A microcosm of what’s wrong with the airline industry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sitting at the gate, awaiting my flight.  I’m going to DCA, so I can go help my dad out with some stuff that I really shouldn’t have to help out with except for the fact that my dad isn’t a very capable individual and has increasingly just been chalking everything up to aging and doing his best to live out The Korean Story™.

I don’t often disclose my personal expenses, but in this case, this round trip to and from Washington DC is running me $570.  Way back, when AirTran still existed, I could get this exact RT for $159 if I played my cards right.  Full fare, and not when I had the ability to fly standby on a moment’s notice.  Obviously, inflation is a very real and unfortunate thing, and it’s been nearly 20 years since I used to be able to get those reasonable and cost-efficient fares, but the fact that it’s gone up 350% seems outlandish and reeks of white people greed.

The gate I’m sitting in is relatively deserted.  Flying on a Wednesday night is great in that regard.  The aircraft will more than likely have upwards of 140 seats all in all, but if I had to guess, maybe barely 50% of the aircraft will be full.  If I were still doing the standby thing, I’d be doing a dance at the gate because I would have a 100% chance of getting on this flight.

That said, there’s absolutely little reason why this fare should have been remotely close to $570.  There used to be a time when flight fares would fluctuate somewhat on account of the demand of a particular flight, and a flight like this should probably have been cheaper than what I was forced to pay just so I could help out a family member, because clearly there was not a heavy demand for the flight.  I’d hate to imagine what it might have cost to go Friday through Sunday.

I used to be salty when this route had gone up to like $379 from all carriers, but now I’d be doing cartwheels if I could get a RT for under $400 these days.

A few weeks ago, there was an article where Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian was quoted, saying shit along the lines of blaming low-cost carriers AKA Spirit and Frontier, for the degradation of airline passenger behavior throughout the country.  My knee-jerk reaction at hearing this was, sure, yeah, a lot of unruly people do fly Spirit and Frontier, that’s not entirely wrong, my own criticism has ol’ Ed Bastian in the crosshairs, because man is clearly so out of touch with the people that he probably doesn’t seem to realize that most people are probably unruly because they’ve been given no choice in life but to pay egregious fares in order to travel, and whether they take a low-cost carrier along with all the other unruly poors, or they shell out money they probably can’t afford in order to travel, they’re going to be bitter and pissed off about it in the end all the same.

I know that I’m feeling quite salty and full of piss at having to shell out $570 to make a routine flight to a destination not even two hours of airtime away.  I just happen to have a little more restraint and keep my vitriol and venom encased in harmless text on a brog that nobody on the planet reads except for me, as opposed to feeling entitled to dress like a 2000’s-era NBA player, and act about as much of a shithead as one.

Ed doesn’t seem to grasp that if Delta would ease off the gas on their price gauging and make flying a little more accessible to the people, not only would everyone flock to Delta if they’re the first ones to cut costs, it would then force all the other carriers to follow suit in order to keep up, and if the royal everyone, is just a little bit happier about not going as broke in order to travel, the civility of airline passengers would inevitably improve.

And then Ed’s completely out-of-touch analysis of the masses would begin to improve, traveling would stop feeling like such a colossally insufferable experience, and call me crazy, everyone would probably make more money in the end, because that’s often just what happens when consumers are actually made happy sometimes.  There’s enough empirical evidence to show the sheer profitability of people not being shitheads to the masses, and hopefully the airlines will rediscover this and the skies may become a little friendlier when they come to that revelation.

This guy would make a killing in Atlanta, or be killed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Sun: Bay Area man, proclaiming to be a ‘squatter remover’ uses swords among other forceful tactics to help clients evict squatters

Back when I lived on the south side of town, there were a ton of homes that were foreclosed on in my neighborhood, resulting a tremendous amount of abandoned properties all through the subdivision.  It was harrowing going onto Zillow and seeing just how many red dots that were all over my entire community signifying all the available properties, where clicking on any of them made it pretty clear that almost all of them were available on account of foreclosures.

However, the problem became when the properties stopped being vacant, and people started moving into them – and in most cases, not legally.  Even one of the homes adjacent to me, suddenly had people I didn’t recognize going in and out of the home, at odd hours of the day, and one of the weirder behaviors I noticed was one guy sitting in the backyard with a laptop, and looking back at this if I had to guess was probably because the inside of the house had no power or air conditioning or something, or maybe they were trying to leech off of my wi-fi.

