Tag: triggered

Well this is going to make a real lean Christmas

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, I got a ticket it in the mail.  When I saw the words “traffic violation enclosed” I winced because I knew that there was an extremely high chance that it was not me that was the driver at the time of the violation, seeing as how I barely get to drive my own registered vehicle these days, as my au pair uses it to do all of hauling of my kids to school and extracurriculars.  However, I was not upset with them because I’m sure it was an honest mistake, and it was more than likely to have occurred in the process of while they were taking my kids somewhere they needed to be.

Bringing the envelope into the house, my mind raced at what the possible fine was going to be, the last time I got a traffic camera violation, it was like $55, and when I got a school zone camera violation that was overturned on account of it not being a school day, I still saw that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $125~ish.  I hoped it was closer to the traffic camera, and not the school zone.

Turns out that the violation was that of passing a stopped school bus on a multi-lane road with a center turning lane, which I’ll admit that I had to stop and think about the rules on that one, but I probably would’ve stopped out of doubt.  And the time stamp confirmed that it was at a time in which it was the au pair taking my kids to extracurriculars, so it wasn’t my own doing; but seeing as how the car is registered to me, that’s who the ticket is directed at.

As for the violation, I imagine my face looking as close to possible as Jim Carrey’s The Mask as humanly possible when I saw the comma in the number: $1,000.  One thousand (fucking) dollars.

My knee-jerk reaction was that, this most definitely had to be a fake, a scam.  Even with the accompanying photo evidence of my car before and after the bus, this fine of a thousand dollars couldn’t possibly be right, especially seeing as how I’ve never had a violation of this nature in my record before.

So searching for it on my own on the internet, I find the city municipal site pretty quickly, and sure as shit, it’s no fake.  It’s an actual program, that’s been softly rolling out since like 2022, and any semblance of lower first violations all flew out the window as of July 2024, where the program rolled into the territory where all first violations are one thousand fucking dollars.

$1,000 for a school bus is absolutely draconian.  This is some Commonwealth of Virginia-levels of extreme punishment.  I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to where I can figure this out, but it doesn’t change the fact that the timing of it, and the flagrant intention of it is going to really ruin my life a little bit right now.  I’ve spent all of 2025 in some of the worst financial standing that I’ve ever been in my adult life, and I’ve been digging and fighting and persevering all year long, and just as I’ve been able to clear some debts right in time for the holidays, getting this ridiculously large fine just feels like I’m being kicked while I’m already down. 

This just reinforces the feeling I’ve had most of the year that I’m just this gigantic fucking punching bag for life’s cruel scenarios sometimes.

I get the whole idea of the program, and I am all about increasing safety for children.  I’m not butt-hurt over the notion of buses having cameras equipped to catch and penalize those who don’t follow the laws of bus safety, I’m just in a state of being flabbergasted that the fines are just so astronomically high. 

While venting my shock at the high violation cost, I came across this news story that echoes my general concern, and this quote is the best/worst/most ironic part of the whole thing:

A fine needs to get people’s attention, yes — but it shouldn’t be so high it’s impossible to pay,” (State Rep and who helped write the law Don) Parson said.

Additionally, this same person was quoted saying:

What we’re doing here is trying to protect children —and it is very important — but I also think $1,000 is too high,” he said.

I’m just in a state of disbelief, honestly.  This $1,000 fine is going to absolutely kill me.  No, I’m not going to lose my home or anything, but it’s not something I can just shrug off.  In all likelihood, it’s just going to be put on my credit card, adding to the debt that has been going in the wrong direction over the last two years, and it’s going to live rent-free in my head for a little bit.

I’m not going to shirk off the accountability and put it onto my au pair, because she got it while in service of my family, so beyond a cursory discussion to be careful of stopped school buses, I’m going to eat the burden, because the last thing I want is this to lead to her visa getting revoked because America sucks and I’m sure there have been foreigners deported for less.

But a $1,000 fine, this time of year, due by Christmas, absolutely blows.  I already stress over the obligation to buy gifts, but this basically consumes the vast majority of my gift buying budget.  Nobody is going to feel sorry for me, and I don’t think it’s really going to be accepted if I just nope the fuck out of gift giving outright because of this, and I’m trying really, really hard to keep my composure in light of this, and not let it ruin absolutely everything in spite of its extreme efforts.

I want to ask the rhetorical question on when will life start to get any easier, but the real question is if it ever really will at all?

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.

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.

