Tag: dad

Feeling despair, vol. #1,256

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, my kids have both decided that they really like the lullaby tune playing on their Hatches while they go to sleep.  It’s the sweetest tune that everyone knows, but when I listen to it playing on the monitor coming from both their rooms, it takes me back to the days when they were but little nuggets of babies, and it absolutely melts my heart, reminiscing of those days.  I do not deny the feeling of tears welling up from time to time when I think about it.

I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately, and I’m having a hard time getting out of it.  Times like this, there’s really little else but for me to try to put it down in writing to see if it helps me process and figure things out which sometimes happens when I put it all into actual words.

Also, it’s because I don’t really feel like there’s anyone I can speak with much these days, because everyone is understandably busy with their own lives and matters and everyone’s time is important to them, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I feel so utterly alone these days, but at the same time I’m so absolutely over feeling like I have to be the initiator of every single human interaction, be it with my own parents, my wife, colleagues or anyone else, that lately I just want to be left the fuck alone after all and not have to do absolutely anything.

But I guess that’s really what depression kind of is at the very root of things, feeling down about anything and everything, hoping someone will notice and offer to help out, but subsequently not wanting to deal with other people and their own personalized bullshit, so it’s just this kind of negative swirl in the brain where you think you know what you want until you realize it comes with some variables attached to them, things that you don’t want, so it’s maybe for the best that I’m just left alone, and then it just regurgitates over and over again until it’s time to go to bed and hope that you wake up not feeling so shitty about things.

What it all amounts to is a version of me that’s kind of going through the motions, where the mundane is the easiest part of the day in the sense that I don’t have to think about things too much, because my job is monotonous and obnoxiously busy, but I get to go to the gym there and I don’t know what things would be like for me if I didn’t exercise as much as I do.

I come home and try to make the absolute best of time I have with my kids, reading books, playing with Legos and other building toys, occasionally watching some television together, and both girls are currently in the midst of reading Harry Potter books, and they both seem to really like them, so it’s been a pleasure reading some long-form stories to them on a nightly basis.

They go to bed, begrudgingly, and not without tremendous resistance, and then dad-mode disengages, but then my house is a fucking disaster zone because everyone treats my home like a storage facility where nobody knows how to throw anything away and shit continues to accumulate within my walls, and bringing it up to anyone results in snappy rebuttals and nothing gets done, but I try to do my best at being really the only one who puts forth any fucking effort at straightening the place up, because I no longer have an office or any dedicated space to call my own where I can hide in and decompress, so I’m constantly trying to make the public areas of my home more to my liking, but that eats into the time I have available to me to not be dad.

I feel underappreciated and taken for granted by just about everyone in my life these days, and my kids are the only ones who really get a pass because they’re still just kids and don’t really understand such complexities of human behavior yet.  But whether I’m at home, or at work, I just feel very underappreciated and taken for granted, and it feeds into the perpetual cycle of being down on a daily basis, probably getting worse.

My medium at work is oft-overlooked and not at all taken into consideration by the decision makers of the company who are all so easily distracted by all things shiny and digital, but when the day is over, our retail locations would sure look like shit if they didn’t have people like me who put forth the work to give them any sort of visual identity.  Just this week, I’ve heard colleagues absent-mindedly proclaim their general ignorance for the work that my team and I do, and I’m just like, great, good to know that you’re not as qualified for the job you have despite probably saying you were, good times.

At home, I feel like a glorified housekeeper, seeing as how I’m the one who does the vast majority of any sort of house work, but the difference is that I’m not getting paid to do it, and in fact, my credit card debt is actually only getting worse after an expensive trip to Asia where I’m shouldering the brunt of the financial lift, and any sort of recompense is going to be slow, small, and generally inconsequential to the fact that I’m the one eating the interest on any balances carried over month to month.