Squatters probably occupied more of the neighborhood than legitimate residents at one point, and was/is probably the primary reason why the entire neighborhood went to shit as rapidly as it did.  I remember doing some Zillow-hunting on the aforementioned adjacent property to mind, and found out that it was owned by a bank or some investment company, with an address not even close to being in Georgia, which made it fairly obvious that I had squatters living next door to me.

Ordinarily I really wouldn’t care if they were discreet and kept to themselves, but unfortunately there was no discretion from those who lived there, and they would have like four cars crammed into the driveway with another two parked on the street, and trash strewn all over the yard.  If not for the fact that our houses were on a hill, with me having the higher ground, their shit would have undoubtedly blew onto my property which would have been more problematic than they already were, but the point was that it sucked having squatters next door.

Cursory research will show that squatters have an extremely inordinate amount of rights and protections throughout the country as it pertains to legally removing them properties that they illegally began occupying in the first place.  It has nothing to do with being left or right leaning, for whatever reasons, squatters basically have some of the most ridiculously concrete iron-clad rights there are, and it’s fucked up that legal owners of properties have literally no other choice but to acquiesce to squatter rights lest they risk crossing legal lines and committing crimes, in spite of the fact that they’re just trying to solve situations cause by other people committing crimes.

Really, the only (legal) options are grind out the legal process and eventually get the law to demand that they vacate the property, lest they be charged with criminal trespass, they leave on their own volition, but usually not before they trash the place to oblivion, or they are, coerced, to vacate the property, and the owner(s) or their proxies can secure it upon exit.

This is where the Bay Area squatter remover guy comes in – I have to say I love the story of this guy, and I wish more people like him existed and provided services all throughout the country, because squatting is something that I imagine is a very rampant problem across the nation and not just exclusively limited to major metropolitan areas like San Francisco or Atlanta.

And it’s just riotous that it’s apparent that his personal signature is the fact that he goes around with a real katana, and claims that it’s actually used in his line of work, and I like to imagine a guy who clearly has seen The Matrix five too many times confronting a squatter with live steel, brandishing and waving it around like a Mortal Kombat character, threatening some crooks to get the fuck out of the home they’re squatting in.

The guy boasts a 95% success rate, so it’s funny that he clearly manages to infiltrate these squatter homes, and by virtue of waving around his katana at people, he’s getting them to vacate the premises at a high clip and helping property owners reclaim their rightful properties.

I would’ve loved to have seen this guy in action in my old hood, and if the owners of the properties even cared about their investments, they would’ve just sent this guy on endless loops around the neighborhood, evicting deadbeat squatters left and right.  But at the same token, I’d imagine Atlanta to be a vastly more dangerous part of the country than the pussy Bay Area is, and he’d probably be up against way more heavily armed squatters, and willing to put up way more resistance.

As the subject says, katana guy would either make a real killing out in Atlanta, or just end straight up killed, but either way I love this guy’s idea and entrepreneurial spirit at putting in the work of evicting squatters on his own shoulders.

WTF is NJPW doing #082

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the other things that happened at Wrestle Kingdom 20 aside from Hiroshi Tanahashi’s final match everrrr, was IWGP Global champion Yota Tsuji defeating AEW’s Konosuke Takeshita for the IWGP World Heavyweight championship, thus creating a scenario where there is a unification of titles.

The thing is, it hasn’t been that long since the current winged design IWGP World Heavyweight championship came into fruition, barely five years prior, when Kota Ibushi won a winner-take-all match and decided to unify the WHC with the IWGP Intercontinental championship, and the winged blet was created, much to the dismay of fans and industry folk alike.

Sure, New Japan Pro Wrestling has been in a bit of churn over the last few years, with their rosters having been gutted a few times, a little bit of scandal, and just questionable management at times.  And chaos tends to lead to reactionary changes, but five years seems like a really short amount of time before the championship array of a promotion needs to come into play; it’s like late 1999 WCW and current AEW kind of scrambling if they’re deciding to start unifying off titles that have barely existed, in the grand spectrum of the industry.

To make matters more complicated, Tsuji exorcised his right as a new World champion by declaring the winged IWGP WHC now defunct, and immediately brought back the universally beloved V4 of the IWGP World title, to which then opened up the question on if he would be willing to break the unification, and allow for NJPW to reinstate the also-beloved IWGP Intercontinental championship.

Tsuji said no, and we’re left in this fuzzy situation where NJPW has a number of championships with questionable lineages and little direction on what lies ahead for the company as a whole.  I’m trying to wrap my brain around their title hierarchy, and writing all this shit down might help gain some clarity.