I get it, but I really really don’t like it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ICYMI: John Cena defeats Dominic Mysterio, wins the Intercontinental championship for the first time in his career, becoming a Grand Slam Champion with less than five appearances left in his career

Lord, I always heard that this was a possibility during the whole John Cena retirement tour, and it was always something that I had hoped really wouldn’t happen.  And with the clock winding down, I thought we had hit the point where it couldn’t possibly happen on account of the lack of time remaining on Cena’s tour in order to make the handoff of the IC title remotely meaningful.

But, the WWE is all about creating moments, and short-term bursts of dopamine for fans, and long gone are the days where openly outgoing talent would eat a shit ton of losses on the way out, including the last one, to really drive home the notion that nobody is bigger than the business, and to metaphorically pay back the industry by booting future stars by taking losses.

I’m not saying John Cena hasn’t been taking his share of L’s over the last calendar year, and for the most part, I’m of the opinion that the retirement tour has been handled pretty well and I’ve found a lot of it to be enjoyable, but I have to say that the most recent development in the tour is one part, that I absolutely disagree with and do not like, at all.

Dominic Mysterio has been so carefully curated all year long, protected and booked so brilliantly, winning the Intercontinental championship at Wrestlemania, and then Mexico’s AAA Mega Campeonato, all while navigating through Liv Morgan’s injury, the Judgment Day’s tumultuous camaraderie, and being chased by guys like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta.

He has defeated all challengers throughout the year, and has shown tremendous growth in character, and honestly, has been one of the only male performers I really bother to keep tabs on.

Feeding him to John Cena, and losing the Intercontinental blet at this stage of the game is something that disappointed me tremendously as a fan, and really makes me wonder if E Creative™ really has a good idea where they’re going with this, or if they’re just eager to check off that very last feel good accolade for John Cena, as to make sure he has every single honor there could be, even if it meant coming at the expense of one of their most valuable long-term assets in Dominic Mysterio.

It also takes a big crap all over all of the guys who have been chasing Dominic Mysterio throughout the year, like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta, because Dom has been going to war with them all year, cheating and beating them dirty, but then he takes a 10 minute loss to John Cena like it was 2013 all over again, and there’s something about the whole act that makes me feel like a year’s worth of booking has been disrespected and peed on just a little bit.

Like, the Intercontinental championship doesn’t benefit John Cena at all.  He literally has no time to boost it or elevate it beyond what Dom has done with it, because last time I checked, he has three appearances left.  And I doubt that his last match will also be for the Intercontinental championship, so that means he has to drop it within his next two appearances, and in my opinion, fewer things erode a title’s prestige than rapid changes, at least not without a good narrative behind it, and I feel like the E is really pigeon-holing themselves right now with this not-well thought out Cena IC run.

Basically, no way it’s going to any of the 16 guys in the Cena Last Match Tournament, because it defeats the purpose for having a tournament in the first place, if one of them is going to suddenly get to have a match, a title match, against him before the last match.  And outside of them, there’s really not a lot of names that are just spontaneously ready for the Intercontinental title much less worthy to get a win on John Cena, genuinely one of the greatest talents in the history of the industry, which is a topic I may touch on in a future post.

I feel like the only real option is to drop it back to Dominic Mysterio, where Dom will win on account of there being a metric fuckton of interference from the rest of The Judgment Day, the Americanos, and he’ll win dirty with an obvious foreign object, but at that point the question is why they had to have him drop the title in the first place, other than to placate a superficial career milestone?  They derail an extremely strong title run and snuff out its momentum.  Even if he wins it back, the mystique of his first run is completely reset, and it’ll feel like a holding pattern until the next contender is ready, instead of like the run Gunther had with it, where it just felt like nobody was ever going to beat him.

Either way, as much as I have enjoyed the John Cena retirement tour, I will die on this hill that him taking the Intercontinental title off of Dominic Mysterio was not the best idea, and smells more of pandering and fan service than being a careful and calculated choice that would be worthy of being in the next season of UNReal.

Daylight Savings blows, 2025 edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At around 5:20 am, I heard #1 outside my bedroom door, panicking in the dark about how she couldn’t find her sister.  The fact that my child was out of her room in the pitch black of the morning was enough to get me to pop out of my bed, but upon hearing that my other child was allegedly missing immediately put me into a state of panic myself.

Worse off, for some reason there was a light on in my sunroom, which I knew wasn’t the case when I went to bed because I’m neurotic and always make sure all lights are off prior to going upstairs; I would later discover that there was a power surge during the night, and since that room’s lights are controlled via remote control, it light switch is usually in the on position permanently, and stuff like power surges or outages usually result in lights coming on upon reconnection.  However, I didn’t know this, and it immediately put the fear of god into me that #2 was in some sort of danger.

