Tag: triggered

Crashing out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had just gotten home.  I was exhausted, in a lot of pain, and completely drained of just about everything needed in order to be a functional adult.  However, I decided to go get the mail before I went inside because I’m the only one in my house who ever gets the mail unless someone is expecting something, otherwise it will pile up and look like nobody lives in the property which I’m always paranoid of because I used to live in the hood and I know of all the little things to do to help reduce your property from becoming a target.

It was while I was trudging down my driveway did I see my shadow stretched out to look like a 17-foot slenderman, that I had the thought of how appropriate that visual is, because that’s probably what I should look like based on how much people in the world pull and tug and rely and lean so much on me, despite the fact that I really wish that such wasn’t the case and that everyone around me would just step up and make some fucking decisions on their own without needing me at all sometimes.

I came into my home, and was pretty quickly greeted by my eldest.  She welcomed me home, and I could already feel the tears welling up in my eyes.  #2 came shortly and by then I was already struggling to hide the fact that I was already crying.  My perfect little daughters, sometimes my sole reason for existing, wanting to show me things they drew, crafts they made at school.  #1 said to me before I got on the stairs, you should go rest now.

Great idea, I said to her.  I went into the bedroom, changed into sleep clothes, and plopped down in bed.  I couldn’t really stop crying and I have no idea when I actually fell asleep, but it was a miserable night’s sleep, waking up numerous times due to the pain from what I would eventually discover was a bad ear infection which wasn’t a surprise considering both my kids had it the week prior, in spite of urgent care brushing it off like it was nothing when I went to go see someone about it on my fucking ruined birthday.

Either way, it was about 10 hours in which I was in bed, sleep or not asleep, or whatever I’d call the fugue-like state of bizarre dreams, pain and tossing and turning because of the pain, and it was at around 5 am in which I decided to punt on trying to get any more sleep, and to get up and prepare for the day that I didn’t want to deal with after the one I had just gone through, but life and the passage through time stops for nobody, and I still had my kids to take care of and if I don’t do it pretty much nobody else will, so on with the show all the same.

As is the popular saying these days, I had really crashed out.  Ironic a little bit, because I had taken all of Wednesday off of work to spend the day with my dad to deal with a lot of dad stuff in order to not crash out when stacking it on with working remotely, but a crash out still occurred regardless, but not necessarily due to just my dad per say, as much as it was a moment in the day in which I had a number of duties and obligations concurrently swirling over my head, and I succumbed to the feeling of how much pressure there was on me.

Continue reading “Crashing out” →

Free is a four-letter word

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And is about as inflammatory and prone to resulting in aggravation, disappointment and general negativity as some of the more notorious four-letter words out there in the common lexicon.

I’ve spent the better part of a week this month at my dad’s old place in Virginia, my old home, cleaning it out, because as he’s no longer living there, the only logical thing to do would be to empty it out and get rid of it.  Of course, that isn’t going to happen on its own, and nobody in my family really seems as eager to not let a valuable asset potential degrade due to neglect as I am, so that has almost entirely fallen on my shoulders to do, despite the fact that I would rather have been doing a hundred other things than driving all the way up there just to clean and struggle to do my job remotely since that home hadn’t had internet access in the last two years.

I had the brilliant analogy that my dad was basically like Wall-E, in the sense that he seemed to collect an inordinate amount of useless and worthless trash and tchotchkes, but he was pretty good at organizing it and making it look fairly orderly within his own home.  However, when it comes to sorting and determining what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed, it became very, very quickly apparent that the load didn’t jive with the time available, and that pretty much everything needed to be trashed.

It was like an episode of Storage Wars where Dave Hester would always brag about the potential profitability about every single storage unit he won, but that’s because he had a consignment shop where all the bullshit he collected could sit on shelves and make a nickel five months later, as opposed to being moved immediately.  My dad had a lot of stuff that honestly could’ve made a few bucks here and there if time were on our side, but in the span of a week, I wasn’t about to try and organize a last second single home flea market for the legions of crap that my dad had hoarded over the last decade and a half.

Box full of optical mice?  Trash.  Bag full of brand-new commercial painting supplies?  Trash.  Boxes full of partially used duct and electrical tape?  Trash.  Box of tool grade rope?  Crate full of commercial paper towels?  Industrial tubs full of liquid soap?  Trash, trash, trash.