Nobody respects my time, which makes me feel like nobody respects me, and with as limited time I have in order to do anything remotely close to being for myself, dwindles with every 5-10 minutes chunk that is burned by my kids not listening, or anyone else just not respecting me or my time.  Almost nothing in the world is a bigger pet peeve than my time getting wasted, I state it as clear as day, and people either ignore it, or consciously choose to not give a fuck, with neither being a particularly respectful decision.

Subsequently, my temper has been short, probably more than usual, because it just feels like nothing is easy, and nothing is really good right now.  The littlest tasks end up going tits up real fast, because wanting to do A, requires B, C and D to happen, but not before you move E, F and G out of the way so that H could be gotten.  I usually snap and curse the sheer amount of unnecessary crap that exists in my house, and my wife just assumes I have anger issues when she, or anyone else doesn’t seem to give a flying fuck enough about my state of being to try and find out what the problems are to see if they could possibly help.

No amount of break, trip or escape would be close to helping me out when I’m in this state of mind, because I know that if I were to be away from my house for even the smallest amount of time means coming home to a disaster zone, which is usually what happens whenever I do go away for like a weekend.  And then it’s usually worse than before I started because now I have to retroactively clean other peoples’ shit, which just ends up being a lose-all scenario.

My wife suggested I come down to a day of Dragon-con this weekend, and I don’t think I could have possibly shot that idea down any faster.  I have no ill-will towards the convention, or any of my friends or acquaintances that are looking forward to going.  But it is not something that I am at all interested in anymore at this juncture in my life, and I definitely am not remotely close to being in a mental state to where I could even fake it for a few hours, even if it means not seeing a lot of people that I think fondly of.

The con is just so different than it used to be, and I understand that that’s a me problem and not the con’s problem, but it’s no longer an event I can go to without an agenda, and wing it.  I used to say about conventions in the past, let the con come to you, but that’s a dated mentality that isn’t valid at conventions today, because everyone comes in with plans, agendas, and schedules, and old fucks like me without are usually left to just aimlessly wander, and hang out and hope to run into people they know, who usually can’t stop for more than a minute because they’ve got shit to do.

I’ve never felt lonelier at an event boasting 50,000+ people than I had at the last two Dragon-cons I’d been to.  I don’t really want to feel that way again any time soon, or spend the $2,000 that usually comes along with room, food, parking and booze.

Mythical wife has a purpose this year, and actual tasks to do, and perhaps that’s something I could consider in the future if I ever felt the itch to ever go back to any convention ever again, but for this year, hard pass on Dragon-con.

Well, I can’t really say that feel that much better putting all of these thoughts down into text.  I don’t think I really have any true takeaways from all this swill that can help me process the depression I’m dealing with right now.  I’m trying to eat better and working in a two-a-day workout, usually some sort of 30-35 minute in the evenings that I’m sacrificing out of my scarce free time, in the sake of improving my health.

But I can appreciate myself in doing it at all, instead of intending on doing it, not doing it, and then getting anxious and upset about not doing it, to which it then becomes an Inception-like layer of angst in which to fuel a future rant.  And I guess that in itself is somewhat of a pyrrhic W, and these days I have to take any wins that I can get.

Dad Brog (#175): Oh I see where I stand

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Early in my parenting journey, among the numerous cliches and unsolicited advice I would receive because dads for some reason are seen as the lovable oafs of families incapable of even the most basic shit, were always a bunch of Ninas parroting stating caution for, The Terrible Twos™ where presumably toddlers at the age of two become some sort of nightmare children, where parenting takes a rampant difficulty spike and makes us want to blow our brains out.

Sure, I’m sure if I go back into my brog’s archives there are all sorts of dad brog posts between 2022 and 2023 where I probably hated what my life was being at that time, but in the grand spectrum of things, year two for both my kids weren’t any harder or worse than life’s ordinary challenges at those times.

The terrible twos can be for terrible parents, because they weren’t really a big deal in my household.

However, nobody once heeded me any sort of warning for the Terrible Sixes, because throughout the duration of year six for my elder child, holy poop has she become an insufferable little shit at time, full of melodrama, exaggeration, but mostly an endless amount of complaining about damn near everything.

