Tag: comparison

New Father Brogging, #017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Cal Ripken, Jr. is considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time, but he was also oft-described as the man of a thousand batting stances.  His tendency to change the way he stood in the batter’s box countless times throughout his career was a metaphor of the game of baseball and how rapidly it changed, and the endless cat-and-mouse game of needing to change things for when things change on you, forcing them to change in response, and so on and so on.  Basically, what it really amounted to was the fact that in order for Ripken to have become the Hall of Famer he is, it required him to be adaptable and willing to change things up, frequently and rapidly.

That’s what sleep training a baby kind of feels like.  Every time I manage to get my daughter to go down for a nap successfully, and then try to reenact the exact same procedure the next time around and it inevitably fails, resulting in a screaming baby that takes 45 minutes to go down for 45 minutes, I feel like a failure of a father all over again, and mentally defeated and fried.  I realize that no trick, tactic or strategy is ever going to work more than one time in a row, and it’s like going to war with Ultron or Cyclopsis the War Zord from Power Rangers, in that exact sense.

I can read everything on the internet and watch all sorts of mommy vloggers, but I think when the day is over, as long as I go into the pre-nap battleground with a mentally clean slate, and keep consistent to the few rules that mythical wife and I have agreed upon for like circadian rhythm and bassinet, I just have to accept that it’s going to be a new challenge each time, and accept that it might be more difficult than the last time.  Considering the fact that anything from indigestion, teething, growth spurts or all of the above can come into play, sleep training ultimately is a constantly moving target, and all I can really do is mentally catalog cues and tendencies, and try to react best to whatever may come.

Just the other day, no amount of holding her was working, and she was wailing for 45 minutes.  Needing to take a break, I set her down in the bassinet, and she was out cold almost instantly, much to my confusion; she abhorred the idea of being put on her back just days ago, and now she was falling immediately??  Just two naps ago, holding her still and rocking her had her passed out in my arms, and it was around this time I came to the conclusion that no one thing was ever going to work twice in a row.

Either way, I think I can easily say that up to this point, five months in, sleep training has been the most difficult challenge of new fatherhood.  I haven’t felt so discouraged and as much of a failure as a parent as often as I have as much as I have during this time, and as calm as I can get myself back to, the feelings of anxiety and self-loathing is always just the next nap time away.

How things can change over the span of a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout my 82-day journey of re-posting literally ten years’ worth of brog posts, I naturally took the time to go down memory lane and re-read everything I’d written over that time.  I think as a whole, the collective brog does paint a decent picture of who I really am, but I’ll also be the first person to admit that hoo-boy, there’s some shit I’ve written in the past that most certainly isn’t the way I think these days.

Inherently, I don’t think people are capable of dramatic change in their lives, but I think it’s fair game to say that opinions most certainly can change throughout time.  Environment, influence, and/or just plain growing up, the way people think can harden or soften, or just plain go in different directions as time passes.

I don’t want to one of those people whom when they get become rich, famous and have the spotlight of the internet shone on them (because that’s totally going to happen to me one day), and have their internet history drug out of the past and screen shots slapped onto Twitter for the world to ridicule and judge, I went ahead and took the liberty to drag out some of the more notable changes that I’d witnessed about myself throughout the last ten years, and regardless of how wince-worthy and regrettable some of the things I’ve written may have been, the fact of the matter is that these are things that I’d thought, ways that my mind worked, and feelings that I felt at those specific instances, and I own the things I’ve said.

Because as much as some of the more regrettable things I’ve written might make me, much less anyone else, wince, cringe or face palm, I do think the revisionist history culture of 2020 is way worse.

Alternatively, this post probably should’ve just been titled “content that did not age well”

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Nope.  Never saw it coming

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Four games.  That’s all it took for the 2020 Major League Baseball season to have its first cancellations on account of a coronavirus breakout, as the Miami Marlins are the first team to have an outbreak of COVID-19 cases, after 20+ team personnel test positive.  Effective immediately, numerous home games were cancelled for both themselves, as well as the Phillies, the last team they played prior to the announcement, and MLB will have a great time trying to figure out how to re-work all these cancelled games into their already abbreviated 60-game season.