Amidst all the crap were all sorts of personal and family mementos too, stuff that my sister, my mom or myself didn’t take with us when we all inevitably moved out.  And as much as I tend to hesitate when it comes to disposing of anything of such nature, I walked into my week of work with a credo, to harden the heart and let shit go, because otherwise I would accomplish nothing.  If nobody cared about this stuff to take with them when they left, nobody is going to care about it when it’s tossed.

High school yearbooks, shop class projects, little pieces of crap that I may have saved at random points in my life, all part of the trash pile.  I had a moment of quiet shock, when my mom took her wedding photo album and tossed it into a box marked for disposal, but seeing as how they are divorced, it’s understandable, but still no less slightly mortifying as a child of said union.

When my work was done, the house was still in pretty much chaos, but at least it was fairly organized chaos.  Originally, I had planned on just being a repeated shuttle back and forth to the dump to dispose of everything that needed to go, but my aunt and my mom meddled and convinced me to pay for professional disposal.  Having a little experience with it, I knew to expect a bill north of a grand if we were going to go that route, but the thought of saving myself and my car the labor didn’t hurt, so that’s the choice I made, and I made some calls and reached out to a few companies, and landed with one who would come at a later date to come pick up all the trash.

Among all the crap, I had pulled aside some items that even I thought, would go quickly, if offered for free to the community, like some extension ladders, a television, and a weed-wacker.  Long story short, the ladders moved, but with resistance, and I ended up donating the television and the trimmer to Goodwill when neither generated a lick of interest.

Additionally, there were also a lot of furniture that I felt had some value in it, and I figured it shouldn’t be hard to leverage the Salvation Army to come pick up some free furniture that they could then flip at their consignment shops; yes, I’m aware of the general negative reputation the internet has over the SA, but I just wanted to get this house cleared in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, and in the past I’ve used them to help clear out my old house, and they seemed like a logical option.

After I had left, and the scheduled day of the SA pickup had passed, I called my mom whom I entrusted to be on site to let the SA guys in, and she told me that they took nothing.  They came into the home, examined all the marked items, deemed them not suitable quality, and refused to move anything that required traveling a flight of stairs.  I knew right away that it wasn’t so much that everything I offered was inadequate, as much as it was around 3:30 pm when they showed up to my place, their truck was probably full, the workers were tired, and they simply did not want to go through the labor of hauling off all the stuff I had asked them to.

So I basically got exactly what I had paid for – zero.

There’s the popular adage that people should never stop learning, and it was at this moment that I decided that I have fully learned an important lesson that I will try to implement into my remaining life, and that free, is bullshit, and to look at anything in life that claims to be free, with the skepticism that I would look at anyone proclaiming to be a Nigerian prince.

Free, always sounds awesome, but free comes with a whole slew of conditionals that are mitigated when there’s some form of transactional currency.  And the drawback to free always seems to be at the extreme risk of something often times more valuable than any form of currency, which is time, because with the case of the Salvation Army, their refusal to do their job because their service was free, still cost me a great deal of time, as I did not have a fallback plan, because they did me right in my own previous experience, which was a fallacy in its own right that I need to be mindful of in the future as well.

But I think about all the times in my life where something has been free, whether it’s been me trying to get something, or me trying to give shit away, and almost all of the instances, have involved aggravation, regret, and questioning why I did in the first place.

It’s like the IHOP fallacy, whenever they do like their free pancake day or whatever, you see on the news people who wait hours for a free short stack of pancakes, when that same short stack would’ve cost like $7 and get it immediately if you paid for it, making those who think about it realize that paying > free.

I’ve gone through great lengths in the past to get free bobbleheads at ballparks, and looking back at all those instances, I can count on one hand where it’s actually been worth it, and I actually applaud myself in any instance where I may have self-policed my time versus free scale and altered my choices in the past.

I also think about the sheer aggravation of trying to give stuff away on stuff like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, because it seems like something that should be layups, but the flake rate for free shit is so astronomically high, so often times I just end up throwing perfectly good shit away, because I simply grew exasperated with trying to not be wasteful and giving away perfectly good goods, because I’m just tired of people.