  • IWGP World Heavyweight Championship (the ugly-ass winged blet) – Dead. Not merged with the IWGP Global championship.  Amalgamation of the old V4 and the IWGP Intercontinental championship.
  • IWGP World Heavyweight Championship (the V4) – NJPW’s current World Championship, held by Yota Tsuji. Was deactivated in 2021 by Kota Ibushi when it was merged with the IWGP Intercontinental championship.
  • IWGP Intercontinental Championship – Dead. Yota Tsuji had the opportunity to bring the much beloved 1B title back, but declined to.
  • IWGP Global Championship – Active, also held by Yota Tsuji. The spiritual successor to the IWGP United States/United Kingdom championship, the theory is that this blet will be the de facto championship that is up for grabs whenever non-NJPW talent wants to challenge NJPW.  The company has been trying to really sell this as a true WHC equivalent, but much like AEW’s struggles with their litany of secondary blets, it’s just not catching.

And as if NJPW needed any more titles in spite of their proportionately small roster, they still have:

  • NEVER Openweight Championship
  • NJPW Television Championship
  • IWGP Tag Team Championship
  • IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Championship
  • IWGP Jr. Tag Team Championship
  • NEVER Six-Man Tag Openweight Championship
  • NJPW STRONG Openweight Championship
  • NJPW STRONG Tag Team Championship
  • IWGP Women’s Championship
  • NJPW STRONG Women’s Championship

So for those keeping count, NJPW has 18 titles in circulation, which is pretty high considering their roster is like, 25 full-timers, about as many in their dojo system, and heavy reliance on outside collaborations.

The bottom line is that it was a good thing that the Tanahashi farewell really took center stage at Wrestle Kingdom, and has all of the NJPW Universe occupied with tributes, because once all the emotion and sentiment have died down, the reality is that the company is kind of in this churning clusterfuck, and for blet buffs like myself, wondering just wtf they’re doing to do to justify all these blets and unifications and rebrands. 

They’ve clearly been taking notes from AEW on how to really devalue championships, and it sucks for a company as renown as NJPW, and all the history they have behind some of their own championships.

Akron is probably the only honest school in the nation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ASM Sports: University of Akron ruled the only school ineligible for bowl participation due to poor academics

In unrelated news, the University of Akron is probably the only honest school in the nation.  Reporting completely honestly in regards to the academics of their student athletes, whom, unsurprisingly are probably as collectively intelligent as a nursery school, instead of boasting falsely inflated graduation rates, and the flagrantly high GPAs of all the guys they have playing sports who are there are probably majoring in African-American studies, sports management, physical education, or any other patsy program that is a red flag for a student ringer.

Seriously though, anyone who’s ever heard a college student athlete ringer speak can tell right away that they’re not attending their schools in order to get an education.  There have been numerous published stories and documentaries about how flagrant this whole issue is, it’s just that as long as college sports keeps raking in the money as it does, there is no end to the amount of cheeks that will be turned to ignore the truth.

Not sure who’s the captain of the ship at the University of Akron, but they seriously haven’t been paying attention at the NCAA money making game, and should probably feel pretty embarrassed being the only school in FBS that has this distinction.  Lord only knows how many other schools, from low-tier FCS programs all the way to the royals in the Power-4 are actually as equally academically inept as Akron was, but are being run by smart enough people to be able to work around that and lie through their teeth in order to remain bowl eligible, but mostly important eligible to keep making that bonus money that comes from participating in bowl games.

This is entirely one of those situations where Akron shouldn’t be ashamed of being the dumbest school in the nation because of their poor academics, they should be ashamed of being the dumbest school in the nation because they’re the only ones who got caught being dumb, since every single other FBS school is probably lying their faces blue in regards to their academics.  If every school reported their academics honestly, the entire NCAA would probably be like, Stanford, Army and Navy vying for every single championship, because every single other school in the country has more athletic ringers that are illiterate than they have people that can pass econ 101.

Either way, kind of good on Akron for just trying to be honest, but in a field as crooked as the NCAA, they’re only shooting themselves in the feet at hamstringing their earning potential by doing such.  I get wanting to have integrity and honor and all that jazz, but at some point it’s just fucking embarrassing being the only ones in the entire division that didn’t get the memo, especially in a state that has six other FBS schools that they could have copied their homework off of.

Wouldn’t be surprised if next year, Akron is miraculously bowl eligible again, and academics across the board somehow are suddenly genius level.

