well, alright

daniel is 25 and lives in nyc. he loves podcasts and tv and nights alone in the kitchen listening to and watching those things youtube instagram

[danielkanhai]

i draw cartoons, feel free to follow over on instagram for more. 

[danielkanhai]

this is what people mean when they talk about cryptocurrency, right?

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[danielkanhai]

tfw you get back from seeing the shape of water. 

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[danielkanhai]

“I got the idea after noticing dogs look kind of like long balloons all twisted up.”

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[danielkanhai]

“If all this stuff is here because the basement is farther away than the dungeon, then maybe we should just make THAT the dungeon.”

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[danielkanhai]

if you join a line at the grocery store and it’s taking a super long time and then you leave that line to join another one that you think is going to go faster after someone has already gotten behind you, you now have to check out and leave the store before that person. if they check out first, or even see you still in the store after they’re rung up, you will have to put down all of your groceries and walk into the ocean. if you try to be smart and switch a line and it backfires that tremendously, you will not go onto the afterlife. that is the price of your hubris.

[danielkanhai]

i hate when apps know that i’m screenshotting something. when i screenshot something, that’s me acting outside your realm of understanding, app. i am beyond what you consider the observable universe. you’re not supposed to perceive me. we don’t know when god screenshots the earth. we don’t know when he’s like, “okay i’m just gonna take a pic in case i ever want to add dinosaurs back to something later and don’t remember how.” and if we did, we wouldn’t act all smug about it like, “hey, you wanna share that post? you could just click here to share it.” no, man. you didn’t catch me. i screenshotted this for my own reasons. what’s next? i can’t take a photo of my computer screen with my phone out of laziness without being shamed by the printer i don’t own?

[danielkanhai]

i bought health insurance recently. the only health insurance i can afford just barely qualifies as a plan. like it’s a thing that, when held up next to the legal definition of “health insurance,” checks all the boxes. it can be technically considered insurance on my health. no one could say under oath that i do not have health insurance. 

and that’s the only reason i bought it. they make not having it feel so criminal, so dastardly. they fine you for being uninsured. i didn’t buy health insurance, i’m paying protection fees to the government so they don’t come into my house and take me away in the middle of the night. it’s lamb blood i’m smearing on my apartment door so the angel of death doesn’t wipe out my joke of a savings account. my health insurance is like a document i bought down at the docks from a guy with a code name in a dark alley. 

“you are now david fischer, a 32 year old architect from tempe, arizona. this document will allow you to pass normally, but you must never use it! lest you raise the suspicion of the authorities! for you see, the real david fischer perished in a building collapse 24 years ago. guy had great teeth, it’s how they identified him. also, you’re technically married to a 58 year old woman in flagstaff now.”

normally when you buy things you shop around, you know? i do comparative shopping when i’m buying a damn travel toothbrush. no such luck with something as mundane as the thing that will determine whether or not you’re invisible to doctors. you’re kind of boxed in. weighing the pros and cons of the plans in my price range was like that meme you see online with the triangle that’s like, “pick two” and then the three options are like, “hot, smart, rich.” it was like anticipating the ironic shitty twist a genie’ll try and put on your wish. 

this plan let’s you see a doctor three times a year, but he texts everything you tell him to your ex and current crush. this plan’s only doctor is completely free and provides any service or referral you could want, but he lives on the tallest mountain and is racist. this plan is pretty chill, but they’ll only help you out after you spend a few thousand dollars out-of-pocket first, just to see if you have money i guess? this plan straight up sucks ass, but check out their cute millenial app, it comes with a pedometer! 

i was looking at this plan that offered you like, a box of bandaids delivered to your old work every 10 years or some dumb bullshit and one of their perks was being able to text a doctor at any time. 

which, first of all, no. no real doctor is sitting around looking at their phone like, “i’m glad i went to medical school so this 26 year old could dm me a pic of a mole he thinks is cancer at 2am. really wish there were more doctor related emojis, ‘syringe filled with blood’ is kind of situational.” you just gave smarter child a link to web md.

the worst part is that the plans for the uber rich are on the same market place so you can see all the stuff that could save your life that you could never afford. “ambulance drivers take hidden access tunnels to hospital. we only use blood from gold medal olympians.” i swear on one of the expensive plans one of the things covered was “the secret cure.”

the plan i ended up getting does have some rule about only being able to visit a doctor a certain number of times in a year. i probably have to be careful, i’m sure if i was in the area and i made eye contact with him crossing the street that would count as a visit. i have a dream about him and that’s visit number two. here’s to hoping i never get any less healthy.

