Tag: job

Dad Brog (#081): Now we enter true hard mode

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Seeing as how my eldest has now crossed over the two-year mark, I can’t really call this series 2 Under 2 anymore.  So for the sake of simplification and finality, because these are what these posts really are, I’m just going to go ahead and just start titling these what they truly are.

So for the past month and change, has been The Best Month Ever, part 2 – a substantial chunk of time in which my mom has been staying with me, to help take care of my children, as well as the opportunity to bond with #2, much as she did with #1 back two years ago.  Her being here is a massive security blanket, as she is someone I trust unconditionally with my kids, and I always know my children are in good hands when I’m not physically present.  Which has been very critical seeing as how I have now returned to the office partially in my new hybrid work format.

Honestly, I think this visit has gone better than the last one, since aside from being the point person on #2, my mom has gotten to witness the growth and development of my first child, and it will never not make me happy to see just how much #1 loves her halmoni, and the rapid development of where it started with “halmi” at the start of the month, but has already corrected to a very well pronounced “halmoni” now.

We didn’t butt heads as often as we did the last time she was here, and probably by virtue of being in a job that isn’t sucking the soul out of me, my mental state was in a far better place now than it was back then, and I didn’t have my own head stuffed up my ass for the first few weeks of her visit this time.

In spite of how glad I’ve been to have my mom here over the last five weeks, it still has been somewhat of a roller coaster.  As mentioned, I returned to the office, which has embarked a whole new world of awkwardness of getting back to commuting and being in a place of business again.  I’ve started working out and running again which is a positive thing.  Unfortunately, as posted about not long ago, I had to put my dog down while she was here, which sucked massively in spite of knowing it was always looming.  And in the middle of this month, I took #1 to Disney World for her birthday, while my mom took a break from kid duty to visit a local friend in Georgia for the weekend, which was pretty good for all of us.

However, what wasn’t good was the fact that my daughter picked up a bug while in Florida, and I can remember the little shitfuck who was coughing all over the shuttle, and being concerned that my daughter wasn’t far enough away perhaps, and now I’ve got two sick kids because it’s impossible to separate #1 from #2 because they love each other.  It makes me really reconsider doing anything that puts either of my kids at risk, because Americans still can’t get their shit together, and frankly it’s not worth my kids getting sick for an egregiously expensive excursion in the first place.

Regardless, the point of the post is that the best month ever part 2 is coming to a close this week, and I have to take my mom back to Virginia very soon.  I’m eternally grateful for her help, and treasure the bonds she made with my daughters, but at the same time I’m absolutely scared and petrified at what lies ahead in the immediate future, with daily life without any sort of safety net anymore.

With me going back to the office a couple days each week, these are a couple of days in which it’s going to be just my nanny, in charge of both girls by herself.  This isn’t say I don’t trust my nanny, it’s just that I feel like I’m the only person in my world who really, really, really tries to avoid any and all scenarios in which my kids outnumber the present adults.  I know how hard double duty is, I’m on it way more than I wish I were, but shit happens.  My kids are handfuls, where one of them is now a two-nager who has some very strong opinions and wants to get her hands on anything and everything, and the other one is an infant that sucks at sleeping and requires the DaVinci code in order to get to nap for seven minutes.

Prior to this, I’ve always had the luxury of being able to work from home, so that I was always available if things went tits up, but that’s not going to be the case for several days each week.  Mythical wife and I agreed that we really only need to hang in there until the end of the school year, but that’s still nearly two and a half months to be going without any sort of safety netting.

As if two kids under-ish two weren’t already hard enough, going back to the office and sending my mom home, is truly going to be putting life into hard mode, and it’ll be a daily touch and feel test to see how things are going, but I have concerns that I may need to put some stress on a job that I’m really beginning to like, due to the realities of parenthood borne during pandemic.

Time to combat the dad bod

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the challenges that have emerged during the journey of raising a second child is that I’ve basically had to give up running.  I haven’t run since October, and it’s been way longer than that since I’d last had a formal workout in a gym.  Raising kids has a tendency to make stuff like exercise expendable in a day’s agenda, and it was bad enough I had to forfeit gyms due to pandemic, but throwing a second kid into the mix has taken running off the table for me as well over the last few months.

