Tag: dad

Dad Brog (#117) – If I could bottle it, I’d be the richest person alive

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much as it might come off like all these dad brogs, and just my general tone of writing in a brog is that my life isn’t that great and that I’m always pissed off and miserable or something, that’s obviously not the case.  Sure, I have my share of days in which I think things could be better, but ask yourselves if you really feel that much differently than I do.  Perhaps it’s the Korean in me always having high expectations for everything and no matter how much I tell myself to temper them, I don’t, and then I get predictably disappointed when things aren’t like, A+ rating at the end of the day.

But really, my life isn’t miserable, because I definitely know that things could be so very far worse, and I am fortunate to be in the position where I am at, to where the bills can remain paid and my kids are well taken care of.  Sure, I don’t feel like I have a tremendous margin of error, and it probably doesn’t take a lot to derail things into stress-filled catastrophe, but for what it’s worth, I’m hanging in there, and if there’s anything at all, the time I’m writing this, I’m not in one of those dark-filled headspaces, where there’s a tone or an edge to the words that I will be writing.

Really though, this is just a tiny story, that if not just wanting to share, for my own documentation, so I can remember this moment as one of those moments in life that I will treasure until the day I die, and as long as my brain can remember it, it would be like a core memory that I’ll always go back to whenever I feel like I need it.

I came home from work, another day in the office.  For the better part of the calendar year, work hasn’t necessarily been difficult, but it has been busy, to the point where it feels like nobody on my team can really breathe, due to the sheer volume of tickets and requests we get.  I don’t really feel like I’m getting to do my real job function, which is to be creative, and am more just punching in and punching out production type of requests, and considering I’ve witnessed my current company have a turnover rate that’s probably six-times higher than my previous employer, it’s a little unnerving.

But anyway, I come home from work, I park my car.  Instead of going in right away, I usually take an extra two minutes to go get the mail from the mailbox because I’m the only one who does it, and if it doesn’t happen now, then it won’t happen.  I can already hear my kids screaming from inside the house, and despite being off-the-clock with my job-job, I’m preparing myself to get back to work with the job that really matters.

I go to the mailbox and retrieve the envelopes in the box; undoubtedly moar bills, moar spam, moar junk.  No sooner than when I look up, I see #1 running towards me, with #2 not far behind.  Both are barefoot, and both have the biggest smiles of joy on their faces.  I scoop up #1 into my left arm, and seconds later, pick #2 up into my right, and begin carrying them back into the house. 

The au pair is not far later, apologetic for letting the kids slip out the way they did, but it’s fine; they’re slippery little toddlers and this is the kind of things that little kids do.  Really though, it’s more than fine, it’s a genuinely perfect moment in life, and if could bottle the feelings of their happiness, my reaction, and the sheer feeling of love, joy and happiness experienced over the next minute, mass produce it and sell it to the public, I would undoubtedly become the richest person in the world, because such raw positivity is so lacking in the world in general, and I know people would be willing to shell out a mint to experience what I did that afternoon.

Seriously, my words aren’t really sufficiently describing just how perfect of a moment it was.  Although the memory will always remain with me, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to see it again, and all I can hope is that it organically happens again in future days in which I come home from work, although I’m sure the au pair will be on higher alert to make sure the door is locked lest they sneak out again.

But it made my heart burst with happiness, to the point where curmudgeonly old brogger me felt the absolute need to share it with the dark and cynical interwebs, because I want to remember it forever.  If I were in Neverland, this would be my happy thought to get me to be able to fly.  It was like a Nintendo 64-kid amount of happiness.

It was a moment that absolves any amount of darkness, unhappiness and pessimism I may have felt over the last indeterminate amount of time.  And reinforces that absolutely no matter what, the love for my kids trumps everything there is, and there really is nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice for them.

I feel like I sacrifice more than an Ultimate Warrior promo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With a post title like this, one might think that this was going to be yet another whiny, my-life-is-difficult diatribe where it can be assumed that I’m in a foul mood of some sort.  The thing is, I’m actually not in a particularly bad mood or anything, but it is just something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I just felt like typing out some words to see if anything comes to fruition, as that’s something the brog has served for me occasionally throughout the literal decades.