The point of all this is that I have, I truly have, learned, that the word free is not necessarily a good word anymore, and is instead a loaded word, full of conditionals and rules and invisible clauses, that one really needs to understand the risks when they inevitably grow tempted by it, solely because of the potential end result of a transaction with nothing exchanged.

So many times in life, it’s simply better to just grow up, pay up, and get shit done, without any of the bullshit that free entails.

I guess this makes me sound old

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago on Thanksgiving, my family missed our flight. 

Actually, we did not miss our flight, but rather we missed the recommended two-hour check-in period because mythical wife and I were parents new to two kids, had a boatload of cargo to haul with us, and had to check-in at a service desk, instead of just going straight to security as if we didn’t have all the extra crap.  And the only reason why we missed it is because ATL’s parking garage is the worst in the nation [fact] and the 15 minutes in which it took us to get from car to terminal was the difference between making it and not.

Being late, I can take responsibility for.  Airline travel these days is a stressful ordeal most of the time, multiplied by the fact that it was a holiday.  Add to the fact that parenting is hard, especially at the time, two kids under the ages of two.

What really bothered me about the whole situation was the fact that after we were told that we would not be getting onto our flight, was the fact that for the next hour and 50 minutes, while I was on the phone with Delta trying to figure out what our options were, was knowing that our aircraft was sitting there, still waiting for cargo to be loaded, still waiting for people to board, still, just fucking waiting.  Meanwhile, thanks to some uppity gate agents hiding behind the subjectively conveniently wall of protocol, my family was denied clearance, and I had to drop $700 on the spot for two new day-of holiday tickets in order to go to Virginia for barely 12 hours, all for being 10 minutes past a recommended check-in time.

Look, I know that rules are rules, and my family wasn’t there at precisely 2+ hours before departure time.  But I’ve witnessed in my rather copious flying experiences people in way more dire and illogical, and should-be-fucked situations emerge victorious, all because there’s a generous amount of discretion, grace and ability to read the room involved with being in airline customer support.

I was ten minutes late.  I wasn’t a dick or raised my voice or created a scene with the agent.  I also understand the needs of the baggage handlers and that their time needs to be accounted for.  I wasn’t asking for super special treatment, and to be escorted through security through special assistance.  I just wanted a little bit of grace and understanding for our parenting situation, and a little bit of leniency on the time, especially since there was more than enough of it remaining to make our flight.

But no, we were stonewalled, marked as no-shows, and not allowed to advance on our original itinerary.  The reasonable flights were refunded as credit, but that needed to be used immediately along with $700 extra dollars to book two new flights, and it led to a real shitty holiday travel experience.

All because a gate agent didn’t really feel like working, and used the wall of protocol to shield themselves behind.

It’s not lost on me that from a cold hard facts point of view, the agent did nothing wrong.  From a procedural standpoint, they did everything to the T, and when the day is over, you really can’t ask for much more from an employee.

Nobody is required or expected to go above their required duties, and I know there’s a lot of gray area when it comes to Office Space debates on doing the bare minimum versus trying to do more, but when the asks are not difficult or require little extra effort, but the result is the satisfaction and gratitude of helping another person accomplish something, why the fuck not give it a whirl?

I’m sure that there have been points in my life where I’ve hidden behind the exact same wall of protocol, but I’m fairly certain that if I did it, it was coming from a place of antagonism, and I was probably aware that my refusal to budge was going to be seen as an act of hostility, from whom I was being obtuse with.

Well that introduction went a little long, because what the whole point of this whole post is that I recently had a situation with a colleague, where I asked for some assistance with a project, and was met with a surprising amount of resistance, a deflection from a shield of protocol, and a conclusion where the task was not completed, and will have to wait an entire week for this person to come back from PTO before it gets completed.

Like the airline story, they’re not in the wrong with the course of action that they chose to take, but the ask I had for them was to convert two sentences and three bullet points into a smaller, digestible 2-3 sentence paragraph; a task that I’ve seen not just any copywriter, but this specific copywriter accomplish in less than five minutes.  I even vetted the ask with them over Teams before entering the request into Workfront, which was met with a response indicating how easy it would be.