Needless to say, I’ve watched my weight do some rollercoaster-ing since the original lockdown occurred, and now it’s not headed in the right direction.  At first, my weight started to drop because I wasn’t eating well, often not eating enough, and with the gym off the table, muscle mass began deteriorating, so the weight from muscle mass presumably started coming off.  Eventually, running became my only real exercise, and doing cardio with no weight training meant that I could really only lose more weight, and I actually got my weight down to almost my peak high school weight, in the 170’s area, and I actually felt like I was looking pretty decent, in spite of the loss of all my gains.

Eventually #2 showed up and life went into hard(er) mode with two kids in tow.  With my job also ruining my life at this point and the challenges of raising two kids simultaneously, the running eventually ceased, and mythical wife and I more or less went into survival mode as far as our eating habits went.  We never had the time and/or energy to cook not-trash food for ourselves, and with the little time we did have, we have been eating a whole lot of garbage over the last few months.  My weight has been creeping up in this time, and it’s been especially noticeable when I’d be doing virtual job interviews and putting on dress shirts, and feeling the bulge and tightening in all the wrong places.

I normally don’t like to put too much stock into weight numbers, since when I worked weights I always spouted the whole muscle weighs more than fat thing, but with no weights in play, I knew that each and every pound that I’d gain was solely based on my own poor choices.  At the time of starting this post, I’d crept up to 192.4 lbs., and with the reality that I haven’t exercised in months, that means I’m 192.4 lbs. of fat fucking American embodiment of failure.

Anyway, my intention is to stop the bleeding, and to try and get back on the horse.  Due to the fact that #2 has been sleeping at night fairly well as of late, I had the confidence to get back on the treadmill and go for a run, the first one I’ve done since October 7th, 2021 (thanks Garmin fitness tracker).

It was the worst run I’ve had in probably 16 years, since I’m basically starting from scratch.  I was running at a pace that I had to keep slowing down .1 at a time because I was blowing out and getting gassed, and it took me nearly 40 minutes to traverse three miles.  Now I say traverse, because I definitely didn’t run the whole time, like I used to do my old workouts of non-stop running.  My pace was probably around 12 minutes a mile, a far cry from my old 9:50 pace, and I feel like I have a long way to go before I can competently get back to those kinds of splits.

But it was also the best run I’ve had in a very long time, because I actually got to do it.  And one thing I’ve always stated is that at no point ever, does running ever feel like a waste of time, and that’s absolutely one thing that I love, because I abhor feeling like I’m wasting time.

If all goes well, I’ll get back to a general routine of running every other day, which is good because running is also when I can try to catch up with watching things, since I can watch things on my iPad.

Furthermore, at the new gig, I’ve done some recon and my access to the fitness center has been activated, so I now officially have a place where I can hit some weights again, which I’m super excited to get started with.  I’m not really looking forward to the fact that I’ll be starting from scratch there, which means the inevitable soreness from doing, everything, is going to be pretty prevalent, but once it dissipates, I’m hoping to try and build back some of the muscle that I’ve clearly lost over the last two years.

It’s not the best stocked fitness center there is, but it doesn’t cost anything and has some free weights, so I can at least not feel entirely like a geriatric living on machines.  I intend to make the best of it, and declare war on the flab that I’ve amassed over the last few months, because how far I’ve fallen off the wagon is not okay, and there’s little I want more than to change that.

Changing the eating habits is probably going to be a bigger hurdle to clear, but at least if I have some exercise back into the rotation, that should help suppress some of the physical decay I’ve been allowing to happen to me.  I’d prefer to have the dad bod that actually looks like I work out occasionally versus the dad bod of the guy that’s let go of everything and will have to start buying bigger clothing because of it.

2 Under 2: A catch up on dad brog post (#078)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Hard to believe it’s been over a month since I made any additions to this series.  I suppose I felt a little guilty that I was using it pretty primarily as an arena to bitch about parenting and that’s really not what I had wanted the tag to be in the grand spectrum of things.  This isn’t to say bad things that stress me out haven’t happened, but a lot of things have occurred over the last month and a half since the last time I made an official dad brog post, and I feel like writing about them before the thoughts, words and motivation to do so vanish into the aether, never to be materialized.

It started with one of the worst nights since #2 was born, as she woke up in the middle of the night like four times, required a bottle each time to go back out, only to sleep for like, 45 minutes before blowing up all over again and completely nuking mythical wife and I out of our minds.  We got to the point where it was trial by fire, and was time to evict the little night gremlin from our bedroom, and officially placed her into hers.  The crib, camera and just about everything else had already been set up, but being right next to #1’s room, our biggest concern was that her night tantrums would run the risk of waking her sister, and two miserable kids was the last thing either of us wanted.  But seeing as how our lives were being ruined at that very moment, we pulled the trigger and kicked her out, and put her into her own room.