But to get to the point, I feel as if the vast majority of my life these days is spent making sacrifices all the time.  I don’t drive my own car into work most of the time, because my car is the big safe dadmobile with the childrens’ seats already set up in them, and it’s left with my au pair so that she can drop off and pick up my children from pre-K.  I drive our third car, which has served me fine, but it is older, needs more care, and lacks some of the conveniences that my own car provides.

At home, I no longer have an office or a space of my own because of our choice to employ an au pair, which is no knock on them, as I still consider it one of the best decisions we made as parents, and one that I would easily recommend to other parents of young children.  But the point remains, when the house gets crowded, or I feel the want or need to just go somewhere in my own house to hide out and take a breath in, I don’t always have such a reprieve.  This was exacerbated numerous times over the last few weeks with several house guests, and I found myself in a position where I just wanted a little bit of privacy and couldn’t have it.

Most of the time however though, are the sacrifices of my time and general self I feel that I make, and I sometimes ponder if I’m doing it too much.  I basically have no hobbies left because I don’t have time for them because my weekdays are all spent working, parenting and then I have like 3-4 hours a night “off” which doesn’t account of the time it takes to clean up after the kids, reset the house, and prepare a litany of things for the following day, so I really have like two hours a night in which I’m truly free to be off and relax, but not without a clock over my head knowing that I have to sleep at a sensible time, so often times I don’t do anything that substantial or the things I want to commit meaningful time to because two hours a night just doesn’t cut it.

On our most recent “vacation” I sacrificed myself to ensure that our au pair could get to experience some things about Disney World, since it is important to me that she gets to actually live some semblance of life while here, and not just be a nanny to the kids, but what it results in is me taking kid duty and ultimately not getting to really do anything that I might want to do, not that I could think of anything I’d want to do in Disney World anymore these days.

The point is, I feel like I’m always in a state of constant sacrifice that I don’t really know where I’m generally at with my life anymore.  All I want is just a single day in which I can sleep in and not have to be the first one up, preparing breakfast, preparing everything, dealing with the girls’ cranky morning tantrums, and have some substantial time to myself.  It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I haven’t found myself in a position to be able to enjoy such considerations in quite some time, and I’m pretty sure the last time I was able to take some time off, was when I hopped on a plane to go to Texas to visit my brother.  But opportunities like that are few and far between, because I’m financially strapped because I’m always sacrificing everything I make to try to support a lifestyle that might be a little too extravagant for my personal preference.

I read a book not long ago about a half-Korean girl dealing with the passing of her mother to cancer.  Piggybacking off my prior post about crying, I think I was drawn to this book because I knew it was going to be a real tear-jerker and I was seeking out something to help burst my dams, but it was still a good read.  But one of the takeaways from the book, and I’m sure it was really meant to be sage wisdom passed down from a Korean mother to her daughter, but I feel like it could apply to a Korean man like me, was that far too often, there are people who give 100% of themselves to their families.  Such is not necessarily a bad thing, especially at the ages of my children, they need everything I can give to them, but her wisdom was to hold back 10% of one’s selves, and keep it for ourselves.

That stuck with me, because I feel like I’m currently living a life where I’m constantly giving 100% to my family, but in doing so, I’m completely devoid of having absolutely anything for myself.  Recently, I’m trying to look for ways to try and gain back any percentage of myself, and even if I succeed, I highly doubt that I’ll be able to get up to 10%.  I guess I’m just such a sacrifice-er, that if I can get to like 5% of myself back, that should be considered a win.

I tried to treat myself to a new pair of shoes; but like so many indulgences in the world, whenever I find something that I might like, it turns out to be what everyone else tends to like, and the specific shoes that I decided I want a pair of, apparently, they’re so hard to get a hold of, that when Foot Locker gets a new shipment of them in, they’re basically treated like an online queue lottery system that everyone has to fight over, and only the lucky ping lottery winners actually get an opportunity to get.  Seriously, I made it through the virtual queue in three minutes, but my size was apparently already sold out, and within ten minutes, they were sold out of all sizes, presumably because of re-sellers and StockX pirates just grabbing anything they can get their hands on.

So, so much for trying to get any semblance of any % back for myself in that regard, back to the drawing board.  But the bottom line is that I just need to stop sacrificing 100% of myself, and find little ways to keep semblances of me, for myself, otherwise I end up as, well, this.  An angsty, emotionally volatile, usually irritable and mad, deep-fried burnt out dad.