But once they received it in Workfront, they responded to the group that the due date for the task was already past-due because our PMs are suspect in capability, and that it would have to wait until the following week due to their upcoming PTO, and that they recommended assigning it to another copywriter if it was urgent.

To this type of response, I scrunched my brow at the screen, and wondered why the fuck they had agreed upon its ease if they weren’t going to help out with it in the first place?  Furthermore, this all happened at like 10 am in the work day, there was more than enough time to just knock it out, then I could do my part, and we could close the entire project out, and that would be one less ticket looming over our workloads.

Aggravated, I decided to not reassign the task, and to make sure it remains on this copywriter’s plate.  It has the time, but it could have been done so much sooner, and on principle, I’m going to make sure that they still do it, and lord help me if they complain about their workload when they get to it then.

I get wanting to coast before a vacation, but I’m also the type who absolutely abhors the idea of anyone having to pick up or fill in or finish something that I started.  I’m a monster when it comes to trying to close out all my tasks, tie up all loose ends, and knock out anything that can be knocked out before I go radio silent.  To me, it just seems like common courtesy, but as I very well have learned throughout my life, nobody works harder than a Korean, and I feel as if I’m a step above the rest on top of it.

Ultimately, my mind immediately thought to the notion that this wasn’t just ordinary apathetic work avoidance, but rather more typical to Gen-Z work ethic, and no matter how nice and chipper and glowy of personalities a worker can be, the barest of bare minimums is to be expected, and that anything that might be construed as exceeding such, is absolutely out of the question.

Nice enough and chipper and pleasant as this copywriter is, they still turtled up behind the shield of protocol as if I were asking them to find the cure for cancer.  Shifting the request to the other copywriter was out of the question to me, because they’re younger and more apt to bitch about an additional request being made of them, and I don’t want to hear it.  But even in spite of all the remaining time in the day, they didn’t have the time to address my ask, but they did have time to get on the department Teams channel and wish a happy birthday to fucking Mariah Carey.

Perhaps the five minutes of doing such should be construed as five minutes of flagrant not-work time spent, and they should make up for it by spending five minutes on the task that I had asked them for.

Either way, I suppose complaining about the perceived work ethics of those younger than me qualifies as one of those things that justifies the fact that I’m old now.  Whatever though, at least I know I’m capable of getting shit done, even if others might consider such attribute as giving shit away.

When it rains, it pours

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This past weekend wasn’t particularly the best, and it’s almost comical at all the nonsense that occurred over it that has put me into this semi-dilapidated mood that I’m actually applauding myself for holding it together and not go into complete crash out mode.

Friday started off bumpy on account of #2 being sick, still recovering from one of those stomach ailments that kids pass around like candy, and it’s still to be determined on if it’s going to hit me at some point soon, seeing as how it’s pretty formulaic in how the bugs incubate for 48-72 hrs. before blowing out, but at least she was on the mend, and obviously kept home from school.

I saw my dad on Friday, where we watched Team Korea get obliterated by the Dominican Republic, or at least the first three innings before it was very obvious things were not going to go the way we wanted, but that wasn’t a bad thing at all, as much as it was something to be expected.  It was good to see my dad and spend some time with him, but seeing him on a Friday was deliberate in the sense that I had no intention of seeing him over the actual weekend days, because I knew I’d be busy.

All the same, regardless of the random lunch time hour in which I drove up to him, I still got annihilated in traffic since Atlanta’s rush hour is 7 am to 3 am, and there’s pretty much no time in the day where there’s not red on the Google map somewhere.  I had also intended to give blood, because I’m altruistic like that and am not the least bit influenced by the $40 gift card incentive + free t-shirt, but the donation center I went to didn’t have a chair available for me, so there was an L there too, so although it was good to get in a visit with my dad, the productive things I wanted to accomplish additionally fell through.

As for the weekend itself, it was pretty much spent almost entirely deep cleaning my house, which left me feeling some things, because I absolutely want to have a clean home, and prior to the cleaning, it was in a state of such disarray, it fed into a lot of my general unhappiness and cluttered state of mind, because I was always in a situation where nobody but me was willing to lift a finger to put any effort into maintaining the home. 