The rest of that particular night didn’t improve much, but we did learn that through a combination of maximum-distanced cribs between adjacent rooms and two white noise machines, it was possible for #1 to not really hear the screaming going on next door, which was a small victory in itself.  Now we knew that we could start working with #2 to sleep in her own room without risking waking up her sister, no matter how much she screamed.

And since then, knock on wood, things have been showing some nominal improvement.  I hope I’m not jinxing it by notating it, but she has been sleeping better more than she hasn’t, and it’s creating some optimism for mythical wife and I, and I’m feeling like if this improvement starts to grow, then I may begin to have the capacity to get some evening runs in on the treadmill, which I’ve been pining for like crazy, because I’ve been gaining weight in not a good way over the last few weeks and it’s feeding into my general anxiousness about life as it is.

As was the case with my first child, my mom has come down to stay with me for a few weeks in order to help out as well as bond with her grandchildren.  Unlike the first go around, I don’t have my head up my ass for most of this time, and I absolutely love having my mom around and I’m not all (as) mopey and depressed about life while she’s here, and understand that this really is the best month ever all over again.

If you want proof of the importance of early bonding, #1 has lived a life very sheltered from people in general due to the never-ending pandemic we live in, but among the few people she met within her first year of life, my mom is one of them.  Now, she is basically stranger-danger to every single person she meets, including my sister, my dad and pretty much all of my relatives that she met for the very first time this past Thanksgiving, because she never knew them when she was an infant.

That being said, one of the greatest joys of my life is seeing just how happy #1 is around my mom, and just how much she wants to be around halmoni, except in toddler speak it keeps coming out as halmi which warms me to the very core of my often hard dark heart.  She loves my mom, all of her cooking, and I’m over the moon at the help and stability she brings to our chaotic household of two kids.

But also the fact that #2 is getting the same opportunity to bond with my mom and hopefully create a similar lifelong appreciation for grandma that my first child has.  My mom’s not getting any younger, and I’m just so grateful that she’s still got enough in her to lug around a 16 lb. and growing infant, and bringing some old school parenting tactics that is getting her to take naps and take a tremendous load off of my shoulders.

I’ve never felt more productive and relaxed during the workday than I have over the last two weeks with my mom in tow, because it means my nanny doesn’t have to pull double duty, and I know both my kids are getting the individualized attention that they really need.

Finally, on the topic of work, this week marks the first time that I’ve been reporting to an office in two years.  Sure, the company has since changed, and I’m going into an office I’ve never been to before, but the point remains, I’m now getting up in the morning and driving into work, three days a week, two days from home.

Among all sorts of awkwardness and germaphobia of doing such, I had a moment on Monday morning where I had to fight a clock, which was nothing out of the ordinary, but I had to pick up #1 and give her a kiss and tell her that I had to leave for work, for basically the first time ever.  Yes, there were 1-2 days after her birth and before coronavirus shut the world down where I went into the office, but she was in the NICU, and completely unaware of the world around her that she didn’t know that I was going to work.  It was a very surreal and unusual feeling moment, but is something that will for the time being, be the norm.

And it sucks knowing that after two years, I’m away from my kids for 7-8 hours a day, because without eyes on them, I genuinely have no idea what’s really going on, save for the mercy of updates from my mom or the nanny.

However at the same time, being in the office environment and completely devoid of all the distractions of home, I’m getting more work done than ever, and I feel like I’m actually learning more about the job than I did while being full remote.  It’s a good and a bad thing because of the tradeoff with my home and kids, but still essential nonetheless in order for me to actually grow in my career.

So that is where life as dad is right now, which is to say that these dad brogs don’t always have to be so miserable and full of mirth.  At this current juncture with my mom helping out, and me not dreading my job, things are actually feeling pretty optimistic currently.  Hopefully I’m not jinxing anything by acknowledging it, but it does feel refreshing to not feel so drowning all the time, and hopefully the myths of things getting easier as the kids get older starts beginning to come to fruition.

Forced writing, vol. 745

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks, I’ve actually been in an okay rhythm of writing.  Between my new job having yet to really pick up steam, leading me to have some occasional downtime, trying to get #2 onto a modicum of a sleep schedule, and the fact that there have actually been numerous things that have piqued my interest to write about, I’ve actually felt satisfied with how much brogging I’ve been able to accomplish lately.