Dad Brog (#116): TW: Love You Forever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not a particularly tough guy.  I cry a lot more than any grown man should probably feel comfortable to admitting, and frankly there are times where I wish I could cry even more.  Sometimes, life feels a bit overwhelming and I think about how a tremendous cry session would feel refreshing and maybe help open the emotional gates and purge, allowing me to end up in a better place than which I started, and if/when it does not occur, I’m left feeling disappointed.

TL;DR, I’m a great big crybaby. 

It’s obvious where #2 gets it from.

That being said, there are triggers for me that I’ve managed to get used to, or have hardened up in the face of, where it’s harder for them to choke me up and get the waterworks to start up.  Songs, books, memories, photos, etc, being the sentimental sap that I often am, learning that I’m somewhat of a crybaby should be about as surprising as racial violence in Montgomery, Alabama.

However, there’s one thing that has recently found its way back into the picture that absolutely murders me, emotionally, and that is the book Love You Forever, by Robert Munsch.  My household has like 400 various books for our children, and some books end up on one of the various shelves around the house and don’t get read for a while, but eventually everything cycles in and out of rotation, and recently Love You Forever came back out of the shelves and into #1’s pile of books in her room.

Prior to the arrival of #1, mythical wife had gotten a copy of it, and reading it then was an impossible task, because I could barely get past the fifth page before I was a sobbing, emotional trainwreck.  After #1 was born, and I would spend hours reading to her, I couldn’t finish the book then either, and it was probably even worse, because I was truly learning what unconditional love was with my own offspring, and I probably broke down after the first instance of the song.

Just thinking about these memories alone has already gotten me teary, that’s how potent this book really is.

But it’s back out of the shelves now, and just a few days ago, I took another attempt at reading it, to my now-three-year old daughter, who is whip smart, has a vast vocabulary and is a gamut of emotions and opinions.  I made it past page five this time while managing to keep the hose from turning on, but by the time I got to the part where the mom was unable to finish the song from old age, I was done.  I started crying so hard, I couldn’t even read anymore.

#1’s got this shit-eating grin on her face, amused at seeing dada completely destroyed by a book, wondering why he’s not reading anymore, because he’s too choked up.

“Keep reading” she says, and I’m ugly cry laughing at how callous my daughter is. 

The last three pages are as difficult as the rules to Apocrypha to complete, and I break down again at the part where the child now grown, is singing the same song to his daughter, but I manage to finish the book.  She’s still laughing at me, and I’m laughing too while sobbing uncontrollably, because I love my kids forever.

But holy god, does this book really need to come with a trigger warning on the cover.  Parents shouldn’t be subject to this kind of emotional genocide from a children’s book.

I would just love one day where I don’t feel like I have to hard carry, everything

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I am really fucking miserable right now, and this is another post where I don’t really feel like I can unload my baggage onto anyone, so I just put it all into writing the best I can and throw it up on the internet onto a brog where I have zero readers and hope that my words are heard.

But as the subject of this post says, I would just love to have a single day in my life where I don’t feel like the weight of absolutely every responsibility was on my shoulders.  I’m exhausted with life right now and I don’t particularly see anything getting better any time soon, and it’s becoming harder and harder to keep up the façade some days that I’m anything at all beyond an overworked dad and basically nothing else of any redeemable contributions.

I’m sure it’s of no surprise that a lot of this stemmed from the recent homeownership woes that my house has been going through.  I say my house, but the reality is that it’s what I’m going through, because when it comes to any of the home maintenance stuff, that pretty much falls solely on me to do.

I’m grateful to my neighbors almost to the point of tears for their generosity in time and effort in helping me get the whole fallen tree thing resolved, but as expected, the bigger issue was the plumbing matter, where I had a leak infiltrating the lower level from the bathroom above.  After all, moisture is the bane of homeownership, and I just knew that this was going to be a more aggravating matter than the fallen tree.

To summarize, plumbers came out to assess the situation, and I was fully bracing for a $1,000 expense, because nowadays, my old belief that most every small matter pertaining to cars, medical, home repairs, or any sort of labor, usually comes to $500, but due to inflation and just ‘Murica, I’ve upped it to $1,000.  Anything under $1,000 would be decided to be a win.

