Tag: coronavirus

I need to just not leave my house anymore

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, mythical wife and I went out so she could find some holiday decorations for the house.  As it is our child’s first holiday season, she felt it was important that we make the house somewhat festive and relevant to the seasons, and I’m okay with that idea.

While we were driving to our destination, you’d think there was no pandemic still going on, based on just how slam-packed the shopping centers and surrounding streets were.  Parking lots getting backed up, because the access roads were being congested by the volume of cars getting stuck at lights, causing this colossal domino effect of typical traffic that I’m appalled but not surprised is going on given the whole pandemic thing that’s supposed to be encouraging people to be staying home when necessary, but we are in the midst of the holiday shopping season, and coronavirus or no, people are absolutely out and about.

When we got to the store, naturally my daughter shit her pants in the car, as is the usual routine, and it seems apparent that for the first years of her life while she’s still in diapers, that I’ll have to build in an extra ten minutes to any car ride at all, to account for the inevitable deuce that happens like clockwork whenever we go anywhere.

But anyway, when we got to the store, it took all of five seconds of being inside of it, did I spot the first no-maskers milling about, acting like nothing at all was wrong with ‘Murica and the air they breathed was as clean and pure as it probably is at the highest altitudes of the Appalachian trail.  Not long afterward, their shithead sons joined them, also wearing no masks, and the feeling of disgust immediately began bubbling up within me.

And while we were there, this one family was hardly the only cluster of people not wearing masks, and I saw several other individuals and families also shopping sans masks.  The ones that bothered me more than the no-maskers were the people who were wearing masks; around their necks as not on their fucking faces, obviously having said “I wore my mask to avoid scrutiny coming in, but now that I am inside, off with it until I’m reprimanded.”

Continue reading “I need to just not leave my house anymore” →

How easy it can be to forget

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

During lunch, I ran out to run a few errands.  It was a beautiful fall afternoon, and cool enough to where it was appropriate to wear one of the numerous hoodies that I own because I like hoodies.  I drove out of my neighborhood, admiring the beauty of fall leaves and colors everywhere, and the gratification in knowing that my own property no longer needed to be raked anymore, due to my hard work.

I parked my car, and popped the hatch and grabbed the garbage bag full of baby clothes that I was going to drop off at Goodwill.  I was two steps walking towards the building when it hit me that I wasn’t wearing my mask yet.  Annoyed at the brain fart, I set the bag down and quickly retrieved my mask from the driver’s seat console and put it on.

Eight months into the global pandemic, and here I am forgetting to put the mask that all people with a modicum of intelligence and/or courtesy make mandatory of themselves.  It’s like, the day felt so pleasantly ordinary for 30 seconds that I forgot that we’re still in the middle of the aforementioned global pandemic, and the dreadful reality that there’s literally still no end in sight.

Scary how the world can look and feel so ordinary, so back-to-how-life-used-to-be, but still be the arena where an easily-preventable but still devastating disease is always wafting around all over the place, indiscriminately waiting on some idiot with no sense or too much freedom to latch themselves onto, and keep the cycle of spreading alive for yet another victim.

Such a reality check was enough to reel me back from feeling pleased with the weather to feeling the need to be weary about the people around who may or may not be as CDC-compliant as I try to be with myself, and that the world is still a scary fucking place.  It’s scary just how easy it is to forget it sometimes.

A sad reminder of how much I miss the gym

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A week ago, I ran 13.1 miles to fulfill the obligations of the Disney Dine & Dash Wine & Dine Half Marathon that mythical wife and I signed up for months ago.  We were itching for redemption to run it this year, as we had to bow out the year prior with lots of sour grapes on how runDisney handled it, because of a little unexpectedly quick turn around on pregnancy, but we signed up for it in 2020, thinking we would have our opportunity to redeem ourselves as well as introduce our little one to her first Disney trip.

Among other things ruined on account of coronavirus, this too was denied to us again for a second year, but we opted to stay registered and run our half marathons virtually.

Mind you, in spite of having obligations of a half marathon, I’ve basically been living on auto-pilot for large swaths of the year, and I hadn’t really done any proper distance training leading up.  I run regularly, but only around three miles per run, mostly for maintenance and health purposes, and not necessarily with a distance goal in mind.  Regardless, because I was planning on doing run/walk, I was still confident that I would be able to pound out 13.1 miles without killing myself.

Sure, some preparation probably would have made things easier, but I did just that, and finished my half marathon’s distance without dying.  I admittedly hit a wall a little faster than I had hoped, and by mile 10 I was running out of gas pretty quickly, and my right calf was telling me that it was very unhappy with my choices in life, but I still finished, and under my goal time of 2 hours and 30 minutes to boot.