Honestly, it’s about as surprising as finding out that dogs like to sniff butts that this happened so quickly.  Frankly, I’m surprised it didn’t take two games before the first cases started to happen, but then again considering MLB said that testing would only take place every other day, who’s to say it didn’t, but then there was a grace period of a day in between?

Anyway, this is just a microcosm of how fun the rest of this season is going to become, because as far as I can tell, from what I’ve heard is that there will be many more double-headers played this year to accommodate the crunch of games, and much like the Toronto Blue Jays will have to endure, since the entire country of Canada basically won’t let them back in, many of them will have re-jiggered to where the opposite team will be designated as the home teams, on the road.  I guess when there are no fans in the stands, it definitely makes the venues feel a little bit more neutral, but baseball players are neurotic weirdoes sometimes, so who knows how they’ll react to batting last in someone else’s ballparks.

Oh, and the double-header games will all be 7-inning games – just like in the minor leagues, which is an appropriate comp at this point, considering how bush league the season is becoming.

SO, this just opens up the door more for the possibility of some wonky seasons; I hope by the time we’re nearing the end of the 60-game season, the Seattle Mariners will clinch the AL West in Houston, where they’re the home team against the Astros at Minute Maid Park, and some guy from their taxi squad hits a walk-off homerun.  It would be the perfect beginning of their playoff run to their inevitable World Series date with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

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This is really the state of America in 2020

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

No matter how much I never liked to admit to feeling it, now that the faucet’s been turned, it seems like not a day goes by where the words don’t pass through my lips, and it doesn’t make me feel any better verbalizing it now as it did when I first came to the realization that right now, America sucks.

Talking with a friend about the state of the world, I found myself saying things that I’d never said before in regards to how I felt, mostly because I’ve been isolated, and mythical wife and I try not to talk about things too much because they really are that depressing, but what came out of my fingers in text is that I don’t think it’s ever felt so physically possible to feel just how much our country is letting us down, the way America is completely and utterly failing the American people on a daily basis right now.

It really is becoming impossible to keep up with all the ways things are fucked up, at least for me, who likes to jot down notes on a daily basis so I can remember the things happening in history for another day, especially in case I feel inspired to write about them at some point.  But it’s downright sad and pathetic the things that emerge on a daily basis about the state of America in the state of the world currently, and I realize that it becomes a little more difficult every day to not grow more jaded and nihilistic about how things are, which are definitely things I don’t want to be happening when I’m in a period of my life where I’m trying to enjoy and savor the time of new fatherhood and spending time with my baby.

It’s kind of not fair that America is in such chaos and forced to hunker, when all I want to do is show my kid the great big world and can’t, because neither of us want to get the coronavirus that’s fucking everywhere and risk our lives.

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New Father Brogging, #013

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, I feel like that guy from Lost, Desmond I think his name was.  The guy who lived in a bunker or some remote cabin, and had to keep entering the numbers into a computer every 100 minutes or so, or else some indeterminate bad thing was going to happen.  If I recall correctly, as I never really watched the show past the first season, and had to kind of catch up on it through reading synopses of it on Wikipedia, it was his negligence at entering the numbers at one point is what led to the plane crash that put all the show’s survivors onto the island in the first place.

But instead of risking a gigantic electromagnetic pulse being released, I’m at the perpetual mercy of my daughter’s feeding schedule, which has shown to be a feed every single 90-120 minutes, depending on if she can actually manage to nap in between in the first place.

Unsurprising, with my life more or less in repeated 90-120 minute chunks of time, one can imagine that it’s difficult to accomplish much in between.  Especially considering that anywhere from 20-30 minutes of that chunk of downtime is occupied by the time it takes for her to actually drink all her milk, resulting in really, an hour plus of time in which I don’t have to be feeding her.  Not to mention the fact that, as she is but a small baby, she commands an extraordinary amount of attention, lest she cry or become fussy.

Needless to say, there are some days in which become very mentally and physically challenging, when I know it’s a delicate and difficult balancing act between doing my actual job’s work, and being the attentive and hands-on dad that I wanted to be.  It’s these days where I struggle to not grow too frustrated, and feeling like I have no real time for myself, because this is what I signed up to do as a parent, and something that I need to remember that it’s never just about me anymore, especially now, but I can’t help it sometimes, and still have days where I’m just grumpy and short.