I walked #1 back into their (we let them sleep in the same room on weekends sometimes, on the unfolded futon) room to have her wait for me while I would investigate downstairs, but upon entering the room, there’s #2 snuggled up like a little taquito on the futon already, still sleeping.  Relieved, I set #1 back onto the futon as well, covered her, gave her a kiss on the head, reminded her that it was the middle of the night and hope she bought it, and implored her to go back to sleep; she didn’t need to know her circadian rhythm was correct at thinking it should be 6:20 am, when she’s normally up for school on weekdays, because obviously I really wanted to get some more fucking sleep.

Nope, by 5:30 am, I can hear activity on the baby monitor, both girls are now awake, and it’s only a matter of seconds before I hear doors opening and shutting, and #1 is marching back into my bedroom, with moments later, #2 freaking out in the darkness of the hallway, wondering where everyone is.  I bring them both into the master, and get them into our bed, in between mama and dada, hoping they might actually go the fuck back to sleep for a little bit longer.

Naturally, that doesn’t happen, and by 5:40, I give up, get out of bed, usher the kids downstairs, and concede that the day is now beginning.

The thing is, I actually had a tentative plan about this morning, because I figured there would be some monkey business with the time change, and the chances of me having breakfast ready for awakening kids wasn’t going to be high, which was that we were definitely, going to go to Waffle House because who doesn’t love Waffle House?

It’s just I was not anticipating them to be getting up within the 5 o’clock hour, but here we were.

It actually wasn’t that terrible, I got them dressed and we were at Waffle House by like 6:30 adjusted time, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that we were not the only customers there.  They were definitely the only kids there, and a part of me was hoping to have seen some other parents under similar circumstances having the same plan that I did, but alas, it was just me who was carting my kids out at this ungodly bullshit adjusted time.

But the point remains, daylight savings remains the antichrist, and it’s abundantly clear that the people in the BC years who came up with the idea were a bunch of selfish fucks who either did not have children, or had the privilege or were bad parents enough to not take into consideration the effects of the time change on parents who did have children.  And I hate them for all eternity and hope their descendants are wholly unimpressive pleebs who have nagging gastrointestinal issues.

I like to imagine that if the originators of daylight savings actually had any children, that they were obligated to actually care for, ranging from ages 0-7 years of age, they would think twice about the whole concept of rolling clocks back and fucking with their circadian rhythms and suddenly having to deal with them at ridiculously early AM hours, while people under most other circumstances would still be getting to sleep, regardless of what hour it actually was.

And as I’ve said before, I didn’t care much for it prior to children, but now that I do have kids, I fucking loathe it, and I like to think I’m pretty serious about sticking to my claim that I’d vote for absolutely anyone who prioritized the abolishment of this bullshit antiquated concept, including, those Somali pirates.

The complaining will likely happen yearly, until either this bullshit program is killed off, or my kids get to the age where they want to sleep in, and therefore my entire house can actually benefit from the rollback instead of bemoaning it.  Not going to bet on the former, though.

I can’t ever be mad about Freddie Freeman

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Trust me, bro: Freddie Freeman becomes the only player in MLB history to have more than one walk-off homerun in the World Series.  That’s it.

When the day is over, I couldn’t give two shits over who wins the World Series.  Obviously, I would prefer it to be the Blue Jays, but as I’ve said before, the Dodgers are inevitable, and prior to the start of the series, I had flippantly predicted that it would be the Dodgers in five, and so far, my prediction is still in play.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is pitching like a man possessed, with two straight complete games, playing like a man who was worth a $330M contract, and the golden boy Shohei Ohtani seems to have figured out playoff baseball, and over his last few games, has been hitting home runs in every single one and OPSing like 5.000 or so it feels.

Oh and make no mistake, the MLB media machine and all of its stage-six clingers are absolutely all the fuck over this Japanese invasion, and it’s getting to a point where I feel like I’m going to resent MLB so much I’d swear it off, by just how much weeb-worship they’re jizzing all over the internet like they’re watering a garden with a hose.  I get it, Yamamoto and Ohtani are playing phenomenally right now, but it’s not like nobody else in the history of Major League Baseball has ever caught fire in the midst of the playoffs and carried their teams to some hot streaks.

But MLB media has become more weeby than 76 anime conventions put together and they just can’t help themselves with how much spooging they’re doing over every little thing a Japanese player does, and there’s no length too great to stretch out in order to make all sorts of convoluted stats or combination of stats to fit the narrative that only Shohei Ohtani is the only person in history to accomplish, so they can cliché-ly end with “that’s it.”