I figured I would be in pretty rough shape afterward, seeing as how such was usually the case whenever I’d done any prior 10K or 10-milers in the past, with training, but the following day, it was nothing more than the atypical tender quads and achy ankles, leading me to be quite satisfied that I wasn’t a complete train wreck of a physical specimen after having not been to the gym in literally eight months.

A day ago, as is something that always has to be done this time of year, I went outside and raked leaves, as I have three very large trees on my property, and therefore have a metric fuckton of leaves to have to rake.  It was a massive pain the ass last year, as I had but a cheap wire rake that I had procured from Amazon, so I decided to not be a cheapskate and get myself a real, effective rake, even if it meant that I had to leave my house and go to a Home Depot to buy one. 

Continue reading “A sad reminder of how much I miss the gym” →

New Father Brogging, #026

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife and I were playing some games online with our friends because we’re still very much immersed in pandemic ‘Murica and this is how things are done these days in order to be safe, and as we’re in between games, the topic of conversation goes towards what television shows everyone is watching.  Talking about The Mandalorian and Utopia among other shows, and how some of us might like them, or if they’re not any good at all, etc.

But mythical wife and I haven’t really seen or finished any of them, because we don’t have time.  Story of parenthood now.

We then start talking about video games; mythical wife and I just started playing Man of Medan, and gotten maybe three hours into the game, before we realized it was midnight which might as well have been 3 am for new parents like us, but reality sunk in that we weren’t sure when the next time we’d have a chance to play more of the game, because we just don’t have time, the perpetual story of parenthood now.

Even playing Jackbox games with friends for an evening means not having the opportunity to do another thing that we may or may not have wanted to do with what limited free time we have available to us, because as the story of being new parents go, you just don’t have much of it, because the primary meat of our time is spent raising our infant child and putting her needs first and foremost above everything else.

I do not have a single iota of regret for having a child and I love my daughter more than anything else in history, but as the objective of these new dad brogs go, is to express the realities and genuine thoughts that I have going through my own personal journey as a first-time father, and the reality is that I just don’t have a lot of time, like ever, for myself anymore, and that part is something that’s always going to be a tough pill to swallow, especially in conjunction to our lives pre-children, where we’d sometimes have nothing but time to sit around and literally do nothing at times.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #026” →

The tin-foil hat perils of waiting too long

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

mj laughing last dance

I kind of think it’s fake news: Mr. and Mrs. Baked Potato Head test positive for coronavirus

When I woke up in the morning to a text message from mythical wife lol’ing over this news, I also lol’d.  I took my sweet time getting to my computer this morning, because I anticipated most all of my friends were also lol’ing over the internet, and I wanted to dedicate a slice of time in which I could also lol with them, and hope to see a smorgasbord of ironically topical memes.

By the time I opened up my browser, theFacebook and my email, it was everything that I had expected to be, like a conga line of memes, jokes and all sorts of stuff clowning on the baked potato, and the irony that the guy who had spent the better part of the year acting as if coronavirus was a hoax, wasn’t real, was just diagnosed with it.

It truly is the epitome of irony, and couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate person on the entire planet.

I fully intended on writing about such ironies, and I had already picked out some gifs to use with this image, because the hardest thing at that time was deciding on which of the Michael Jordan laughing from The Last Dance gifs was more appropriate for the ensuing post.

But then this shit called ‘work’ kind of took precedence, and in spite of my want to write about the hilarious appropriateness of a clown who denouncing an illness getting it himself.  And as the day progressed, and I began to hear little bits and pieces and the occasional opinions from others, my friends included, most notably all of the potential conspiracies and the obvious revelations that almost no news that has been reported, has actually come from anywhere but the White House itself, leading to tremendous skepticism of its validity, due to the fact that everyone knows just who currently occupies it.

I am obviously no stranger to conspiracy theories, and I enjoy coming up with wild and outlandish theories on my own, but given the track history of this entire presidential term, I can’t help but have this sneaking suspicion that there is entirely the possibility that this is all one elaborate hoax, in order to politicize the whole situation, discredit the media, diminish the reality of the devastation of coronavirus, and turn the tables into some political strategy in order to regain momentum in the upcoming presidential election.

Continue reading “The tin-foil hat perils of waiting too long” →

Let’s replace “Krogan” with “Americans”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really know what spawned the line of thinking, but I recently had a thought in my head about comparing the mythical one-day vaccine to coronavirus to the cure to the Krogan genophage in the Mass Effect series.  Frankly, I don’t know how this post is going to pan out, but I figured I may as well just start writing, and see where it ends up.