At this very moment however, I’m in a position where I wish to continue to ride such momentum and keep on writing, however my motivation to write is basically nonexistent today.  It’s not for lack of things that I know I could brog about, from the Royal Rumble, a Bengals vs. Rams Super Bowl, Tom Brady’s retirement, or the spoiled surprise of the Washington Redskins Commanders new team name.  Or social commentary about how despite the threat of coronavirus being no lower now than it was two years ago, people are going out and about all the time, and other sicknesses are spreading like wildfires, leading to situations like earlier this week where I had to go two straight days without a nanny, while on the clock, wrangling two kids.

No, I don’t much feel like writing right now.  And I hate to make it seem like I’m never not in a bad place, but right now I’m not in a particularly good place.  However, I’ve said it several times in the past, it’s times like this when I don’t feel like writing, is exactly when I should be writing, even if I am forcing it.  I have the capacity to do so, and short of dicking around on YouTube or doing surveys on my phone, there’s still no better way to spend available time than writing for me.

I just received confirmation from the vet that my dog is very much not a good candidate for surgery, due to the development and spread of cancer in his little body, and at (roughly) 16 years old, it’s probably best to just do whatever necessary to make his life comfortable, but for all intents and purposes, dog has cancer, who knows how much longer there’s left, but it’s probably not much.

I’ve touched on it before, but #2 has been regressing hard in terms of sleep, in spite of the training we’ve been trying to implement.  For the most part, both of my kids have been polar opposites of each other when it comes to sleeping, and for how great my oldest sleeps, #2 is an absolute nightmare when it comes to the topic of sleep.  Over the last few days, she’s been waking up multiple times in the night screaming bloody murder, and nothing short of plowing her with bottle after bottle seems to be capable of bringing her back down and getting her to sleep.  For another 54 minutes, before it all seems to repeat itself.

Mythical wife and I have been basically getting no more than an hour of sleep at a time before it repeats itself, and it might be just fatigue rate, but seriously, this shit is ruining my life right now.  I loathed teething and sleep regressions from my first go-around, but there’s nothing saying we’re not hitting both at the same time with #2, but it absolutely sucks balls, and I can’t even look forward to going to bed anymore, because of the expectation that shit will repeatedly hit the fan while asleep.

So when baby isn’t sleeping, parents aren’t sleeping, and we’re miserable and ornery and exhausted, more so than when she was a tiny newborn.  And this impacts my work life, which is actually now important now that I’m a new guy in a new place, and it’s critical that I make positive first impressions of how hardworking and reliable I am, but I haven’t really been able to, because of kid duties, and I’m concerned about having those that hired me think they got a dud, instead of the stud I know I’m capable of being when I’m normal, engaged and not distracted.

Of course, this, like most soul-sucking, sanity-testing tribulations of parenthood, will pass, but it’s just a matter of when.  It feels like a speedbump that never will end, and it’s so, so hard on a daily basis to operate in the routine I’m in.  It’s a waiting game with no definitive expected target date in sight, and frankly that’s feeling like the case with anything and everything these days.  From small shit like waiting for an email response from customer service, to waiting on some merchandise I’m interesting to drop when they said it was going to drop, to bigger things like the aforementioned wait for my daughter to get her sleep shit together so that my household can actually get some rest and improve the quality of our lives.

I am, not in a very good place right now.  I’m trying my best to keep my head above water, and trying to find happiness and small wins in the little things, like the explosion of growth and development from my first child, and the general daytime happiness and smiles from #2 at any other time outside of the night when she should be sleeping.  But when it comes to the big picture, there are a lot of things that are bogging me down, and I hope that the strings cut and they fall off sooner rather than later, because I’m just so over so much, and I need, just a little bit of time to catch my breath and not feel like I’m so underwater all the time.

I don’t want to be an emotional vampire

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Since starting my new job, things haven’t been easy.  I was provided the wrong laptop from the very start, which inhibited my ability to do the core of my work functions from the onset.  My household also (likely) contracted the ‘Rona, which I’ve already said my piece about multiple times already, but I didn’t want to bring that up just when I was starting my new job, fortunately everything’s been remote still to this point.