Unlike Desmond from Lost, the chances of earth-shattering catastrophe isn’t likely if/when I let too much time lapse between feeds/naps, but given the wailing that my daughter is capable of when she’s over-tired or over-hungry, and it might as well be capable of making parents feel like their heads are going to explode.

Regardless, I know this is something that will eventually pass in time, but the whole point of writing out things like this, is so that I can always remember the things I think during the whole timeline of raising a child for the very first time, and perhaps one day, some random person will get into my writing, and read this, and if they’re going through the exact same thing, know that they aren’t alone, and that the things they’re experiencing are very likely not exclusive to them.

New Father Brogging, #010

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A thought that often crosses my mind is that I can’t believe the world that my daughter was born into.  And then I feel really sad about it, despite knowing that she very well won’t remember any of this stuff, but one day she might read about it in history books or any sort of resource that outlines the happening throughout history.

It’s bad enough she was born right at the very start of when coronavirus came into the United States and was shortly declared a global pandemic, literally changing the landscape of the world where the vast majority of educated people began to take shelter in their homes, to minimize the spread of a new disease.

But in a way that can only be described as amazing, a global pandemic still managed to get pushed into to the backseat by the more recent civil unrest that’s boiled over on account of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and very recently George Floyd in Minnesota, with the latter being pretty flagrantly executed by a white police officer, when his neck was low-key crushed under the knee of the cop.

As I’m writing this, all across the country, there have been countless protests, many of which escalated into riots complete with looting, and there are hundreds to thousands of people who have been physically harmed, gassed, tazed or impacted by some form of crowd control.  The police are widely viewed as the enemy now instead of the agency that’s meant to serve and protect, and it’s times like this in which I’m kind of glad that one, I don’t live/work as close to actual city-proper Atlanta as I used to, and two, add the staying home as yet another ironic benefit to there being a fucking pandemic.

It’s a very sad and scary thought to think of this being the world that my first child was born into, and I feel like the generations before her have already let her down in fostering a world that’s supposed to be safe and better for the future.

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Well, she wasn’t entirely wrong

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

lol: A Susan goes to Wal-Mart, sees an nWo wrestling t-shirt, blasts Wal-Mart on social media for supporting global elites trying to push for a literal new world order

I guess she didn’t see the WWE logo on the very picture she took, or more likely she didn’t take the two seconds to verify what the logo was if she didn’t recognize it in the first place.

Either way, this story made my day, and it’s not often that I’m put in a position where I have to take the side of Wal-Mart, but when the day is over Susan/Becky/Karen culture is worse than the corporate disgust of even Wal-Mart.

This was a classic case of a Susan who goes around looking for things to SJW about, and hoping to be the first one to do such.  And once she found something that she thought she could get her teeth into, she doesn’t even try to do a little background research about it before going off on Facebook about her conspiracy theories of global elites on top of attempting to shame big business despite the fact that she herself was apparently shopping at a Wal-Mart.

And naturally because the internet lives for little else than the opportunities to point out when other people are wrong, it didn’t take long for the Susan to become the target of all sorts of laughter and ridicule once it was realized that she was flagrantly mistaking a professional wrestling t-shirt for propaganda for the Illuminati.

But let’s play devil’s advocate here a little bit; Susan wasn’t entirely wrong with her remarks of:

global elites pushing for the nWo (New World Order) which includes one world leader, one world religion, one world currency and one world government

…as long as it was kept within the appropriate context: of professional wrestling.

I mean seriously, look at those assholes (above).  Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall (sorry, it was hard to find a decent image that didn’t include at least one scrub like Sean Waltman), if it were truly up to them, they really would have pushed for such an agenda.  Undoubtedly, Hogan would love to be the one world leader [of professional wrestling] and he’s already declared himself to be God before [not just god of professional wrestling, or A god, but just straight up God god with a capital G].  Nash and Hall are two of the greediest motherfuckers in the history of the industry, so they’d obviously be all about one world currency, especially if it meant they got to have more of it than anyone else, and would probably be supportive of whatever one world government would help expedite that collection of money.

So Susan wasn’t totally wrong with her conspiracy theory, she just went a little overboard with its boundaries, and it was just unfortunate that she happened to do it on social media, where once it makes it onto the internet, it didn’t matter that she deleted the post later, there’s always going to be at least one prick who will have screen grabbed it and chronicled it forever, and then it becomes fodder for some rando brogger.