WTF is AEW doing #466

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know that I’m pretty critical of a lot of the things that AEW does, but I’ll be the first to admit that I kind of like the Continental Classic tournament they’ve been doing on an annual basis.  You have a lot of main event talent, intermixed with some talented guys from the mid card, and you have them wrestling in a bunch of matches that don’t really have any storyline behind them, and most importantly, have results that aren’t just the main eventers running roughshod over the mid card guys.

Speedball Mike Bailey picked up an impressive win over Kyle Fletcher, Jungle Boy Jack Perry got a win against Pac, and the most shocking outcome was when Kevin Knight picked up a clean win against Kazuchika Okada.  They really did a good job of selling that anyone could beat anyone, regardless of their standing in the company, and it led to a lot of pretty pure wrestling.

However, it wasn’t until the tournament concluded did I realize that there was an actual prize at the end of the whole thing; in previous years, AEW had a, surprise, title blet for the winner of the Continental Classic, which was the [don’t call me Intercontinental] Continental championship, which was originally won by of all people, Eddie Kingston.  He would then lose it to Okada, who would successfully defend the title by winning the 2025 Continental Classic, and continue to hold the title until it was merged in July 2025 with the International Championship in a completely nerfed version of Okada vs. Omega.

But for all intents and purposes, the Continental championship was deactivated, along with the International championship, and Okada began carting around a, surprise, new blet, christened the AEW Unified Championship, which they tried like hell to sell it as a World title equivalent, since Okada is very much a World title caliber performer, but unsurprisingly, it didn’t catch.

Getting back to the present, without any real explanation, going into the conclusion of the 2026 Continental Classic, the Unified Championship was already scrapped, and it was decided that the winner of the tournament would become the new Continental champion.  Conveniently, Okada would also advance to the finals, hoping to defend the title in the finals regardless of the fact that the title is up for grabs at any other point in the year, storylines notwithstanding.

Spoiler-alert, Jon Moxley won the tournament by defeating Kazuchika Okada, thus becoming the new Continental champion.

However, conveniently, Okada would still have a blet to cart around, because when they scrapped the Unified Championship after six historic months, they reactivated the International Championship, which was by default, Kazuchika Okada.

It should also be pointed out that when the Continental and International were merged into the Unified, it took one blet off the table, but AEW responded quickly by creating a, surprise, new blet, in the AEW National Championship, which was won by, and is currently held by Ricochet (which I’m actually okay with).

But for a promotion that has taken a lot of flack for its Oprah-like EVERYONE GETS A BLET number of titles, it’s just hilarious that they tried to pare down, couldn’t, and when they retconned one of their attempts to pare down, ultimately they end up with more blets in which they started with.  So to recap, AEW currently has:

  • AEW World Championship
  • AEW Women’s Championship
  • AEW Tag Team Championship
  • AEW Women’s Tag Team Championship
  • AEW TNT Championship
  • AEW TBS Championship
  • AEW Trios Championship
  • AEW Continental Championship
  • AEW International Championship
  • AEW National Championship

For those keeping count, that’s a total of 14 physical blets with the AEW name on them.  This doesn’t account for the revolving door of Ring of Honor, CMLL, RevPro, or any of the backyard promotions’ blets that Mercedes Moné is carting around.  Like, there have been literal shows where every single segment has had someone walking around carrying a blet.

There’s clearly no such thing as permanence in AEW.  Titles get merged, deactivated, retconned and then reactivated at a moment’s notice, without any genuine or logical explanations.  This isn’t even the first time that this has happened too, because it maybe hasn’t even been an entire calendar year since AEW merged their Trios with the ROH Six-Man titles, which resulted in at one point the Bang Bang Gang of Jay White, Austin and Colton Gunn carrying nine straps collectively, but then a few months later, Ring of Honor decided to just break off and crown new Six-Man champions without any real explanation.

Either way, the point remains, AEW still operates in head-scratching manners on the regular, and as much as I want to like them more than I do, I’m more often too busy scratching my head trying to piece together all of their weird operational decisions to figure out what the fuck is going on.

The year-end post, circa 2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[Originally written on December 9th, but held off until end of year due to personal neuroticism]

Today, I took a half day off work.  I originally wanted to take a full day off on account of the fact that I’m sitting on nearly six days’ worth of PTO hours that I haven’t used, and my company has a use it or lose it policy, and I’m more than likely going to take an L on some hours.  But the way I see it, or at least the way I try to rationalize it to myself is that it’s a little bit of give and take on the sick hours, since there’s probably been several days in which I should’ve just taken the day, but I “worked from home” on those days but whatever, I took a half day off when I wanted to take a full day off, primarily because there was a big monthly meeting at 8 fucking AM that I felt that I needed to attend because I had several projects being shown and it was probably for the best that I be there.