But when the cleanliness of the home was reliant on someone else, everything gets done, but on their terms and not necessarily collaboratively with me, and I do feel a sense of bitterness that I don’t feel like my own household respects me enough to want to give a fuck about the home for my sake, until they need to give a fuck for their own purposes.

I’m talking about mass de-cluttering, filling up the entire bin with shit getting thrown out, shampooing carpets and clearing counters and shelves, and I’m glad that a lot of this shit finally got accomplished, but at the same time, I’m annoyed that this never gets done when I want to have an orderly home, and only gets done when it’s on someone else’s terms.

Such, were the resentful thoughts swirling through my head, as I worked basically sun up to sun down each Saturday and Sunday.

Except Sunday, I did have a little reprieve and a hard stop, on account of a localcar wrestling show that I was going to hit up with some of my friends.  It was a fun show, and I dropped a little cash to meet Shotzi Blackheart, since I’ve long been a fan of her and her work, and I was thinking to myself, for all the hard work and negative thoughts of the weekend, this was a pleasant way to wind things down.

But then when I’m pulling into my driveway, I’m looking at my car (I had taken the third car), and I can’t help but think it looks off-kilter.  I pull closer, and I see that the rear passenger tire is completely flat, and I’m like wtf.  My knee-jerk reaction is fear that the tire was slashed or something malicious, but cooler heads prevailed, and as I was examining the tire, I could see the silver of a nail that I had picked up, at some point on Friday, as it hadn’t been driven at all on Saturday, and over the span of the last 43 hours, it completely bled out.

Again, I have to applaud myself for keeping somewhat calm in spite of the obnoxiously inconvenient revelation, but we also had company over, and I didn’t want to be in a state of distress in front of a bunch of my wife’s friends.  But fortunately, the tire wasn’t in such a state where it couldn’t inflate, and I quickly deduced a plan to play some car Tetris the following day between mythical wife and au pair, and I could take my car to a local joint and hopefully get a patch, since the location looked like it might still be able to be patched.

However, those plans were derailed in the middle of the night as it became quickly apparent that #1 had caught the dreaded tummy bugs from her sister, and they had incubated and blown up, and at like 2:20 in the morning, I wake up to find my child standing next to my bed in discomfort, and I have to heap praise onto my eldest for keeping it together long enough to prepare for the unfortunate vomit party that began shortly afterward.  #2 just exploded like the kid from The Exorcist, in contrast, but the silver lining is that we did not have a repeat with #1.

Obviously, she was not going to school in the morning, but this did put a wrinkle in my hopes to get my car fixed.  And at 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the morning, it’s hard to have much coherent thought on pivoting, but I was ready to punt on car repairs for a day, because obviously my kid was a higher priority.

Fortunately, mythical wife called in, and with enough coverage between adults and kids, I was able to field the tire issue.  The drive there was tense, seeing as how I had a tire actively leaking air, and I could hear it hissing before I got into the car, but thankfully I made it to the Costco where I got my tires, dreading that they’d tell me that my 2-month old tire needed to be replaced for some bullshit reason.

After dropping off my car, I thought this would be the perfect time to treat myself after all the nonsense that I’d been going through, and get an iced coffee, since Costco food court iced coffee is surprisingly delicious, like maybe two tiers beneath a Tim Horton’s ice capp.  But naturally, for whatever reason, their machine was down or gone, but the point remains that I could not get what I was hoping to get.

Yes, that last one is about the first world of first world problems there could be, but hey, I’d been going through a lot of shit over the last few days, and I just wanted some fucking coffee.  Fortunately, the tire was an easy patch and without incident, and one of the two major red flags that I had to deal with was immediately wrapped up.

Either way, to add insult to injury, the headline of this post wasn’t just a figure of speech, because amidst all this bullshit, the weather decided to go full Georgia fake spring meme, and spontaneously drop into the 30s and 20s as the day progressed, with thunderstorms and freezing rain, so it quite literally was pouring during the worst events of this post.

I may have barfed out 1300 words summarizing how obnoxious the last few days have been, but again I want to pat myself on the back for at least having the gumption to not take it out on others, and not let it affect my blood pressure too much, but I’d be lying if it weren’t mentally, and physically taxing, seeing as how I’ve been getting even less sleep than ordinarily, in order to take care of sick children.