Mostly boredom, which I’ve always believed to be the primary obstacle in harmonious living for children.  But it doesn’t matter that we have multiple regions of my entire home that look like a Toys R’ Us was resurrected and then imploded, plus all the crap they have in their bedrooms, my kids have the audacity to claim that they’re bored at almost any time in which they are not being actively played with.

I love playing with my kids, but I’m a sensible person who occasionally likes to have moments where I can pretend like I’m not a dad and can sit and stare at nothing, or look at one of the numerous memes and texts sent to me by a friend or my brother, like any other adult of our times.

But recently, in one of her self-agonizing bouts of boredom, #1 was going on and on about what she wanted that would undoubtedly succeeding at defeating her boredom, and I simply asked her, what about what I want?  Her response?

it doesn’t matter what you want, dad…

Okay.  I just got The Rock’d by my own kid.  Needless to say, nobody found it more entertaining than I did, and I laughed heartily for nearly three straight minutes, at my kid saying such a dick thing to me, all because of the way it was said.

Needless to say, she didn’t get what she wanted, and I didn’t cave, but nor did I really get to chill out, and probably looked at my watch and wondered what the fuck I could do as a parent to try and find some sort of push/win-win scenario where we can pass the time without too much trouble.

Either way, the point remains that year six has proven to be what I imagine what other shittier parents think they have when dealing with the Terrible Twos.  The difference is that six-year olds are more developed, cognizant and aware, know more vocabulary and can speak their tantrums into existence, which mine is, frequently, versus a tiny two who’s still learning the endless depth to what the world has to offer.

This is why I always scoff, roll my eyes, and laugh at anyone out there without kids who thinks at all that their lives are difficult.  Y’all MFers just won’t get it; and it doesn’t matter what you think.

Dad Brog (#174): A brave new world

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The house is empty and quiet and for the next 60-80 minutes, I can kind of do whatever I want.  It’s a jarring and weird feeling, and this is going to be the case, probably indefinitely, during the durations of the school year(s, to come).

Today is the first day of school where I live, and it’s the first day of school where both of my kids are on the same morning schedule, and now go to work with mythical wife who teaches at said school.  Prior to this day, both kids went to a preschool that was on a different schedule than mythical wife, or last year, where one was still in Pre-K, while the other began her elementary school journey and I basically had two morning routines, prepping and sending off one kid at time, on different schedules.

But now, they are both going to the same school, on the same morning schedule, and I just have to do one morning routine, and then they’re out the door and it’s like slamming into a wall where it goes from fast-paced, eat, dress, brush, pack, shoes, go, go, go, to suddenly nothing.  Calm.  Quiet.  Still.

And I’m still trying to process what I’m going to do, and how I’m going to try and capitalize on this gift of time that I’m going to get every single school morning, presumably for a very long time.

The thing is, I knew this was coming, and I have been giving it thought to what I was going to do, but it’s one of those things where no matter of thinking, planning or theorizing was going to really compare to how things were going to go once the time finally came, and I’m sitting here on day 1 of forever, doing one of the things I imagined I’d do, which is to try to carve out some time to write, about the myriad of things and topics that I think about writing about, starting with, writing about this brave new world of actually having a little bit of peace and quiet in the mornings now.

It’s a little different from the summer mornings, where I kept my school year alarms all intact, waking up at 5:45 daily regardless of the fact that the kids didn’t have any school to go to.  I did it because I didn’t want to fall out of routine and have to deal with the bodily regression of trying to adjust to the school year, but mostly because I liked having the peace and quiet in the early morning while everyone else was still asleep, and could more leisurely have a cup of coffee, knock out a daily Duolingo session, and do some writing before one or both of the kids would eventually awake and tear hell coming downstairs.