So, as far as the rest of my day went, instead of punting and logging on from home after the 8 AM meeting, I decided to just head into the office since I tend to be more productive there.  And yes, I was pretty productive in the two hours that I was there, determined to hard stop at 11:45, but the dearth of work I’ve had throughout the year has been pretty mundane and often aggravating in nature, mostly because most all the work is like that at my company because of project management that can’t ever seem to stabilize due to rapid employee churn and turnover.

Plus, there were some concerning layoffs that happened a week prior, and naturally everyone at the office is on high-alert and on their best behavior, lest they become victims of another spontaneous workforce reduction initiative.

Anyway, I left the office and headed down toward the vicinity of the airport because I have to pick mythical wife up, and everyone knows just how much fun a trip to Atlanta Hartsfield Latoya Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport, Nail Salon and Hot Wing Express is, even for a pick-up job, but I saw it as an opportunity to at least treat myself to some Willy’s and loaf in the parking lot to do my daily Duolingo.

But by the time I get back from the airport, any chance at any sort of personal endeavors are pretty much gone, since my kids are just getting off school, and despite being off the clock, there’s another meeting that I felt that I should at least listen in on because again, tryna be indispensable.

So, I try to be productive with my day, since I’m a weird fuck who finds satisfaction in productivity, despite it being completely counter-culture to the notion of taking PTO in order to relax.  But since I’m off the clock, I take the time to set up some outdoor Christmas decorating that fell to the wayside because of all the babysitting I’ve had to do for my dad, being under the weather a week ago, and that I just generally never have any fucking time.

I get the lights set up, and then I come inside and set up the second Christmas tree, which sounds like a complete waste of time setting up a second one, but y’all need to understand that this is my tree, aptly called the jihad tree, because it is cheap and small, but it houses all of the tacky and fun and ridiculous and mostly broken and unwanted Christmas ornaments that I’ve been accumulating over the years.  I love this tree and what it represents, and it’s important to me that it goes up and gets its time to shine and display as much as the show tree does.

And then it’s time to get dinner prepped for the kids, and the point of all this is that despite the fact that I took a half day off, absolutely zero minutes of my entire day were really spent in any sort of blow off, fuck responsibility kind of way that PTO should be spent on, and such is kind of a snapshot of just about every day of my life, in 2025, as well as god knows how much longer since.

I had to actually stop and think about it, how I felt about how the year has gone, because I really don’t always have the time to stop and think about things unless they’re usually critical, but I think it’s safe to say that as a whole, 2025 really has stunk.  Yes, I know how curmudgeon and pessimistic that sounds, which is probably what most people think of my personal brand being, but when I stop and think about the general day-to-day and minutiae of living in 2025, and very little of it is notably good.

I’m stressed out and depressed more often than I’m not, and every single day I feel taken for granted, ignored, taken for granted, deprioritized and of course, taken for granted.  I always feel as I have to hard carry the vast majority of aspects of my life, nobody helps out, everyone takes but nobody gives.  I have to take care of everyone, and nobody ever seems to be available to take care of me.

A tremendous amount of angst stems from my financial position, and I genuinely can’t remember ever being in as much debt in my entire life as I am now.  Absolutely nothing I do can dig out of the holes that I’m falling deeper and deeper into, and just when I manage to feel like I get a win somewhere in my finances, something inevitably always shows up and I end up in a worse position than I was previously.  Again, nobody is helping me, and everyone around me is making things worse, and I know it sounds shitty to say, but families are fucking expensive, and I feel like nobody is willing to make any sacrifices or changes in my world except for me, and it shows, because I’m living paycheck to paycheck right now and not doing a very good job of keeping my head above water and this has a massive bearing to my general state of being.

In fact, it was just a few days ago in which I was having a completely normal day without incident, but then I got that ticket in the mail that was a $1,000 fine.  Something I didn’t do, but still something that I am responsible for rectifying.  And then to add insult to injury, there was a $6,500 expense that I was not expecting to show up, just the following day.

I’m not suicidal, but it was definitely one of those moments where I wanted to say that I wanted to just blow my head off, because this shit is fucking ridiculous.