But it was just too much nonsense to not summarize and make brog content out of it, and here we are.

I highly doubt Buc-ee’s cares what the BBB thinks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

USA Today: The Better Business Bureau gives Buc-ee’s an F rating, primarily due to their lack of response from customer feedback

When I first saw the headline of the BBB giving Buc-ee’s an F, my knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines of, what inane bullshit reason can there be for the BBB to give Buc-ee’s an F?

And when I saw that it had almost entirely to do with the fact that customers were complaining, I knew right away that the rating meant pretty much nothing, and that people at Buc-ee’s probably could not give any fewer shits than what the BBB thinks of them.

A part of me figured some anonymous BBB plants were sent to various Buc-ee’s throughout the country, to rate on some standardized criteria, and that they were probably a bunch of white collar city hipster dorks who wouldn’t understand the Buc-ee’s brand and mentality, and that they collectively gave it an F rating.  But when I learned that such was not the case, and that the rating was based on the assessments of random pleebs, then this F rating became even more meaningless than what IL0veCorgis and Xx_BigDickP3RKIN5_xX thinks about local public transportation on their local ABC network affiliate’s comments section.

Of course Buc-ee’s doesn’t give a shit about the complaints about them people make to the BBB, much less expend any time in order to try and resolve them.  People only go to the BBB when they’re upset about things in the first place, and for the things that people are complaining about, they can threaten that they’ll never go to a Buc-ee’s again, because the honeymoon period with a lot of these joints is so never-ending that one big mad customer vowing to never go there again means nothing when their grand openings require entire police departments to control the crowds.

Like, personally, I haven’t gone inside a Buc-ee’s in a long time, and it’s not solely because I haven’t passed one.  The last few road trips to Florida, my household has chosen to not go to them, mostly because we don’t want to deal with the crowds and the masses of humanity that go there.  I still love the brand, I love the products and food, but while their popularity is still nuclear, I’d rather not deal with the crowds.  But if I were in a situation where I could hit them slightly off-peak, I’m going in in two seconds.

My guess is that the people who complained to the BBB did not take such concessions, and went into the lion’s den at peak times, and were upset by things that happened because most Buc-ee’s outside the state of Texas are massive clusterfucks of humanity that shit easily slips through cracks at.  Frankly, it’s their fault for choosing to do so; you can’t be mad at Target employees on Black Friday for them succumbing to chaos, because to anyone who’s ever been to a Buc-ee’s can probably attest that it was like a mini-Black Friday to them as well.

Needless to say, the Better Business Bureau acting on the reactions of idiot customers makes them come off looking like jealous fatties for rating a successful operation like Buc-ee’s with an F.  It’s not a great example comparison because I’m actually on Buc-ee’s side on this one, but it’s like Buc-ee’s is the asshole CDO Manager from The Big Short who was played by the guy who played Ryu in the Van Damme Street Fighter, and the BBB is Mark Baum, but their debate concludes with Buc-ee’s arrogantly offering to compare bank accounts, and see who the world favors.

Buc-ee’s is out there printing money, minding their own business, and sure, they’re not a perfect company, but neither are their customers.  The BBB can fuck right on out of here, coming at Buc-ee’s like this, but I guess there’s little other way to try and be relevant than going at businesses more successful than they are.

Dad Brog (#164): nobody told me there’d be this much paper

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For about the first five years of parenthood, I’ve done my best to keep record of all the artwork that my children have created, be it at home, at school, camps or wherever they’ve been tasked to create something with their own hands.  Regardless of how it looked, it was always awesome, and I’d always take tremendous enjoyment out of the explanations that came from the imaginations of my children, and I always fall in love all over again with just how beautiful of minds kids have before they’re systemically neutered by lame-ass adulthood.

But my god, of all the parenting advice and resources I indulged throughout my journey before and into parenthood, nobody ever mentioned the part where two kids, much less one kid, generate about a small rainforest’s worth of paper in the things they create.

For those first five years, I tried to keep everything that they did, from drawings, gluing things to construction paper, cutouts of god knows what, dioramas, collages and whatever they made, I wanted to hold on to it.  Obviously, I know that’s not realistic in the long run, and for two nights after the kids went to sleep, I’d crack open the giant crate where I’d been hoarding all the artwork, set up my digital camera and some lighting, and I took photographs of everything that they had created; then I’d put them into the recycling bin for discreet disposal.