And frankly, such a routine is what I was thinking of doing now, except that the kids come first, and then I have that gap between when they go to school and I go to work, where I can do it.  I pondered doing some exercise in that time, or even potentially going to the office early where I could hit the gym before I started my work day, but for the time being I’m opting against such.  Working out during lunch has been a great way to break up the monotony of work days and frankly I don’t feel that 60-80 minutes is sufficient time for me to get in an adequate workout plus time to shower and refresh.

I also don’t want to even put myself into a position where I could be remotely close to doing any modicum of work outside of work hours and that seems to be the point of writing this all out, so I can write out how I often contemplate the differences between work ethics of the generations of the workforce, but if there’s one thing that the kids of today are better at, is understanding that in so many instances, giving more than what’s necessary rarely pays off, and me rolling into the office 15 minutes earlier isn’t going to make much of a difference in my day-to-day, except that I’m taking 15 minutes away from myself where I could be doing something I want to do instead.

All that being said, coffee, Duolingo and brogging seems to be the obvious and inevitable daily agenda, as I embark on the brave new world of having some morning calm of the kids going to school, together, at least for the next four years.

Dad Brog (#173): I wonder where she gets it from

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is the baby on board tag I put on my car from even before #1 had even arrived.  I had just installed my first ever car seat into the car, and I was completely gung-ho about diving head-first into dad mode, and this tag went up onto the back hatch windshield shortly thereafter. 

A little after a year later, when I switched to a larger dadmobile after #2 arrived, the tag was one of the first things that went up into the new ride.

The sun has clearly faded it, and it has fallen off countless times throughout the years, but I’ve always put it back up, even as my kids went from babies to infants to toddlers to the little opinionated shits they can be today.  At ages six and five, they are far from being babies, in spite of the fact that I always remind them that they’ll always be my babies, no matter when they’re 26, 38 or 45.

The latest fall off, the tag sat off the window for a little while, unnoticed, until it somehow managed to come into the house, stuck to a something that was being brought inside.  I looked at it on the kitchen counter, and feeling a melancholy, bittersweet wave of nostalgia, decided that perhaps it was time to finally say goodbye to the tag, since my kids are far removed from being actual babies anymore.

#1 then looks at the tag and wistfully says I shouldn’t get rid of it, and that it should go back up into the car, just for old time’s sake. 

Kid is six, she hasn’t been alive long enough for things to be old enough for old time’s sake.

But it was amusing to me that she’s clearly got this sense of nostalgia and tendency to attach emotion to completely useless inanimate objects, and it’s clear where she gets it from.  And I fear for her future, because I think it’s inevitable that she’s going to develop some hoarding tendencies and have a home full of completely useless crap, because her dad fights such on a regular basis and her mom is incapable of throwing anything away, and my dad was bordering on being on Hoarders: Buried Alive based on the monumental amount of well-organized bullshit that I had to clean up from house earlier in the year.

The tag is still sitting on the kitchen counter, pending a decision, and because nobody in my household is capable of not putting all their crap on the counter or table and letting it accumulate and stack like precarious Tetris stacks.  In a few days, if I’m feeling aggravated, it will end up in the trash, victim of rage cleaning at wanting to feel some semblance of order and cleanliness in my life, and I know that this is the inevitable fate of the tag, so I don’t really know why I don’t just bite the bullet and pull the trigger.

Except that I do know the answer to why, and that’s why it will be allowed to remain there until the lesser emotion does its natural order, and it’s pretty obvious where my eldest gets it from.

Dad Brog (#172): The Lego difficulty spike is real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Growing up, among my favorite toys were Legos.  Frankly, that fandom hasn’t changed, considering the small collection of nostalgia Lego sets that I’ve purchased within the last few years that I’ll never actually put together but protect with fervor at the thought of not having them because it’s better to have and not need than to want and not be able to get and maybe one day when I have a nice big room of dedicated me-space, I’ll be able to set up a table and actually put these sets together but anyway.

