Tag: famiry

This shit gets ridiculous sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few months ago, I chronicled how the week in which I was on a cruise with my family, was a week in which the whole fucking universe decided that they needed to get in touch with me, there were emergencies, there were fraud alerts, and I had no less than 69,000 emails, messages, chats and other alerts that took an inconvenient amount of time to sift through and deal with the most critical of issues.

Since I realized that the world most certainly does revolve around me, it’s been comical at just how predictably reliable it’s been that basically, when I am indisposed, unavailable, busy, or just plain not in a position to communicate, is when the whole fucking planet wants to communicate with me.

Case in point, I’m on a flight, connected to shitty WiFi.  I can receive texts and check email, but most all else is woefully unreliable, and I feel like I’m on the 2400baud modem that my old 486 was equipped with.  While on this flight, my boss DMs me despite my out of office being on, and since I’m not as smart as I think I am, I haven’t disabled notifications from Teams so I’m seeing them come through; additionally, there’s a ping for an impromptu business meeting, to which this sudden nature means something substantial, like someone critical leaving or having gotten shit-canned.  I don’t know and won’t know until I get back to the office but I am curious, but not curious enough to reach out to a colleague on a day off to find out.

A voicemail comes through, and it’s apparently my doctor’s office wanting to reschedule my annual that’s in two months, scheduled a month ago, because the American medical system is completely fucked, and I have to figure out what shitty appointment time probably three more months out I can get in on and hope the doc doesn’t schedule an out of office then too. 

And then I get a text from my sister telling me to call when I can, which is honestly these days tantamount to ask me to cure cancer as much of an aggrandizingly obnoxious ask to make of me.  But I can only imagine it pertains to my dad whom I just left after a fucking week of babysitting, so now I’m curious but can’t call because although I have shitty WiFi, making calls is still not something we do in the air.

It’s been like this fairly regularly since I realized that I control the universe.  No matter what I do, it’s when I try to take some time for myself is when everyone in my world starts trying to get in touch with me.

When I’m at my desk, available, ready, and willing to communicate?  Fucking crickets

Hit the gym during lunch?  Ping
Go out for a run on WFH Fridays?  Ding
Spending time with my kids?  Bing
Driving anywhere, any distance?  Be-doop
Running errands with an objective?  Boop-boop

And so on and so on.  It’s one of those things that sure, nobody knows what I’m doing at any given time but all the same I still feel that fucking everyone needs to give my time some more respect and just leave me the fuck alone.

One of these days if I ever get to have a single god damn day sabbatical, I think I need to hole up in a hotel room all by myself and just sleep, shotgun a show, eat whatever I want to eat, and put my phone the fuck away except for to do shit that I want to do, because the conclusion I’m coming to while I’m blathering all this shit out in that I need to just not be so god damn plugged into so much shit.

I’m drained and I need a vacation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve often said in my life, if there were a such things as a mythical purgatory, mine would undoubtedly look like Reagan National Airport based on how much time in my life I feel that I’ve wasted here.  Even now, I am once again stuck here on account of multiple flight delays, probably because of some rain as if the stuff has never existed in the history of the universe.

And it’s not one of those old “well maybe if you actually paid full fares” accusations I used to get when I had a flight pass and could jet set on standby flights any availability I got, because that ship has long sailed and I’m on a full-ass fare and still dealing with the insufferable passage of time at DCA.

Anyway, as the title of this post so succinctly reads, I am drained and I am in need of a real break.  The week of Thanksgiving started off a little bumpy, but limped towards progress, the holiday itself was really personally fulfilling, and there were a lot of good memories.  However, my holiday started with a long-ass drive, concluded with a long-ass drive, and now I’m stuck at my personal hell just trying to get home, so I can get back to work without really having any time to have unwound or relaxed, at all.

As I’ve said in the past, I’m probably at that stage of life where a lot of people my age have to accept and understand the mortality of our parents, as well as the onset of babysitting, assisting, holding hands, arguing about independence while trying to not step on eggshells of frail personal egos and the fears of change and mortality of them themselves.

This past week was basically all of the above, trying to see if I could convince my dad to move into a home down in Georgia.  The place where I brought him allowed for us to do a trial stay for a week, and I loved the idea of doing over Thanksgiving, because I always made me feel very sad over the years of my dad being by himself on just about every holiday, and I could have him spend this year’s with me, as well as hope to see if he could accept the place as a viable landing spot to get him out of his current home which is too big, has too many stairs and way too isolated from any family members who are willing to help him. 

