Tag: tryharding

Clearly school is not hard enough

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I came across this story of some 12-year old kid in North Carolina who was set to graduate from both high school and college simultaneously, and the first emotion that emerged from my brain as if it were a slot machine, was annoyance.  I don’t know why, but stories of overachieving little kids don’t really impress me so much as I question the difficulty of contemporary education in America, and wonder if we’re collectively lowering the bar of intelligence on a societal level if kids whose balls haven’t even dropped are becoming capable of tackling collegiate level coursework.

Sure, it’s just an associate’s degree, and pretty much anyone can get an associate’s degree, but it doesn’t change the fact that the narrative doesn’t change that a 12-year old went to, and got a college degree.  There is a possibility that this kid might be somewhat of a genius, but at the same time there’s also a possibility that the level of education in Salisbury, North Carolina might be questionably low.

I recognize the names of Salisbury and Rowan-Cabarrus, because their names are on signs that I blow past going 80 mph on I-85 while traversing through North Carolina, between the greater Charlotte and Greensboro regions.  Needless to say, it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, which leads me to believe what mastery of counting pine cones and the velocity of a NASCAR on a windy day can translate into a 5.45 GPA.  Seriously, what the fuck kind of grading rubrics exist now to where kids don’t just get 4.0s but seem to routinely exceed the royal fucking A into these ridiculous 4+ GPAs?

Either way, I don’t know why, but tryhard kids just kind of bother me.  It has nothing to do with the fact that as a father myself, these are ridiculous bars to hope my own children can strive for, as much as I feel at the root of all these stories is some very passive-aggressive humblebragging by either the kids or their likely insufferable parents, who eat up the notion that their children are making the news.  This kid is right up there with one of those overachieving tryhard high school seniors who applies to every Ivy League and blue blood school and gets in.  It’s just annoying to me.

Clearly, school is not hard enough these days, because when I was 12, all I cared about was Power Rangers and Final Fantasy IV, much less having any aspirations of any sort of education past the sixth grade.  Sure there’s an easy joke about how nothing seems to have really changed nearly three decades later, but we also didn’t have a pandemic that gave all children basically unlimited time to see just how high they could tryhard.

Tempting, if I knew how

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really know shit about stocks.  I know the general basic concept of buying shares when you can afford to purchase them, and then it’s a waiting game of hoping they rise and not fall, and if they do fall, sitting on them until they can hopefully rise back up.  And then you sell them, hopefully for more than what you paid for them.

Regardless of my general lack of knowledge, I’m absolutely fascinated with stories about the stock market, whether they’re films like Boiler Room or The Wolf of Wall Street, or numerous books written by Michael Lewis who seems to have a niche writing about stock market stories and/or gambling, but I guess in a way the stock market is basically like gambling, and gambling is something that I do enjoy doing myself, which probably explains why I’m so easily fascinated by stories about the stock market.

The thing is, despite my general fascination of the stock market, I don’t even have the slightest clue to dipping even a toe into the pool.  Supposedly, I could get on apps like Robin Hood or set up an account with like eTrade or some other service, but like I said, I have no idea.  Furthermore, I often ask myself if this is the kind of rabbit hole I even want to explore going down the first place, because as I said, it’s basically gambling outside of a casino, and I’ve most certainly done my share of losing money in a casino, so it might not be such a great idea to put myself in a situation where I can lose it outside of one.

If I were single and without children, the circumstances would probably be different to where I might feel inclined to try, but my life in general these days is more than just myself and I always have to consider that, so in spite of my temptation and curiosity, the likelihood of me actually partaking in it is pretty minimal.

Regardless, it’s hard to not be fascinated, curious and of course tempted, when hearing of the wacky hijinks of the internet where from what I understand, Reddit has basically colluded in a manner, to seemingly artificially inflate the price of GameStop stock, to where it start off at worthless, but has ballooned up like 140%, and people are literally making large returns on investment in quick in-and-outs. 

There are numerous people that I know that are buzzing about it, and have put some skin into the game, and I’d definitely love to be among them, but like I said, I don’t feel like I’m really in the position to be as flippant with my money, and that’s coming from someone who spends hundreds of dollars on replica wrestling blets, but more importantly, I don’t want to create a habit or become addicted to it, because I love winning, I hate losing, and I’m not saying that I’ve ever had any inkling of a gambling problem, but I’m also not able to access Las Vegas every day.

But damned am I fascinated by it all, and tempted if the circumstances were different, because it literally seems like a really easy way to make some real quick and thrilling scratch if I just ponied up a little start-up capital and pulled out quickly.