Much to my delight, my children have grown to like Legos in their own right, and over the last two years or so, we’ve been occasionally putting Lego sets together and they get decent entertainment out of both the building as well as playing with the finished products.  Sure, they’re expensive as F these days as the cost of official Lego products have inflated as much as petroleum throughout the passage of time, and it is interesting to see the alternate yet compatible brands that are out there now, much as Tyco were the off-brand of my childhood that got mixed into the brick piles, but Mega Bloks and some cheap bootlegs from Daiso have been good ways to subsidize entertaining my children, and once disassembled, nobody has any clue and for the remainder of this post I will continue to refer to all bricks as simply Legos, much like the term for sodas have a generalized term.

Over the last few Lego projects with my kids, there’s always a finite amount of time in which the kids’ focus wavers and eventually breaks, and lately it’s typically gone from, let’s build together with dad to, distractions from the other kid making it hard to focus on continuing, to ultimately zero participation with dad is it finished yet?

What doesn’t help is the seemingly massive difficulty spike in build complexity with today’s general Lego sets, and it doesn’t seem nearly as basic as my own childhood, going from Duplos into set #6954 Blacktron: Renegade although perhaps that’s a bad example but I wanted to make that nostalgic deep cut.  But the point remains that there’s a pretty wide difficulty curve in Legos in general that seems to be a stark contrast to the gradual increase in builds from when I was growing up.

Like, in my elder child’s room, she has two bins full of Duplo blocks, and on almost a daily basis, she builds the most expansive castles and structures that she, and I are so proud of her imagination skills at creating such things.  But come downstairs, and we’ve got all the Lego kits we’ve been amassing over the last two years, and regardless of the suggested age written on each box, I just figure it’s more important to get them based on the concepts and properties that the kids like, seeing as how their dad is an adult Lego enthusiast with decades of experience putting these things together.

Except the thing is, and which is probably the chief reason why Legos are harder now than they were when I was a kid, is the fact that just about every Lego kit now has 400% more small and intricate pieces than the kits I grew up with.  I don’t know what terminology the  Lego community uses to describe Legos today, but for lack of a better term, the amount of pieces that are sized beneath 2×4 and even 2×2 peg pieces AKA a whole shitload of tiny pieces, is tremendous; creating scenarios where they get lost, easy to miss,* resulting in an increased probability of build failure.

*and easy to end up stepping on, which many know that nothing is a greater pain in the galaxy than barefoot stepping on Lego bricks

Furthermore, as impressively creative as lots of today’s Lego builds are nowadays, many end up with suspect connection points, weak joints and integrity ill-suited for elementary school aged kids who want to play and imagine and simulate, instead of dorky adult builders who want to build and display and not actually play with them.

All this being said, my kids and I will put together various Lego kits, only for them to be played with for 5-10 minutes, immediately forgotten until a corresponding kit is created, added to the world of completed kits, and maybe another 5-10 minutes of play is created.

In between play time, small components break off, go missing, mixed together, and it becomes impossible to put things back together.  Thankfully, I have the experienced wherewithal to not toss any instruction booklets in the rare event anyone actually wants to reassemble anything, but as we get more sets, and more sets get built and fall apart, inevitably things get to the point where they have to be fully disassembled, and all bricks get put into the dreaded Lego Bin, where everything is tossed into a communal tub in the name of space conservation.

And it was in the latest episode of dad waits until the kids are in bed to start breaking down idle and incomplete and broken up kits and putting them into The Lego Bin did I really realize just how intricate and full of small tiny pieces that today’s kits all seem to be comprised of, and how I feel like this really impacts the overall replay-ability of Legos in general, with kids probably favoring to get brand new kits instead of playing with communal piles of micro-parts, and writing that out, perhaps that’s the goal of Lego corporate to begin which makes those cocksuckers evil geniuses.

Either way, I’m glad my kids like building with Legos, but the shade of adulthood continues to look at things from my childhood in their modern incarnations with skepticism of accusatory greed and intentions to bilk consumers before providing a source of entertainment and happiness.