Although there were some good times during the week, like having my dad over for Thanksgiving and ensuring that he wouldn’t be by himself, and having him spend some time with my kids, his grandchildren, the end result is basically no real different than when we started.  Such wasn’t really unexpected, and I’m honestly not really surprised, but it’s still disappointing that all the time, care and effort I put into everything led basically nowhere, and at the end of the day I can’t make him make a decision, and it’s up to him to decide, something at all, no matter how much logic and truth my sister and I try to get into his head.

Needless to say, I am just drained.  My life in general operates at a pretty high stress threshold to begin with these days, and adding my dad and all his end of life affair footwork on top of it is perpetually overflowing me on a regular basis, and I don’t feel as if I’ve had a chance to unwind, decompress or just catch my breath in weeks.

I think I may have to use a vacation day in the coming weeks to just take a random midweek day off where I can not be the first fucking person up in the morning, get some actual sleep, and hopefully a feeling of actual physical and mental recharging.

Not feeling particularly thankful these days

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few times, I’ve seen memes about how dads in general often suffer depression in silence, primarily on account of the fact that nobody cares about their feelings or emotions.  Family, friends, the royal everyone, either people are too wrapped up in their own lives to concern themselves about the emotional/sanity state of some other men, or there’s some credence to the umbrella statement that nobody cares about the feelings of dads.  And occasionally, there are times where I kind of feel this, and I’m just to broke ass poor to afford therapy, and I try to find it in exercise and writing.

Here’s a transcription of what I vomited to my phone because I was having a shitty morning and I felt like I wanted to write about it but didn’t want to chance it to forget the things I was thinking because I was in the car and I always think well in the car, which of course I do, because it’s a place and time in which I am completely incapable of jotting down my thoughts, because life really loves to fuck around with me when I’m generally unavailable:

It’s one of those mornings where nothing is going right. I am thankful for nothing. Forgot to eat breakfast because my kids got up early because they’re sick because every time we send them out of town they come back sick which sucks.  Work sucks, family sucks. Technology doesn’t work.  It’s frustrating.  It’s raining, I’m not feeling very thankful, family in disarray.  I don’t have time to catch up on anything.  I have to clean my house but I live with slobs and kids.  I can’t Black Friday shop.  I can’t have time to watch wrestling or Pluribus or Peacemaker or Netflix.  I never have any time for myself.  I bend over backward for everybody, nothing is ever reciprocated.  My mind is in a dark place.  Everything is frustrating.  Venting to nobody is cheaper than therapy, gym and writing is my therapy.  Memes about dads who suffer in silence and nobody cares feels very poignant and true.  (My) Dad is being weird about his possible future home, ungrateful and lecturing me about my flaws.  BP is getting worse and not sure if it’s just medication or stress and it’s affecting shit like my vision and health

So yeah, a lot to have unpacked to my phone through diction, but at least I was able to more accurately get a lot of shit off my chest and be able to look at it and analyze the things that are eating at me, and it’s not lost on me the irony of complaining about not having any time to do certain things, and then prioritizing writing about complaining about not having any time when I could be doing something more leisurely and entertaining instead, but that’s just how eternally important writing is to me over just about anything else.

But yes, to the point of the subject of this post, I’m not feeling very thankful at the very moment.  Things are very volatile, draining, and not good for my levels of stress, and I’m sure which are contributing to my escalating blood pressure issues, which is its own chicken and egg situation, where I don’t know if the increased stress is causing my BP to increase, or if the increase in my BP is what’s causing me to feel like I’m falling apart physically at times, with headaches and degrading vision.

I have to clean my house up for Thanksgiving, which seems like an extremely daunting task because everyone I live with is a slob and the house is perpetually bordering on needing to contact Discovery to reboot Hoarders: Buried Alive, or at least it seems to me, and of course there’s only one day to do it, although I could be starting it now but it’s just so daunting and I’m depressed that I can’t bring myself to do it without giving myself at least a little bit of time to brog and vent first.

At the very top of the list of stressors though is my dad being down in Georgia testing out a facility that he could very well potentially move into, which in one hand seems like the best end of life option, but on the other hand it means he’s close and accessible to me, and he’s already been weird and a pain in my ass in just the first few days of spending a ton of time with him.  Honestly, I don’t think things were as daunting in my life until this shit started ramping up, and I feel like it’s a contributing factor; the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as my BP elevating, and probably necessitating an alteration in medication.

Everything else, like work pissing me off, my kids being sick, me being exasperated with technology, etc, that’s all just background noise.  It’s the bullshit that takes an annoyed mood and turns it into bad ones, ragey ones, and the over the top frustration which lead to limit break diction rants into my phone like the one up above.