Then, there was the bullet I realized that I had avoided from the old job with numerous of my former colleagues and reports getting axed that fucked my head up, because I’ve come to the realization that my shitty old boss knew this was coming and had been planning for this for a while, and I just so happened to have gotten out before the hammer fell, but it doesn’t change the fact that I have survivor’s guilt as well as feel like some of my old reports are accusing me of knowing it was coming and not telling them, which couldn’t be any further from the truth.

More recently, I’ve found out that my dog has cancer, and until I get an ultrasound, won’t really know the full extent of what we’re dealing with, but given the fact that he’s like 16 years old, things aren’t looking too optimistic right now.

All while my second child is still a living nightmare when it comes to sleeping, as it’s feeling nigh impossible to put her down for naps while I’m on the clock at work, and I can’t expect my nanny to handle the two under two remotely competently without compromising the care on one of them.

Needless to say, things have been pretty rough on my side, while I’m on the clock, but the difference now is that I’m the new guy at a job I’ve just started, versus being the guy on his way out of a job I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of.  My flakiness now, I give a shit about, and feel like shit that I’m being flaky, because my head’s not on straight because of all the bullshit going on and/or my youngest being a gargantuan cockblock for my ability to work, because there’s no way I can concentrate on work when she’s screaming bloody murder instead of taking a fucking nap.

My new boss is chill, and probably would be understanding to some of the shit I’m going through, seeing as she has children and dogs, and clearly isn’t the micromanager that has it out for me in the first place.  But at the same time, I don’t want to unload all this baggage when I haven’t even completed my first month with the company.

Although I’m sure I would be okay and probably get some leniency and empathy, I just don’t want to be like the emotional vampire from What We Do In the Shadows, the girl who was Colin Robinson’s office rival-then-fling, who always had some unfortunate shit happening to her, so she could siphon off the emotional energy of all the people in the office.  Because that’s what I feel like I would be, if I would make too much of my bullshit known, and I don’t want to give that off, when I’m still in the stage where I’m still making first impressions everywhere I go.

But it really does suck just how inhibited I am sometimes while I’m on the clock, because I really do want to hit the ground running and do better than I feel I’m doing now.  Ironically, as much as I don’t want to go back in to the office, I feel like my productivity has a ceiling while I’m at home, and if I really want to shine at new job, I think I’m going to eventually have to embrace the need to go back.

What I feared might happen, happened

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sad.  One of my former reports from my old job texted me to let me know that they, and numerous other members of my old newsprint team from my old job were all being laid off.

This is something that I figured could eventually show up on the table, but seeing as how over the last six years I was there, I never saw, or heard of anywhere in the company that did any sort of laying off, I didn’t think that it would actually happen.

It’s funny, when I had planned on leaving the company, my ego and I had hoped that it would get a modicum of respect and acknowledgment.  I’m not saying I was ever the most important cog in the machine that was my team, but I did design the work process that kept us afloat throughout the transition into the Ford Pinto of software we were forced to use.  However, when I had announced my notice of resignation, we were already in the first week of a two-week notice from one of my production counterparts, and unbeknownst to me, my other production counterpart was a week away from announcing their two-week notice.

Suddenly, I was the Stephanie Tanner middle child of resignations, doomed to be unnoticed, and worse off, I begun feeling concerned that this power vacuum that was forming due to the departure of 3 out of 4 managers on the team was going to no longer put the team in a defensive mode until they could staff back up, but now put them at risk of being potentially liquidated, and the work outsourced.

Ever since the pandemic rose and my team specifically took some lumps throughout the last two years because the print medium isn’t as agile and adaptable as digital ones, there was concern throughout the team about the security of their jobs.  I had, honestly opined that I felt that everyone was safe, solely because of the ironic fact that we all had knowledge of the aforementioned Ford Pinto of graphic design software, so it’s not like any joe-schmoe could be hired off the street to do our jobs.  And for the last two years, in spite of how much of a pain in the ass it’s been, our team had navigated the bumpy waters of pandemic retail, and come out no worse for wear at the end of it.

But now, with the Great Resignation™ hitting our team specifically and creating such gaps in the team, I can’t say that I’m surprised to see that liquidation and outsourcing has begun.  The company as a whole clearly soured on the print medium, which was my impetus for starting to look for a new job, aside from the fact that I hated the fuck out of my boss, but none of it changed the fact that I still cared about my team and that all these talented designers all deserved better than they’ve been dealt.

I do feel a little bit of guilt that there is the possibility that my departure, along with the departure of the other managers made this happen, although I have no clue to whether or not this was always on the table in the first place regardless of if we were there or not.  But when the day is over, I still have to, and I did, put myself and my family above all else, and it turns out that I dodged an extremely close bullet.