[danielkanhai]

when i was a kid i’d hear about people doing their taxes on tv and stuff and i was always really nervous about having to do them myself as an adult. like you’d always see people all stressed out with envelopes of receipts and i’d be like, “there’s no way they’d send you to jail for not saving those.” now i’m an adult and i do my taxes and it’s easy as shit. like they spell it out for you step by step. granted, i have websites to walk me through it. my only conclusion is that i outlived the difficulty of taxes. like i skipped over a whole time period where doing your taxes was a hard thing to do, and landed safely in a world where other people figured it out for me in the simplest way. and that’s not my fault, i was just a kid! what am i gonna do? not use all the technology mankind has made available to me?

now i just have to do that for everything i find daunting in life. just ignore it and hope i don’t have to deal with it until there’s a very simple process for solving it right in front of me. owning property? i’ll wait until it’s like using a vending machine. writing a will? i think there’s already an app for that. getting health insurance? nope, didn’t luck out with that. the world had like two and a half decades to cure all diseases and make it all affordable before i needed it and everything’s still a mess. there are 8 year olds alive right now who have no idea what health insurance is, but by the time they’re in their mid 20s they won’t even need to know. not because we’ll have like, super cure-all affordable vaccines, but because your only health insurance in the vast expanse of the post apocalyptic wasteland is a gun, fire, and gasoline.   

[danielkanhai]

tracking packages makes me feel at ease and productive. like, hey i copy and pasted some numbers into a thing and now i know there’s a box chilling in lebanon, ohio, and it got there at 4:30am. out of my hands, bud! i was sleeping then!

i need a placebo tracking number. just some number that generates a random time and city. something to keep me busy when i’m trying to fill the void that is 90% of my waking life. whenever i feel anxious i’m just like, “’9:22pm: processed, hebron, kentucky.’ ooh yeah, that hits the spot.” 

[danielkanhai]

364 days of the year: very aware of failings in life. 

december 31st: extremely aware of failings in life, there’s a shrimp ring, and kathy griffin is here.

[danielkanhai]

i’m home in orlando for the holidays and i’m on instagram looking up people i went to high school with. it feels weird, like, instagram didn’t exist when i was in high school, and i don’t keep in touch with anyone i knew there, so this is like looking into some weird parallel universe where life just...kept going. just being somewhere where i grew up and having smartphone feels like time travelling. like it feels kind of illegal. like i’m going to go online while pumping gas and tear a hole in space. 

anyways follow me on instagram @danieltkanhai to see the time i was on the news for being friends with a deer. check out what kind of hand soap i use. watch me watch frasier in a taxi. wow this became an ad for my instagram.

[danielkanhai]

i’m not good with money. i’m kind of good with money. i’m good enough with money to know when i’m being bad with money and feel immense guilt over it. like i pay all my bills on time and then i’m free to torture myself over every dollar i have left that i should be saving. it’s hard to tell when you’re wasting money though. like if i buy a sandwich, that’s kind of a waste of money because i technically could have bought the ingredients to make several awful, bad tasting sandwiches, but on the flip side, if i don’t eat, i’ll die. so it’s like this morally gray area. on a scale of importance how close do i put “being alive” and “being happy”? pretty close. suddenly checking both those boxes for 8 bucks seems like a steal.

i bought this jacket that was 60 dollars, but it was on sale for 42. when it came, it was too small, so i had to send it back. i still wanted the jacket, but when i reordered the sale had ended. there was another sale on, for not as much, that brought it down to 52 dollars. so at that point i was out 94 dollars for a jacket i didn’t even have. side note: i had to really talk myself out of just keeping the too-small jacket. like i don’t really order clothing online and, man, you gotta swallow some pride to be like, “look, i read the thing about how this is ‘european cut’ and chose to ignore it. this all on me. i am not european cut, i understand if wearing this tiny coat for an entire winter is my punishment.”

anyways i sent the jacket back and eventually got the replacement. it fit, so i just kind of carried on with my brand new european-cut-for-an-american life. 

today, like, weeks later, i got an email saying the jacket store guys got the too-small jacket and i’d be credited for the original 42 dollars within 7-10 business days.

and i’m so dumb all of a sudden i’m acting like i just got 42 dollars. like, no, idiot. you spent 52 dollars weirdly over the course of a month and a half. you don’t even have the credit yet. this isn’t new money. this is the ghostly wail of moneys past. but i’m still sitting there like, “look, i already processed that money being gone. like i dealt with the loss. how can you tell me that’s the same money as back then? i’m not the same person.”