All the same though, the timing of it all, while we’re on the cusp of Thanksgiving, has me feeling not very thankful for a whole lot right now, even though there very much is, I’m just not feeling it at this very specific moment in my life.

Real talk: my head hurts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why I feel like I should write about this, especially since it’s coming from a place of fear and apprehension of the worst, but I guess that if things do go tits up in regards to this, there’s a part of me that I guess wants to chronicle it for the sake of chronicling all of the things in my life that might be a big deal, whether or not they’re bad or good.

But for the last few days, I’ve had a pain in my head, and not the metaphorical kind that comes from a lifestyle of being stressed all the time, compounded with varying degrees of depression and anxiety.  Like an actual dull rolling ache that pulses along the back left part of my skull.  It’s not the worst pain in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but because it kind of throbs and rolls through when it happens, it sometimes catches me off guard and causes me to really wince or if I’m in the midst of doing something, causing an interruption.

It kind of hurts to the touch, but only the first time, and subsequent rubbings of the area don’t really hurt, so I’m not entirely sure if it’s a topical thing or if it’s something going on underneath the skin.

I’m aware that this could be many different things, many of which are no real big deal at all, but me being me, my mind tends to go towards the worst possible scenarios, and given what my family has been through over the last few years as far as people having to deal with different things, I have to ask myself, and hope that it’s not my turn for something bad to happen to.

Needless to say, old single childless me would have just continued to gut it out longer and waited for it to get worse before acting on it, but the married dad me of today doesn’t want to run the risk of it being something that could’ve been prevented from getting worse if it’s something that I can get in front of.  It’s only been a few days, where I had just hoped it was maybe daylight savings-related old man body adjusting to the time change, or just the elevated level of stress in which I’ve been running on, on account of the issues I’m dealing with, with my own dad, as well as a high workload at work, on top of being an active and hands-on dad dealing with my own kids on the regular. 

Unfortunately, the occurrences of the occasional pulsing aches has not really subsided, so I reached out to my doctor for their opinion, and we’ll go from there.  What I’m hoping is that I’m just dealing with excessive stress, compounded with likely blood pressure elevation that I’ve learned runs in my family, and that I just need to chill the fuck out more often than I do, and that it’s not like some aneurism or blood clot or tumor risk I’m running and that I need immediate surgery and utilization of shitty American health care insurance to fuck my family over for the next few years.

However, the point remains that it does have me a little nervous about what it could be, and I’m eagerly awaiting response from my doctor, so I can have some piece of mind of what needs to come next.  It’s the waiting and the unknowns that truly are the killers, but in spite of it all, I do pat myself on the back for breaking old habits and mentalities and just trying to gut things out and hope they go away.  Having one’s own family definitely helps with that, and understanding that my life isn’t just my life, so much as it belongs to others whom I wish to be around for as long as I can.

I think I’m entering that stage of life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Actually, there’s no thinking that I’m entering it, the reality is that I’ve already entered it, it’s just that there’s a part of me that has been kind of in denial about it, and the reality is that we’re like at, phase 2 or 3 of it now instead of just entering it.

I’m talking about the point in our lives where a parent(s) begin to lose their independence, and for lack of a better term, we’re entering the end game phase of life.  It’s been going on with my dad for the better part of the last two years, with an increase of health ailments and incidents, loss of balance and falls, and an increase of medications, doctor appointments as well as just general concern for well-being from my sister and I.

My dad is getting up there in age, and it’s a tough pill to swallow that with every single medical incident, he’s getting closer and closer to the exit, than rebounding back to the independent and capable hard-working dad that’s been in my life.

Naturally, this is nothing out of the ordinary for most kids who care about their parents, and I’ve bore witness already to many close confidants in my life to have gone through this stage of life themselves.  I’ve been to more funerals over the years than I care to admit, but at the same time, such seems to be one of those rites of passage that simply exists on the passage of time, and if we’re being honest here, it’s probably only going to increase as time progresses.

However, it’s different in the sense that it’s now in progress with my own parent now, seeing him gradually deteriorating from the effects of Father Time, he who is undefeated and undefeatable.  It’s not just a sense of sadness and melancholy at it being my turn, as much it’s a whole lot of increasing stress at working with my sister to make sure that he’s not being preyed upon by predatory service providers, from home repairs, realtors, to any crook  out there hoping to take advantage of vulnerable seniors.

It’s frustrating, because my sister and I are constantly skating around this line where my dad is struggling with losing his independence and facing his own mortality and making a lot of questionable decisions independently, but then there are times in which the man won’t make a decision to save his life, and is waiting on my sister or I to make them for him, before he inevitably doesn’t like it and then protests it.  It’s like dealing with my 4-year old sometimes.