Plus I’m just getting tired of stepping on all these goddamn bricks, which isn’t so much Lego’s fault for scattering them on my floors, but at the same time it is, that they keep making sets that have nothing but 1×1 and 2×1 micro-bricks that are real easy for young children to misplace and end up scattered.

Dad Brog (#171): Someone made me breakfast for a change

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
Toof fairy goin’ broke these days lately

For the first time in forever.  I guess years of passive remarks about how nobody ever makes me breakfast has sunk in to at least one member of my household, and my six-year old daughter took it upon herself to demand that she make me breakfast one morning.

And in spite of her grand aspirations, wanting to make something straight out of a Disney feast, I reminded her that often times the best food are the ones that are simple, use fewer components and are just made with love, and she took that to heart, when bringing all the things she wanted to use to a cutting board, separated from me since she wanted it to be a surprise.

It was Nutella spread on two end pieces of a loaf of bread, with blueberries in between.  The blueberries were not rinsed, giving me a moment of pause of concern, given the current news of listeria bacteria prevalent in today’s vegetables, and my child seems to have noticed that I’m the only one who ever really eats the heels of the bread, mostly on account of my staunch refusal to waste food. 

My breakfast sandwich was served with a few cubes of watermelon on the side, and a literal cherry on top.

It was the most delicious breakfast that I’ve ever had. :*)

Dad Brog (#170): year five of forever, the sequel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, my younger child turns five years old, and as is often the case, I wonder just where in the world has the time gone.  I can still remember the time before children where the biggest stresses and anxieties were planning a wedding after dealing with the increased responsibilities at work after a promotion after moving into a new house.

As cliched as it sounds, the last few years of parenthood have been a blur, probably amplified by the fact that I had two kids in short succession, and as much as it sounds like everything all one melded memory, I do remember most all of the individual details of everything that has transpired.

It’s funny because by default I usually just refer to my kids as a year apart, but there’s always this odd six month gap in between when my oldest has her birthday and the youngest is numerically two years apart, that always feels like an eternity where I have to mentally do the math that such is the case, and then #2’s birthday hits and it’s all like where has the time goneeee?

In any case, my youngest is now five, and back to being a year apart from her sister.  My beautiful, precious younger child, whom mythical wife likes to refer to being, the spicy child, her clone, her mini-me, in the sense that she tends to have adopted more of her personality traits contrary to my own, and quite the opposite of her sister whom many say is more like me, personality-wise.

Yes and no, because #2 does fiercely enjoy her independence, which isn’t to say that her mother, mythical wife does not, but there are aspects of her behavior when I see her meandering off on her own that I can see that reminds me of, myself.  As a second child myself, whether she or anyone wants to admit to it, there are always going to be some things that I really can relate to, that those who are not, won’t.

Like for example, mythical wife often accuses me of being harder on #2 than I am on #1, and I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s mostly because she’s more defiant and independent which often comes off as being obtuse and uncompliant to reasonable asks, and I apparently do not deal well with when my kids aren’t listening to me, especially when I’m asking for simple things.

Therein lies one of the constant struggles of parenting multiple kids, is constantly reminding one’s self that no two kids are ever going to be alike, and to be capable of being fluid enough to switch gears depending on the configuration of present children.

In spite of the very-white, all-rook-same-ing statement I occasionally get, asking if my kids are twins, in my eyes, my girls couldn’t possibly be any more different from one another.  They look nothing alike to me, especially since one has really curly hair while the other does not, and their personalities are also very different.

But regardless if my youngest occasionally gives me a harder time than my older child, I don’t love her any less than with every fiber of my being.  It’s the fact that she’s more like her mother in some personality facets that makes her perfect, and much like her mom, she might drive me crazy at times, but when the day is over and things settle down and get quiet, all I feel for her is love and the want for nothing but to be the best dad I can for her, even if I am wildly imperfect.

So from one second child to another, my spicy daughter, the wish for her to have the happiest of birthdays, and the want for her to know that she is loved, treasured, and most definitely cared for, and as long as I draw breath, I want little else other than for her to be happy and live a good life.

I love you, forever.