Nike’s Seinfeld Shoes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I’ve struggled a little bit trying to get back in to the groove of regular writing.  Between the balancing act of trying do things whenever my child is napping, and the fact that I haven’t really found a good rhythm or inspiration to write about things, I’ve often times found myself sitting at my laptop with nothing much going on, other than scrolling through news sites and feeds to look for something to inspire me before ultimately killing time on YouTube watching chiropractor popping clips or scenes from Marvel movies.

But then I saw an ad, of all things, for Nike’s Alphafly shoes.  Supposedly, they’re causing somewhat of a stir in the running community, and I guess there are some tryhard enthusiasts out there who think they’re illegal or performance enhancing or something along those lines, but I can’t really care enough to delve deeper because I can’t really get over the fact of how fucking hideous they look.  With their gigantic, bulbous and protruding soles, all I can think of is that they’re basically the modern-day equivalent of the jump shoes from that one episode of Seinfeld.

Seriously, my mouth curled into a wtf face after I saw these things.  I gave a cursory google search to see what they were even capable of, but there’s so much noise and chatter about the legality of these things in organized marathons, that I can’t actually find any credible information on what the whole point of these shoes actually are, nor do I feel like expending the effort to dig any deeper.

Regardless, they’re basically Seinfeld shoes, visually.  And much like Kramer was pegged as looking like a special needs person when going out in public in them, I imagine anyone wearing these that isn’t actively in a competitive run would probably look similarly having these thick-ass shoes on while wearing jeans or ordinary pants.  But given the fact that they’re like 3” off the ground, I imagine a lot of height-conscious people might do it anyways, to make themselves look taller.  That’s the tradeoff however, for wanting to look taller than less mentally capable, I suppose.

New Father Brogging, #006

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the most important things that I’ve learned as a first-time dad is that whenever you feel like you’re getting a grasp of raising a baby, behaviors will inevitably change and then you’re back into a position of knowing nothing all over again, and feeling helpless when your baby is reduced to crying and finding great difficulty at what may be causing your child distress.

When my baby is crying, it could be a variety of things that could be causing it; might be hunger, even if it might be improbably because she ate a full feed just 80 minutes ago, but a growth spurt could be in play, meaning she’ll want to eat pretty much every single hour.  Maybe it’s indigestion, to which there are only a few things that can actually bring her relief, like pressing her up against the warm body of a parent, or medicinally with gripe water or newborn anti-gas drops.  Maybe she needs to be burped more.  Maybe she’s cranky because she needs to take a nap.  Lately, she’s become cognizant to the discomfort of having a soiled diaper, something that hadn’t been the case in the first five weeks.  And sometimes, she just wants to be held by mom or dad.

The point is, there have been numerous times where I feel like I’ve identified a behavioral pattern, only to rely upon the knowledge of yesterday for today’s problems, and find out that everything has changed all over again, and then I’m left feeling dumbfounded and useless that I can’t figure out how to bring comfort to my own child.

I never once discounted the difficulty of parenting, for the first time much less, but as I expected it would be, parenting is not easy.  This does not deter me in the least bit, but I am just confirming that it’s about as difficult, and occasionally frustrating as I imagined it would be.  There’s nothing like changing a diaper, only for the kid to rip a wet fart and soil it seconds after being put on, only for an after shock to hit two minutes later, and make me throw my hands up at the frustrating of changing three diapers in the span of 120 seconds.

Ultimately I wouldn’t change a thing, and I’ll change a trillion diapers if I have to in order to raise my little girl right, but damn can I at least say there are times when I just have to say, what the fuck man?

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Neck Beard Club is 2 sweeeeeeeeet

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Don’t wait, get on board with the hottest merch in professional wrestling!  Official Neck Beard Club merchandise is available at Hot Topics across America and ProWrestlingTees.com.  And why stop with the official t-shirt, when you can get the official fedora, and top it off with the official Neck Beard Club vape pen!  Supplies are limited, get ‘em while they last!

This is actually an idea that’s been rattling around my head for a while now, but just very recently did I get the motivation to actually bring it to fruition.  Maybe it’s because I recently went to my very first New Japan Pro Wrestling show, and even in spite of the mass departure of all the guys that ended up birthing All-Elite Wrestling, Bullet Club remains as relevant as ever, even if it’s sort of kind of beginning to feel like the nWo black and white after Hogan and Nash basically imploded the entire faction.

The point is, Bullet Club started to become kind of lame once it reached peak popularity, and much like the nWo, hit a level of where it began saturating so much of NJPW, it was basically the only thing you saw fans gravitating towards.  Suddenly, the whole world’s wrestling fans all started becoming huge Bullet Club marks, and it wasn’t that they were fans of NJPW, it’s just they were fans of this idea that didn’t originate in the WWE, and it was cool to like wrestling things that weren’t WWE.

