowledgeable of news and current events, because if anything at all, that could make me better at conversation, but I really just like being in the know of things.  But after the rise of COVID and having kids and having kids in the age of COVID, it’s just not as important, and far behind the priority of making sure my kids are safe and fed every day.

Needless to say, my bubble has shrunken to where I have to ask other people if they think a year was bad or not, because I don’t really think my opinion holds any weight.  Because within my bubble exists pretty much just my kids, mythical wife, sports, wrestling and working for the sake of making money in order to live, and just about everything else exists outside of it.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve created living documents for every year, where I’ve literally narrated a tiny blurb to summarize every single day, of notable things and happenings, because I’m of the mindset that something important happens every single day, be it as small as one of my kids successfully eating something new, or as momentous as Russia invading the Ukraine and daring the rest of the world into another World War.

Some years have been really sad to look back through, because there’s a mass shooting every single month, or the deaths of notable people in the world, but as far as my interests and explorations of the world via the internet go, combined with the happenings of my daily life, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that something important does happen, every single day.

Continue reading “Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?” →

The Thanksgiving post, circa 2022

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I am thankful for this photograph coming out pretty decently.  Through Facebook memories, I’ve seen pictures of past Thanksgivings where I remained home with my group of other vagabond friends who didn’t travel or have local family in town and we always got together for evenings of traditional Thanksgiving food, games and eventually Brack Friday shopping.

Then I got married, had kids, and it’s been a minute since we had a traditional Friendsgiving.

I called an audible this year, and made the choice to stay home for Thanksgiving this year.  With three adults and one child that no longer qualifies for lap travel, and no real place for us all to stay whilst up in Virginia, the idea of going up for Thanksgiving seemed like a colossal clusterfuck, so I made the call to forget the plan and just stay in Georgia in the comfort of our own home.  

I just didn’t want to sink a boatload of money on a trip that was going to stress me out when I could’ve gotten the same results staying at home.  Needless to say, the tone of this post is probably going to go downhill really fast now.

Because aside from the obvious things, like the health of my kids and having a better job than my old one, I can’t really think of anything that I’m thankful of this year.  I understand that putting such a sentiment in writing makes me sound like a bitter and miserable person, but at the same time all of the above isn’t really that inaccurate.

My job doesn’t burn me out on a daily basis, but the rigors and daily tribulations of parenthood more than makes up for it these days.  Even with an au pair that is like a gift from god, there’s still way more time than I want where I’m on double duty with both girls, and it’s just so tremendously difficult to manage a toddler and an infant at the same time.  It always makes me feel like a failure, because I can’t really give any one of my kids quality attention because I’ve always got to remain on defense that one doesn’t hurt herself while trying to man the other, and it fills me up with resentment when I logically should not be on double duty but I am anyway.

I am so burned out on a daily basis that people in HR would probably be willing to extend me a little leniency.  I haven’t had a proper or adequate break from being in this stage of dad mode, and I think I might be headed towards a breakdown if I don’t.  I love my kids more than anything in the world, but the day-in and day-out responsibilities that they are, and the fact that I get less than 2-3 hours a day to unwind unless I want to jeopardize sleep and being even a shittier dad the following day never helps.

Even trying to be introspective and analytical, I genuinely don’t feel anything to be thankful of otherwise this year.  I’m just so perpetually full of piss and vinegar that I have no thanks to give.  I am on an island where maybe one or two other people I know probably understands what I’m going through, and my mood swings are becoming more scathing and bitter the longer this continues.

I probably need therapy, a solo vacation wouldn’t hurt, and maybe stopping saying I’m fine when I’m actually filled with anger is a good idea too.   Maybe a Fight Club-like cry session would help.  But none of these seem particularly feasible without clashing objectives and wants, so I’m just left in this bitter mass of existence within myself where I can only hope to find solace in the little things and try to convince myself that they’ll make everything alright.