The showerhead was spraying back, which was determined the culprit of the leak, and a new shower head was affixed.  $467.  I was pretty pleased to have made it under $1,000 and I had hoped that the matter was solved. 

But this post wouldn’t be here if that were the case, and that evening sure as shit, the leaking was still present.  I got in touch with the plumbers, whom were total pros, polite, and I genuinely like them, but seeing as how all this shit was happening behind walls, the next solution would be to convert my 30+ year old three-valve shower hardware to a single pipe system, because the dated hardware was probably what was leaking.  Suddenly, I’m up to $1,700, and add in the showerhead and I’m looking at not just $1,000, but $2,000+ to solve this conundrum.

Whatever fine, I just need this shit fixed.  But since I’m poor as fuck and mostly living paycheck to paycheck these days, I have no real idea on how I’m going to cover this, but I know I need to get this resolved sooner rather than later, because the last thing I want is my home to deteriorate from a leak, because I really do take serious that moisture is the antichrist when it comes to homeownership.

Continue reading “I would just love one day where I don’t feel like I have to hard carry, everything” →

Dad Brog (#115): Father’s Day 2023

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As many should know about me, when I say I’m going to do something, it’s a safe bet that I’m probably going to stick with it.  I’m not bragging about it, it’s just who I am.  I don’t commit to a lot of things in the first place, so when I do commit to something, it should be expected that I will follow through with it.

That being said, last year was year one of my Father’s Day gift to myself, which is truly the only thing that I genuinely want on a year basis, which is a picture with my daughters with their tag team championship blets, with me with one of my numerous blets from my collection 25 blets deep.  I genuinely could keep this going for 23 moar years even if I didn’t get any more blets, which is a fat chance, because all promotions eventually redesign and there will always be title reigns that inspire me to want them, but the fact of the matter is that it is also genuinely my life’s mission to have this photo, every year, with my girls, for the rest of my life.

So here we have it, year two of dada and his daughters with our respective blets.  I’m not sure what really made me pick the IWGP United States championship as my blet of choice this year, but it seemed to work out, because Kenny Omega and Will Ospreay tore the roof off of the arena in Toronto, and I just love how gaudy and red it is, and I was just feeling it for this year.

But more importantly is just how big my girls have gotten over the last 12 months since the last photo was taken, and #2 is rapidly catching up in height to her big sister.

Full disclosure, this was still a composite photograph, cobbled together from three separate photographs, because it’s nigh impossible to expect to get a perfect picture of both my girls posing with their blets and expect to have me in the photo as well, and I wonder how many years it’s going to take before I’m able to do this in one fell swoop where all three of us are in position at the same time.

Regardless, much like last year, and much like all future iterations will probably do, this photo makes me extremely happy.  No matter how hard life gets, parenting gets, and how much emotional turmoil I go through every now and then, these photos calm me and brings me back, and I think about just how happy I will be in the future when I’ll have enough of them to make collages and scrap book them, and maybe become internet famous for five seconds when the Buzzfeed of 2045 gets wind of my timelapse and wants to use me for clickbait.

And because I’m neurotic, I’m going to make sure to make this post always drop on June 25th of every year, regardless of when Father’s Day actually is, because I started it last year on June 25th, so it’s forever going to be the dada and daughters blet day from here on out.

Dad Brog (#114): Of course she picked the J’s

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Welp, this post didn’t age well: a long time ago, apparently back in 2017, I made a post questioning the existence of Air Jordan shoes, for toddlers.  Like, Air Jordans were developed to be Michael Jordan’s signature line of athletic shoes for when he was in the act of playing basketball, but almost instantly they became anything but athletic shoes to anyone other than MJ or any other basketball players who wanted to be like Mike or were also under contract to Nike.

They became status symbols, reasons why people were killed, eventually becoming acceptable as formal wear and/or a stylish option that could be paired with just about anything at all and be met with an approving nod.  Eventually J’s would be released for women, and much like it was back in like 1988, Jordans were about as popular as they’ve ever been, if not more than they were when they burst onto the scene.

And then I saw a kid that could barely walk, rocking some MJ 12s, and was like wtf, why does a toddler need J’s???