It’s just that as an empathetic person, it kills me that people that I cared about are put in this unfortunate position.  The saving grace is that they still have nearly nine weeks notice, which gives them fairly sufficient time to begin looking for new jobs, and with the cards all out on the table, it’s not like anyone has to be discreet about it.  In fact, as long as they’re not insubordinate shitbags, all my old team that’s on the block doesn’t even really have to put up the front of being friendly or overly professional anymore, because the company is still going to rely on them to put out all the scheduled advertisements all the way up to Memorial Day.

And then they get a severance package, and fortunately the timing of it will still allow all of them to partake in the company’s semi-annual profit sharing bonuses which usually take place in March.

At this point, what I’m most curious about are the future statuses of other individuals on my old team, namely my old boss.  I don’t get the impression that they’re on the block like my old reports are, and I have this pessimistic suspicion that they probably didn’t fight very hard, nor are they remotely anything close to the type who would go down with the ship.  They have another channel under their umbrella, and I’ve long known that that one was their true passion, while my team was kind of the bastard they had to manage in order to have their role.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they in fact initiated this liquidation, because often said that their life would be peaches if they could get rid of newsprint, and could focus solely on catalog.  But these are things that I’ll never know, but the result of it all is still feeling terrible for a lot of talented designers who will soon be out of a job, and not help feeling a little bit guilty for helping push the boulder over the edge.  I don’t regret anything I’ve done in regards to seeking greener pastures before the shots were fired, but I’m still allowed to feel empathy for those I used to work with who were saddled by this unfortunate development.

How today should be versus how it is

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today is my last day with *Fortune 50 company redacted*.  I’ve been here for a hair under six years, and this is the longest job I’ve ever had.  As much of a stressor and source of frustration the job had turned into over the last two years, under normal circumstances today really should be a bittersweet one, because there are still a lot of good people there, I’ve made a lot of good relationships, as I close this chapter of my career.

Instead I’m just bitter, at all the life’s circumstances that are swirling around in play right now, and I’m having a very difficult time letting go of all this anger and frustration I’m feeling. It’s tarnishing absolutely everything around in my life right now, and I’m fully aware of it and how calm people always wax poetic about how it’s never good to hold onto anger, but I can’t help it because my entire household has been compromised by one fucking person who thinks vaccination means they can resume living life like it were 2018 again and going into crowds and picking up plagues to spread unto others.

I should be excited about my new job starting up soon, but I’m not.  I haven’t even worked a day, but I’m already dreading it, because my home is still fucked with COVID, and in spite of me originally thinking I may have been asymptomatic, I’m feeling shit in my throat that is saying otherwise and I’m 99% sure I too now have dropped off the list of the undefeated but I can’t know definitively because the America is too full of stupid fucks, the disease is everywhere and I can’t get tested because all sites are slammed to oblivion and and all home tests are sold out everywhere until like 2025.

Instead of embarking on my new career path full of optimism and hope eternal, it’ll more than likely be just like a day like today: me on double duty with my girls because we can’t bring in help because of COVID and mythical wife still having to go to work because the school system is more fucked up than Heaven’s Gate and they’re more than willing to turn a blind eye to someone with a very recent exposure as long as they don’t have to go get a substitute teacher.  So I’m quadruple stressed out because I probably have the ‘Rona, I’m still on the clock with my last day of work, I’m worried for my wife, and dealing with both kids.

All because one person brought the fucking plague into my home.

I should be coasting to the finish line and feeling melancholy as I bid adieu.  I should be excited about my new job coming up. 

I should be in good spirits.

But I’m not.  I’m angry, frustrated, disappointed and disgusted.  Brain full of bile, throat full of phlegm, feeling bitter and resentful and helpless because there’s absolutely jack shit that can really be done about any of this but wait it out.Have to power through orientation and day 1 of new job while putting up a facade that everything is fine.  Have to wait out 10-14 days to hope that this Omicron bullshit works its way through my house’s residents.  Have to eventually find somewhere to test or have to pay for fucking home tests if they can even be found.

Have to keep life in fucking hold stasis for even longer, because of the conduct of someone outside my home.

Today should be a good day.  But it’s fucking not.  I can get over me getting sick, but my wife and my innocent children getting sick, is inexcusable.  It’s not fucking fair, and this is anger that I will be incapable of letting go of, for a long time.