[danielkanhai]

my mom is really into korean dramas right now. she’s marathoning a whole series, but she’ll like, get up and go make something to eat or like, grade a bunch of papers at the same time. and i’m sitting there watching her like, “lady, you don’t speak korean. i know you think you do, because i’ve also made the mistake of trying to eat a bowl of cereal while watching hunter x hunter. you have to focus.” but then she’ll somehow know exactly what’s going on. so like, either she does speak korean, or the stories are super simple, or she knows what’s going on in the same way i know what’s going on when i watch an episode of game of thrones. like i fully understand what’s happening to one or two characters, but then i don’t really know the whole deal of another and just smile and nod and hope there’s no major crossover to the story line i actually can follow because it’s only an episode or two old.

[danielkanhai]

i’ve been alone in the apartment for a few days and there was this fly i was trying to kill. this morning i was chasing it around, and, well i have a very small apartment, so when i say i was “chasing” it i mean i was making sharp turns trying to get it with cockroach spray. i don’t have any fly spray, but i’m convinced cockroach spray is the same formula, just with a different spray nozzle. fly spray is a light mist, like a cloud the fly gets caught in. cockroach spray is more like a silly string kind of laser so you can hit them from a distance. it’s hard trying to use one for the other. it’s almost like they knew what they were doing down at the lab the day they came up with the stuff.

this fly kept landing on my stove and hovering around my radiator. like it thinks i’m going to spray flammable oil, because that’s pretty much what the poison is, it’s like oil that fucks up their wings and shit, all over my stove top and then light my whole place on fire the next time i try and be fancy and use conventional heating instructions on my can of chef boyardee ravioli. like it takes a lot of nerve to do that to me. to stand right there and try and get me to sabotage my whole life.

anyways i have a fly strip too, which i’ve talked about before because i’m glamorous, and right after i got dressed i came out i saw it on there, trapped. and i felt bad for it because it was still moving around like it had no clue what was going on. i actually felt bad for this fly. so i sprayed it point blank on the strip. will spraying my fly strip with roach poison ruin its effectiveness? i don’t know, but right after i did it i saw another fly. a second fly. that always gets me, when there are two of them, because they fuck and make babies. even if they don’t like each other i bet. just to spite me. two flies who hate each other start a family just to annoy me. i don’t know where it goes on, but knowing two flies are going at it somewhere in my apartment drives me insane. 

i think i’m being ghosted by this school i applied to. i didn’t want to go back to school, but i don’t know what i’m doing. i’m really directionless right now. i’m trying to extend my stay in young adulthood for as long as possible. just in the middle of the ocean jumping from driftwood to driftwood. i applied to this program, a one year degree, and i had to go through all the paces. i had to write a peppy application essay where i had to come across as this guy who’s got a biiig appetite for life and oh opportunities give me a major hard on and i always don’t feel defeated. i couldn’t check a box and then go, “i am not a bad guy, let me pay you to put a semblance of purpose back in my day-to-day. a little hope. put a few more watts in the light at the end of the tunnel there, for me.”

everything was going great, i met all the deadlines, my transcripts were good, here’s what i think screwed or is screwing me. i did a special program in high school that gave me college credits. i got an email from a woman at the school i applied to that said my college credit exemptions from high school weren’t valid unless i had records sent from my high school. i went online to the program’s website to order the documents directly. they asked for a login/password combo i was given in 2009 and of course had tattooed to my forearm for easy reference.

i had to call my high school. i had to pick up my phone, my phone that the technology for didn’t even exist when i was in high school, and i had to call them. it was like calling another dimension. it was like trying to find my way back to oz from kansas without the help of a tornado. the line was all static-y and shit like i was breaking the space-time continuum by even attempting it. i don’t want to even imagine what my high school is like. all the metal picnic tables are all probably new and some weird color. there’s probably some new ugly mural or something, i don’t know.

i had to talk to a man and explain to him that almost eight years ago, before he even started working at the school, there was a woman who had his job whose name has been lost to the annals of time. this woman ran a program that a little boy was in, and that little boy was now a little older boy who needed evidence that it all really even happened. the program was european and the boy had to get codes for an online portal so he could have some server farm in fucking sweden or something send his dusty ass decade old latin scores across the atlantic. somehow this took three weeks and probably lost the boy his spot and the 75 dollars it cost to apply.

you know the funny thing is that when i called the guy and took the 15 minutes to explain who i was he asked me if i needed the documents for grad school. i panicked because i didn’t want to disappoint this stranger over the phone who i’d never meet, so i said yeah dude of course. he then invited me to come speak to the students at my old high school to show them all that they could accomplish by being in the program. i was like, “buddy, i know you think i’m a new york hot shot because i just told you i’m a new york hot shot, but i’m calling you in secret from the back stockroom of my depressing retail job and if i ever came to speak to your students they would lose all hope and quit school altogether and probably bully me because high schoolers in 2016 are fucking intense and scary to me.

[danielkanhai]

been playing pokemon sun on my youtube channel which you should subscribe to. 20 years ago i would have understood one thing about that sentence.