Thankfully, last night was a reminder that there are stalwart baseball players in existence that aren’t from glorious Nippon, and that the Dodgers true captain is the one who bailed them out of an 18-inning purgatory with once again, calling game in the most dramatic of fashions, the walk-off home run.

Freddie Freeman became the ONLY PLAYER in MLB HISTORY to have multiple walk-off home runs in the World Series, now having done it in 2025 a year removed from when he walked off the Yankees last year. 

That’s it.

And I know that I’m rooting against the Dodgers just like the the vast majority of the world outside of Los Angeles and entire country of Japan, but there is no part of me that is capable of hating Freddie Freeman, even if he is on the team.  I am happy for his second walk-off homer in the World Series, and I’m happy for his family to have been able to witness him once again bail the entire team out and be Mr. Hero, the only one genuinely worthy of such, on a roster full of guys that MLB really wants to be Mr. Hero instead.

Despite the fact that he plays for the Dodgers, an act of heroism by Freddie Freeman, at least to me, is still kind of a big middle finger to MLB, their media machine and all Dodgers fans that overlook his own greatness because they’re all too busy drooling over Ohtani or Yamamoto or even Roki for no other reason than that they’re shiny Japanese imports.

Lest everyone forgets, Freddie, and Mookie Betts, were guys who had their own championship rings before last year, and knew how to win without a $1B payroll and malleable management to make a cultural shift to cater to players, and it’s not a far stretch to say that without their leadership and guidance, they wouldn’t have won last year, where Ohtani had to be carried across the finish line by Freddie Freeman who went gangbusters in mauling the Yankees all series long.

I still want the Dodgers to lose in the end, which doesn’t really seem like a likely possibility, but I’m at peace if Freddie Freeman snaps out of his general postseason underperformance, and it subsequently helps the Dodgers win, because like I said, it’s impossible for me to be mad about anything that Freddie Freeman does, because he’s just that good of a human being that even him playing on the most reviled of teams doesn’t change my appreciation of him one bit.

Dad Brog (#157): the shittiest morning possible

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Full disclosure, I don’t write this with any sort of anger or festering rage about the morning that I had, but more with astonishment that such a morning could have been had that I have no other option than to write about it, primarily to one day be able to recall this to embarrass the ever-living snot out of my child.

But long story short, one of my kids absolutely pooped all over themselves this morning while sleeping, and naturally it was me who discovered it, me who had to deal with it, and me who had to clean everything up.

For real though, I wasn’t mad about it at all, because something like this happening, the first question was, and should be, is everything okay?  The answer was quickly discovered to be yes, but it was rather a child who was too afraid of monsters in the dark to get out of bed to take care of their bowels, probably compounded on top of being in a state of deep sleep, and instead just soiled their bed and slept in it.

Regardless, given the fact that on any given morning, cleaning up a ton of poop isn’t typically a part of the routine, I had to pivot and quickly resign myself to the fact that the morning was going to be delayed, and that the recovery of my child was priority.  I took them into my walk-in shower to use the flexible showerhead to give them a nice warm cleansing, got them dressed and started with breakfast before I had to go back upstairs to really survey the damage and get to work.

White people, would be quick to declare the sheets and comforter a complete loss at this point, but me, not being white, and knowing that I can rescue these things on account of the fact that I’m not a pussy and afraid to get children’s poop on my hands, took the soiled sheets also into the walk-in shower and gave them some good scrubs, and pretty much salvaged them.  I still need to give them a through spin through the washing machine, but by the day’s end, they should be ready to be back on my kid’s bed as if there was no Armageddon in the first place.

I coached my child that they should never be afraid to call out for me on the monitor in the middle of the night if they have to go potty, and that under no circumstances will I ever be mad at them for waking me up in the middle of the night to take care of business.  Quite the contrary, I would be super stoked and happy, and I mimicked the groggy, but rejoiceful reaction I would give them should they ever take my up on the offer, and hopefully they will in the future to avoid such similar mornings.

But good lord almighty, what a nightmare scenario of a morning to encounter.  I still feel like I can smell it in my brain to this very moment.  Truly a literal, top-3 shittiest mornings of all-time in my parenting career; and honestly I’m hard pressed to even recall two other poop nightmare mornings to round out a top-3, which means this might really have been the shittiest morning of all time, by default.

I look forward to this post circling back eventually on my On This Day plug-in, so I can troll remind them of the bullshit they put me through when they were but literal babies when they’re older, so they can really appreciate the kind of dad that I’m trying to be.