For those who don’t know Mass Effect lore, the Krogan are a race of these almost dinosaur-ish, triceratops-ish, reptilian species.  They’re ultra-tough, aggressive, burly and violent, and as the story goes, they reproduced at a speed that gave concern to the galactic alliance, and for lack of a better term, a virus or genetic ailment of some sort, known as the genophage, was unleashed onto the entire race, in order to help suppress their population growth.  Yes, it’s a fucked up concept, but as all stories go, there’s really no bigger villains in the galaxy than man (and their intergalactic allies).

In Mass Effect 3, there’s a mission (Priority: Tuchanka) where the cure for the genophage is developed, and it’s up to you the player to travel to the Krogan planet, to determine the fate of the entire species.  If successful, the cure to the genophage is airborne released into the skies of Tuchanka, where it presumably cures every Krogan who breathes.  Given the way ME3 ends, who’s to say if it actually amounts to anything, but it’s a nice gesture to try and give them some sort of semblance of life back to the Krogan before the Reapers emerged from dark space.

In my perfect world, when the vaccine for coronavirus is developed, it will basically be Priority: Tuchanka, except that it’s more like Priority: America.  Unfortunately, as much as the idea of Commander Shepard going up against, and inevitably killing hundreds of right-wing, over-armed anti-vaxxing Karens and muh-rights Karls is a sadistic fantasy to behold, the mass killing wouldn’t quite go over so well in the real world as it does in a video game.

But the end result where an airborne vaccine is just mass-released into the atmosphere, and takes the choice out of the hands of everyone, seems like a pretty ideal outcome to me.  Granted, given the fact that the world is currently rushing the shit out of this, and who knows if we won’t accidentally sterilize the whole planet in the process, but it’s a risk that many would probably be willing to take in order to get back to some sort of normalcy in the world.

Ironically, the amount of resistance it would take to get a vaccine distributed throughout America much less the rest of the world, would probably be equivalent to the massive resistance we the players get in trying to save the Krogan in a video game.  And unlike in a video game, we can’t just annihilate everyone who is resistant, as gratifying as it might seem.  But the idea of the vaccine simply being dispersed in the atmosphere and taking the choice out of everyone’s hands seems very appealing to me, because it’s not about freedoms, it’s not about rights, it’s entirely about the long-term survival of the human race, and when too many people are being stupid, intelligent ones need to step in and make the smart choices for them.

Well, that didn’t turn out entirely as I had thought it might, but it’s sad/funny that we’re even in a position where the American future can plausibly be potentially compared to the genocidal plot of a video game.

Quarantine Hair

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The last time I got my hair cut was January 10, 2020.  Obviously, I looked up old bank statements to find out precisely when the last transaction was made to my barber, but I knew it was way back a while because I remember the disgusting growth of my hair throughout the weeks into months after my child was born and ‘Murica descended into the endless pit of pandemic.

For obvious distancing reasons, this could not be rectified at all for a period of time, and I genuinely had concerns that my barber, who is a one-person independent operation, might actually be in jeopardy during the initial onset of coronavirus and the sheer nightmare it was wreaking on small businesses across the country.  I entertained the idea of experimenting with my own clippers and perhaps doing something on my own, especially seeing as how I rarely leave the house as it is and nobody would see any abominations that might’ve happened before it could grow back in, but with a kid in tow and life getting turned upside down, my hair was barely a concern.

As some might recall, Georgia was basically the first state to rashly drop most distancing guidelines and our idiot governor was very quick to allow for haircuts to be one of the services to be allowed back, regardless of the endless spike of infection cases throughout the country.  Despite the fact that I had a green light to go get my hair taken care of, there was a large part of me that simply refused to go along with it, because I frankly did not agree with the notion that barbers and salons were “essential;” they were more catering to the vanity of people who feel the need that their fucking hair is worth putting human lives in danger.

So, for months, my hair has been growing and becoming quite unruly throughout the process.  For a while, I was still able to keep somewhat of the spiky faux-hawk look that’s kind of become my general look, but eventually the length began to defy gravity, and it started to become the long wavy mess that it becomes when it gets too long. 

A part of me was tickled at the idea of trying to grow a man-bun since full disclosure, I actually don’t mind the way a lot of them can look.  But that would likely have required longer than a year to really accomplish, and frankly when I get flustered, anxious or stressed, hair getting in my face is one of the easiest triggers of aggravation there could be, which is why I went short every single time I even thought about letting it grow out.  Plus, my hair is really thin to begin with, so even with tied up, it’s a small yield of fluff that doesn’t seem worth it.

Continue reading “Quarantine Hair” →