But this was six years ago, and now I have a three-year old enrolled in a hip-hop dance class for the next season of her dance school’s year.  No tap shoes or ballet shoes for this class, it’s about sneakers.  Now I’m probably a little bit more of a sneakerhead than mythical wife is, but she knows that J’s are still the cream of the crop when it comes to stylish sneakers, so naturally she trolls the shit out of my by deliberately steering my daughter into wanting some J’s of her own.

And as much as I didn’t want to plunk down the $60 for a pair of shoes that most likely won’t even be able to fit her by the end of the dance year, the idea of my own kid rocking her own J’s wasn’t entirely undesirable.  Naturally, when Nike opened their Disney vault and basically made every iteration of Air Jordans available and customizable to the Nth degree, the 9-year old in me that loved MJ 1’s got my own pair, and in spite of the price tag, I like the idea of my kid having a pair of her own 1’s, regardless of how absurd it is that there are J’s for toddlers in the first place.

So here we have it, it took some steering from the wife, but the seed was planted in #1’s head, and she picked out the MJ 1’s out of several options that she also picked, and through process of elimination, naturally landed on the J’s as her pick for hip-hop class.

$60 poorer, but at least I’ll have pride of having some matching kicks with my kid, doubly when she outgrows them, and bequeaths them to #2 to where they’ll get a second life.  And if I can take care of them well enough, maybe I’ll sit on them to where I can flip them on like StockX in the future for its original investment in like 15 years.

It’s the little things

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When mythical wife told me that we were going to go on a field trip for Father’s Day, I thought that perhaps we were going to head to the ballpark and catch a game.  The Braves were at home, they were playing hot, and there’s usually some sort of Father’s Day promotion or giveaway associated with the day.  Plus, we haven’t been to the ballpark since like 2021, and a nice day game seemed like a viable option for Father’s Day.

But when I saw her punch in “Columbus, GA” into the GPS, I knew what we were doing.  She probably knew I knew, because she knows how fixated I am on these sorts of things.  Regardless, it very much was a me kind of thing to be doing, but obviously with the introduction of kids into our lives, things like me are fewer and further apart, so it really was a welcome idea to turn the clock back a little bit and do something completely random and time-consuming for what really amounts to so little in the grand spectrum of a day.

We went to the newly opened Tim Horton’s in Columbus, the very first in the state of Georgia. The first of allegedly 15+ to come in the state.  But as much as I love their iced cappuccinos made of crack like they were actually made of crack, I really didn’t have much thought about trekking all the way to Columbus for it, because they’re nearly like two hours away from Atlanta.  Especially since there’s already a proposed location in Atlanta, even if it’s in the shitty Midtown area.  But I was willing to wait out my first ever Georgia iced capp for when they were closer to where I was, and not Columbus, Georgia.

However, mythical wife knows me pretty well, and this is totally the type of thing I’d do in my previous life.  And so we made the journey down to Columbus to the first-ever Timmy’s in Georgia.

I was curious to whether or not the place was going to be slammed or not slammed, because Tim Horton’s is still a Canadian company, and there’s no guarantee that the yokels of Columbus really knew what was going to be put in their little town.  I feared the place would be a shitshow, but fortunately when we got there, it wasn’t that bad.  If we were driving through, it would’ve been a wait, but after the drive down, I wanted to go in and take my time a little bit.

Unfortunately, despite the name and brand being brought down here, the service and performance of the staff were still reliant on locals, and despite the fact that the restaurant was just three days open, and they were overstaffed to the gills, they were still completely overwhelmed, and they took forever to fulfill even the most basic of orders.

And unfortunately, they kind of messed up on my order, by completely forgetting to give me my hash browns, and more importantly, botching up my iced capp, the one thing I really wanted.  Granted, they botched it by making it an Oreo iced capp, which was delicious in its own way, but I still wanted a regular, vanilla iced capp, with no shit in it.  I didn’t notice it until we were gone, because it wasn’t mixed very well, and it wasn’t until I got a chunk of Oreo coming up the straw did it dawn on me, but at least I still got sort of what I was hoping to get.

Either way, for Father’s Day, yes, mythical wife and I drove two hours each way, so that I could get an iced cappuccino.  It was worth it, and I look forward to the next time I can have another Timmy’s iced capp, and hopefully it will be correct then.

But it’s the littlest things that make me happy, and short of my yearly belt photo with my daughters, there’s not really anything else I could have asked for.