In his perfect world, he’s able to tie up all loose ends, sell his home and seamlessly transition into some sort of senior/assisted living to where he can live out the remainder of his life comfortably.  Obviously, seldom is life that accommodating, so in my perfect world, my sister and I are able to get him out of his house where he’s one really bad slip trip or fall from dying discreetly, into a good senior/assisted living facility, and then we can close up shop on our own, retroactively.  It’s just that we’re dealing with his abrupt changes of mind and quick trigger when it comes to deviating from any sort of plans that have already put into motion, mostly on account of his all-too Korean tendency to listen to friends and peers above his own children.

Honestly, I’m trying to get my dad down to Georgia, to get a clean slate and live out the remainder of his life down here closer to me.  I have a place in mind that I think would be very ideal, and unlike the money-driven cesspool that Northern Virginia is, rent is not asset-based flexible (read: flexes based on how much liquidity you have), and my dad would probably be able to comfortably sustain his living conditions on his SSI and retirement income without bleeding out financially.

But the clock is definitely ticking, in that we have to move expediently to get him out of isolated living, and into a facility where he can at least get daily wellness checks to make sure that he doesn’t fall and there’s nobody remotely close to help out with.

All the same though, I feel as if I’m in end game, and I hope to make the best of the time that I do have left with my dad, and bringing him down to Georgia would be a very positive initial step.

Dad Brog (#151): Father’s Day 2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

#4 of forever

True to my neurotic nature, this is the date in which I will forever post the annual Father’s Day blet picture day photograph, so that I can be tickled in future years when I look at the On This Day section of my brog and see a veritable montage of the years and passage of time as my kids go from tiny little baby nuggets into the vibrant and sassy little shits that I love more than anything in existence.

I should also like to point out that this is the first, and probably only year in which all blets in the photograph are actually still actively on television.  Literally every other blet in my collection is retired or redesigned, and it’s only a matter of time before NXT rebrands the North American blet, and it’s seemingly always rumored that the WWE will scrap the women’s tag team titles.

Full disclosure, I actually took these photos almost a month in advance and have been sitting on them until this time, and I’m glad that I did.  I had just gotten my hair cut, and my lawn was cut a day earlier, and I’ve been having some issues with my landscapers and was forced to softly fire them, leading to me having to cut my own grass after taking the last four years off from the chore.

Also with the summer in full effect now with daily 90F+ temperatures, all of us would’ve been miserably hot and cranky doing our photos now, compared to the conditions of when I had taken these.  So no regrets whatsoever on shooting well before Father’s Day and well before my arbitrary posting dates, especially with how they turned out in the end.

Continue reading “Dad Brog (#151): Father’s Day 2025” →

Dad Brog (#150): Next stop, kindergarten

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I blinked a few times, and now my eldest daughter has graduated pre-K, and is en route to starting kindergarten the next school year.  I still have a hard time digesting that, considering that the last five years have soared by, where my kids were born the generation of COVID babies, and the world has gone through a whole lot of hoopla to get to where we are today.

Like, it didn’t feel that surreal when #1 began 2K and went onto 3K while #2 started a year later, but more recently, it dawned on me when I went to the last Friday sing-along of the year, that this was also the final Friday sing-along for #1 outright.  Very soon, the school year was going to come to a close, and all the classmates she’s mostly had over the last three years, almost all of them are going their separate ways, since being a private pre-K, kids are from all over the place, and despite the fact that this school is zoned for a specific elementary school, almost none of them will actually be going there.

Obviously, #1 doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that she’s not going to be seeing a lot of her classmates again with any regularity very soon, and instead it’s me the parent that feels sentimental for her that she’s not going to be seeing her friends, some of whom she’s grown quite close with over the years, and we as the parents can all tell each other that this doesn’t have to be the end, but much like our own adult relationships, it basically is.

Such is the relentless passage of time and the journey of life, and my first kid has completed one of the first stages of life, being preschool.  She’s a whip-sharp, intelligent and observant kid, that has a beautiful imagination, loves to draw and paint, and I’m often floored at the academic development she’s shown over the last three years of preschool, and it’s going to be all sorts of emo-dad emotions in the future to see what she does next, starting elementary school.

As most parents aside from myself probably opine at similar circumstances, I just can’t believe that time has flown so fast, and I’ve already got a kindergartener on deck.  Aside from the financial alleviation of having one less kid in a private pre-K, it’s going to be exciting to see what lies ahead in the future as #1 takes the step into the next stage of life, entering contemporary education.