And in my own little head, when things become too popular, they become lame, and I barely had any time learning about Bullet Club before I began thinking they were so popular, that it was nigh impossible for them to live up to the hype that the collective internet had put them on a pedestal with.

A year or so ago, I went to Dallas, and with my brother, we went to a Ring of Honor show.  Back in like 2012, I went to an ROH show in Baltimore, and it was an enjoyable experience seeing a lot of talent that I’d never seen before and just witnessing a brand new scene, very different than that of the WWE crowds that I have little desire of going to their shows anymore.  So I had high hopes that this ROH show in Dallas was going to be as good as my first time.

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Not surprising, but still sad

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I found out recently that the Hooters Casino & Hotel in Las Vegas is going under, and I can’t help but feel a little melancholy at the thought of that.  It was definitely not the most glitzy and must-see destination of all of the Las Vegas casinos, but it was still one of the casinos that seemed like it might actually have some staying power, based on its fairly decent location at the south end of the Strip and just the general fact that they were Hooters, a company powered primarily on one of the staples of Las Vegas’s commerce: boobs.

Then again, the south end of the Strip hasn’t always been that advantageous, especially looking at the sad state of properties like the Tropicana, Excalibur, and the revolving door of identities that Hooters was before it was Hooters, and it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise that even the mighty titty-centric Hooters is even failing.  Especially considering that in comparison to the many casinos that employ go-go dancers and lingerie dealers, Hooters’ signature uniforms have become somewhat tame and daresay conservative, and their business model has grown stale in a city that’s always changing, in the name of making money.

It was a few years ago in which I went to Hooters last, when mythical wife was still mythical gf and it was her first trip out to Las Vegas ever.  We were staying at the neighboring MGM Grand, so we wandered over to Hooters, just so she could get the full gamut of casinos, seeing as how the night prior, we had wandered around through bougie joints like the Cosmopolitan, Aria and City Center, so now it was an opportunity to see some of the more tired and less-than-glamorous joints.  And walking into Hooters, it was the very definition of tired and defeated, with carpets that looked like they haven’t been changed since 2000, the odor of stale cigarettes, defeat and desperation, and barely any dealers working the floor.  Granted, it was a little earlier in the day, but it was still kind of a reminder of the harsh reality that not everything in Las Vegas is glitz and glamour.

Ultimately, it’s of no consequence to me that Hooters Casino & Hotel is getting shut down, because I’ve only ever stayed there once, and I don’t always go there whenever I go out to Vegas.  When the day is over, the emotion I feel is mostly based on the simple fact that it’s a change to something that I’d grown accustomed to, and there’s no secret that change itself is one of the chief evokers of emotion these days.

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Dannyspeak: Overpopulated Days

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like most people out there, we tend to have our own personal vernaculars.  Phrases that we use, mostly in private, but sometimes out in the wild, which occasionally requires explanation.  Most of the time, people scrunch their eyebrows and are dubious about the use of particular phrases, but occasionally others adopt such things, and introduce it into their own vernacular.

I don’t know why, but I’ve often felt the compulsion to write about my use of the general term “overpopulation;” it’s sat in my drafts file as a topic to write about on more than one occasion, but I’ve never actually taken the time to actually write about it.  Seeing as how my writing habits have become quite strained throughout the last few weeks and months, mostly due to work trying to suck the ever-living life out of me, I’m always trying to improve my motivation and capability to write, and no matter how bad things get, writing is the one hobby and outlet that I really do not want to let fall too far off the rails, and much like being able to run a mile at any drop of a hat, I always want to be able to write whenever I feel like it.

There are two places in which I most frequently decide that the world is too overpopulated: the parking lot at work, or at the gym. 

Being the creature of habit that I am, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that I wish to park in the same parking spot every single day.  In order to accomplish that, I realize that I need to pick somewhere that isn’t necessarily rockstar parking, right next to the entrance of the office, but somewhere where I could (hopefully) reliably get the same spot on a regular basis.  That being said, my preferred spot is one floor up from the main entrance, but fairly close to the stairs, so I can traverse one flight of stairs and be at the aforementioned rockstar entrance.

For a while, it was pretty nice, getting the same spot on a daily basis.  I knew I could be five minutes earlier or five minutes later than the usual arrival time, and it would be there, and I took comfort in knowing that I basically had a consistent place to park.

But then, much to my dismay, I rolled into the parking lot one day, and there was a fucking pickup truck in my spot.  It pissed me off royally, and I hoped this was a one-off occurrence.  But then the truck was there the next day, and several other days in which I happened to be off by a few minutes.  Even after I rattled off a nice little streak of getting my spot back for several consecutive days, this fuckface would still take my exact spot whenever they managed to get there before I did.

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