I thought about perhaps using my kids’ artwork as content for an Instagram account I toyed around the idea of, but haven’t pulled the trigger on account of reluctance and a general lack of time to really commit, but the point is, even if I tossed them, I still kept record of their creations, proof that they were on this earth, existed, and made things with their own hands.

However, my kids are a little bit older now, and school is really producing paper content commensurate to their ages, and without fail, at least 2-3 sheets of paper come home with #1 daily, and #2 brings home a bag full of art assignments every two weeks, and seldom are they in any standardized, easily archivable size.  Furthermore, our au pair is great at keeping them occupied with art and drawing, and they burn through reams of paper almost as fast as they burn through toilet paper in the house.

Needless to say, I’ve gotten to the point where I simply can’t keep up with the paper that my children produce, and it’s basically become drown in sheets of paper, or start tossing things when they’re not looking.

This isn’t a brog post if I chose to do the righteous option and solder forth with hoarding, and today I had to harden my heart as I took stacks of papers and drawings that my kids have done over the last year or so, and put them into the recycling bin.  It kills my soul to do it in such a manner, but at the same time, my mental state goes to the shitter if my house’s state of cleanliness matches the chaos that is often in my brain, and when push comes to shove, if I can’t help myself from time to time, I’m no good to be able to help my kids and family.

My kids won’t notice, but I do, and I can’t help but feel wracked with guilt at the choice of my actions.  Among these stacks were all sorts of drawings that were thought out, explained with exuberance, and in some cases, were probably drawings of our family, or their sister, or something else drawn with love and good intention, and here I am, the asshole dad who can’t stand clutter and chooses to toss them without record keeping, and the feeling absolutely sucks.

But again, as I’m so often reminded by so many people, sometimes I have to put myself first every now and then, and perhaps this is a reminder to myself that I should embark on my Instagram idea and use my chlidren’s artwork as a general basis for content, it might just help keep me accountable to be better about keeping record.

Dad Brog (#163): rattled

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife, the girls and I went to the Asian market the other day.  When we were on our way out, #1 got a little ahead of us, and began crossing the street on her own.  Mythical wife managed to get her attention to stop and come back and that she knows the rule that, hands held when in the parking lot.  No sooner than she got a hold of her hand, a Lexus SUV came flying into our periphery, before coming to a stop, maybe 2-3 feet away from mythical wife and #1; but adjacent to them.

Had both of them been 2-3 further into the crosswalk, they would have been hit and run over, entirely.  Me yelling out HEY to the reckless driver wouldn’t have done anything to stop them.

Naturally, justifying the stereotype of being some of the most unsafe drivers in the world, it was an older Korean woman, maybe a few years younger than my mom, who was driving the car.  She looked up at us with shock and concern in her face, pantomiming bowing her head in apology at her neglectful driving, and I gave her a stare that I wish could induce death, for the danger she potentially could have put my family in because she was probably too busy checking fucking KakaoTalk on her fucking phone instead of paying attention to the road in one of the most attention-requiring zones there could be, directly in front of a grocery store.

Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and ironically it was a good lesson for my kids to learn at the very real dangers of parking lots, since up to this point they bemoaned having to hold a grown-up’s hand every now and then, and wanted to flex moar independence that only kids of this age can.

It wasn’t really until we were driving home did it really start to sink in to me at just how fortunate we were that nothing happened.  Like I said, #1 was extremely close to getting hit by a car, and frankly I don’t know how I’d have reacted if that actually did happen.  More than likely I’d have wanted to kill the ajumma behind the wheel who was responsible for it, but I was playing the scene in my head where I struggled to curse and scream at someone in my elementary-level Korean.

I’ve seen my child in hospital care and with tubes and all sorts of apparatuses attached to them.  I am in no rush to ever have see such again, and I don’t know how I’d handle it if I had to, against all of our wills.

Needless to say, I was quite rattled by the whole situation, and by the time I got home, I had decided it was probably for the best not leave the house any more for the day.  No matter how much we try to protect our children from the very real dangers of the world, it’s like at any given point, it’s always just that close, at any given moment.