But this really was the pivotal moment in which I realized, man, 2025 really has fucking blew.  And usually I end up writing my year-end post closer to the New Year, but honestly I don’t think three fucking weeks left in the month is going to change anything because I basically have had to cancel Christmas because of $7,500 out the window that I have no earthly idea how I’m going to pay it.

On top of feeling like one of the world’s biggest punching bags is the babysitting I’ve been doing for my dad, in trying to get him to move down to Georgia.  If it’s not clear, I live a tremendously high-stress life as it is, but adding him and all of his resistant to change bullshit and communication issues because he never learned any fucking English and my parents never pushed me to learn more Korean, has really done a number to my health this year.

I’m 43, but for the first time in my life, I’ve really felt old, with my hereditary blood pressure issues seemingly escalating, presumably from all the increases in stress, leading to signs of feeling old like deteriorating eyesight, increased bathroom usage, and tension headaches.  And again, I know what all my stressors are, but nobody in my world seems to give a fuck about remotely helping me, so I’m just left feeling like I’m on an island, getting worse on a daily basis.

Needless to say, I know how dismal and insufferable this post must come off, if any of my zero readers has managed to make it this far.  I know I’m not alone in the world in feeling depression, despair and a general dissatisfaction with life.  I love my family and my kids, and they still manage to bring occasional moments of peace and happiness, handfuls they can all be at times.  But on an overall aggregate state of being scorecard, I’ve been pretty miserable all throughout 2025, and what really sucks is that I’m not sure how much better things are really going to get in the ensuing year, because a lot of the things that are killing me now, probably aren’t going to be going away any time soon in the future either.

One day at a time, I guess.  Try and enjoy little things, and try to not drag too many people down with my actual sourness and hide it behind a mask and keep more of my true thinking to the brog that nobody fucking reads.

Good lord, man.  I just want everything to get better, but I just don’t know if, when or how that’s ever going to happen sometimes.

Dad Brog (#160): overstimulated is another way to say burnt [the fuck] out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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George Carlin once did a routine where he talked about how society has a tendency to try to rename harsh things to sound less severe and more generally acceptable to society.  His primary example was how the term shell shock was renamed to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Shell shock was at some point deemed to be too shocking for sensitive people to hear, and therefore PTSD came into vernacular, and yes it probably helped at making it slightly less scary to talk about, I get this impression that PTSD itself is climbing to that stature where shell shock was, and soon we’ll probably get another, softer, replacement term to replace it but I’m straying off topic here.

Whenever I get into one of my moods where all I see is red, I’m mad at the world, I hate everything and everyone and want nothing more than to be able to stop time all around me and take a deep breath and relax in complete isolation, like that movie from 20 years ago (Cashback), the only phrase that comes into my mind is: burnt [the fuck] out.  Everything pisses me off, just about nothing is capable of bringing me back, and the only thing that comes close to helping is going to sleep and hoping it’s not still around when I wake up.

Over the last few years, I’ve been spoon-fed a whole lot of content that definitely caters to the fact that I am married with children, and I’ve noticed that in that time, a phrase I’ve seen a lot of, is overstimulated.  Most of the time it pertains to all the mommy content creators who really love to declare themselves or hypothetical stressed out other mommies as being overstimulated, but because I can relate to overstimulated mommies way more than I’d like to admit to, I get it.  However, I also recognize that most of the time, the symptoms of a mom that’s overstimulated it is, seeing red, being mad at the world, hating everything and everyone, and probably wanting nothing more than to be able to stop time all around them and take a deep breath and relax in complete isolation like that movie from 20 years ago (Cashback).

It occurred to me that what’s probably happened over the last few years is that the phrase “burnt [the fuck] out” has been used so much and so hard, and that peoples’ eyes have begun glazing over upon hearing it, is that society has basically invented a replacement term for it, in order for it to get people to listen and be curious and think about it, and that term is obviously, overstimulated.

It sounds less harsh than burnt [the fuck] out, and because there’s no optional profanity to attach to it (inherently), it’s like there’s a ceiling to how piercing it can be used with some venom behind it.  Overstimulated, is a gentler and less severe word on the auditory senses of weak people, but I think I’ve unlocked the bullshit spin behind the word, and refuse to see the phrase for something other than what it really is, a descriptor for people who are feeling burnt [the fuck] out.

But it’s good that I’ve realized the truth behind it the bullshit.  It gives my own personal vernacular a softer and less scary option to use if I feel like I’m speaking with some particularly pussy people, and surmise that telling them that I’m burnt [the fuck] out won’t scare them off entirely.

Hopefully the next time I write a dad brog, it won’t be about some overstimulated subject matter.