Underneath my yellow skin

Let’s talk more about health in general

Let’s talk more about health in general. Here is yesterday’s post filled with ranting and ravings about life in general. Despite my best intentions, I went off the rails as usual. Let me try to focus on the point I want to make. Which is that family dysfunction sucks. No, wait! That’s not the point I was trying to make. My point was that it’s hard to tackle health/diet without slipping back into thinking about the eating disordered thinking that my mother has exhibited all her life.

I’m trying to be healthier withouth becoming disordered. I have not been able to do this all my life, so what makes me thinkk that I can do it now?

I think it because I have fifteen years of Taiji under my belt. I think it because I still am thankful to my body for carrying me through my medical crisis–something I should not have survived. Here’s something that many people don’t know; it’s better to be ten pounds overweight than underweight if you suffer a medical crisis. I knew this before my own medical crisis, and it’s something I tell people whenever I can. I feel like a broken record, and most people don’t want to listen. It is so engrained in us that being fat is the worst thing in the world, many people can’t fathom that maybe it’s not true.

I remember several decades ago, I was listening to NPR (or MPR. I’m pretty sure it was NPR, though), and they had a doctor on. She was saying that as you got older, you should GAIN weight, not lose it. Partly for the reason I already said (it cushions your body if anything happens to it), but also for other reasons. Which I don’t quite remember. This reason, though, is the one that stuck in my head. That it’s better to gain weight as you get older to cushion your organs in case something really bad happens to them.

Anyway. I don’t like being fat. I am being truthful in saying that while I can still appreciate what my body has done for me, I don’t like how it looks. There are several reasons for that which I’m not going to get into at this moment. I’ve done it so many times in the past and that, while relevant, is not the point of this post.

I’m trying, yet again, to be healthier without falling into the trap of only carrying about being fat. I’m doing things like walking on the hour when I remember (as I mentioned yesterday). I’m trying to be more consistent with my fruits and veggies, and I think this is a good start.


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More talking about my health in general

In yesterday’s post, I was talking planning on talking about health in general, but I quickly derailed myself to talking about family dysfunction instead. It’s related to health, though, so  I don’t feel completely bad about it. Let’s face it–family dysfunction is baked into so many things, I could unpack it forever. I’m also still ignoring *waves at the world around me* everything because I have to figure out how to deal with it in a not rage-inducing way.

In yesterday’s post, my intent was to talk about eating more healthily and doing things to better my health in general. That’s not the way it went, but that was my intent. Instead, I went on a rant about how my mother made me feel like shit about my body from thet time of seven and sent me down a very dark and painful path because of her obsession with how the ideal girl/woman should look like.

It got so bad that after my last visit to Taiwan (gotta update my passport ASAP, just a side thought), I had to put my foot down and tell my mother that she could not mention my health ever  again. I had forbade her from talking about my weight at some point, which meant she just changed from talking about my weight to talking about my health–but she meant my weight.

How do I know? Well, first of all, I know her very well. Secondly, when I was in college and anorexic, my junior counselors called her in to talk to her about it. They did it out of good intentions, but it was not a good thing for them to do. Why? Because it embarrassed the hell out of her, and she gets nasty when she’s shown up. Not in the any typical way, but in underhanded, manipulative, guiltt-induucing ways.

I remember my mother sitting there with her face sour. I could tell she was upset–at me. Not for being anorexic and bulimic, but for making it look like she was a bad mother.

Did she have anything to say about me being anorexic and bulimic? No. Did she have any concern to show about my health? No. In fact, the only time she ever said anything about me when I was skinny was during my second dance with anorexia. She looked at me for several long seconds and then said, “Your waist is tinier than mine.” She said it with such hate and jealousy, I internally recoiled.

This is how I know that her concern abouut my health is bullshit. If she were really concerned about my health, she would be worried that my thighs didn’t touch, and I could not make it up a flight of stairs without gasping for breath. Do you want to know how distorted her thinking was on the subject? Before I went to college, I used to blast my boombox (yes, I’m that old) and dance on the living room floor for hours as my exercise. My mother once said, “Should you be doing that? I’m worried that the floor will collapse.”


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Let’s talk about health in general

Let’s talk about health in general. It’s the broader category under which martial arts fall, and  it’s not something I talk about much. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more, and I want to get in better shape.

This is tricky because I have a life-long history of eating disorders. It started when I wsa seven and my mother put me on my first diet. My cultural lineage is Taiwanese, and they are even worse with weight-based shaming than America (at least they were when my parents were children/young adults). In addition, my mother had a mother who was obsessed with girls being skinny and pretty–basically being decoration. Which was grimly ironic because my grandmother was nott like that at all. She was not decorative or just sitting around limply doing her womanly duty.

She was the first woman to graduate from a certain college in Japan (can’t remember which one), and she was the first woman to be the equivalent of a senator in her prefecture. Yes, she had eight children, but she didn’t like being home with them. In other words, she didn’t walk the walk when it came to her talking the talk.

By the way, this is the same with my mother. She has a litany of things she thinks a woman should be, but she doesn’t like any of them herself. When I was a kid,  Iused to think she was a bad cook. I didn’t really think too deeply about it until much later. Then I realized that she had the problem of a husband who refused to eat anything other than Taiwanese food (when he was actually home) and two kids who only ate American food. Preferably burgers and pizza.

My mother was into clean eating before it was a thing. She made my brother and I clean our plates and gave us the hoary old line, “There are starving kids in Africa.” It didn’t make sense to me, even at the time. That’s bad for them, but how is my eating or not eating my food going to help with that?

My mother was a mass of contradiction when it came to food. As an Asian mother, her impulse was to stuff us silly. But because of her body/food issues, that was followed up with her commenting on how fat I was. I’m not exaggerating. She told me when I was seven that I would be so pretty (ugh. That’s another dysfunction that she espoused since I was little–a girl was supposed to be decorative and pleasing to the eye. Especially the male eye) if I wasn’t fat.

At seven.

Let me tell you, that’s a guaranteed way to put someone down the path to an eating disorder or seven. I dealt with anorexia and bulimia in college, and then overeating/compulsive eating afterwards. I still deal with the lattar and–oh, the former went into my mid-twenties. I used my obsessive nature to be the best anorexic I could be (even though I did not phrase it that way), and I did it so well.


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My future in martial arts

I have more to say about martial arts. This is probably not a surprise as I tend to obsess over things–especially when I see something that spurs on my interest. Such as the demo. Or watching videos of my teacher’s teacher doing different forms. I wrote yesterday how my mind was blown by him doing the Cane Form with the saber. I included the video in yesterday’s post, and I’m going to include it again in this post. Why? Because I can and it’s fantastic.

I am going to try to thin kof weapons in a broader sense. I tend to be rigid in my thinking and a rules follower (unless I don’t see the point of the rule, and then, fuck the rules), so while I will strive to do the weapon forms well, I will also strive to think of ways to go outside the box.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about my teacher is that she is so good about being chill. The whole point of Taiji is to relax and be as lazy as possible. It’s about using minimal effort for maximum outcome.

In addition, my teacher does not want anyone to get hung up on being perfect. As she likes to say, you can make as many mistakes as you like. It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or if you’ve been doing it for decades. You are still allowed to make mistakes.

It’s through Taiji that I learned how to be not as perfiectionistic as I used to be. I’m not totally cured, but I’m much better than I was before.

In addition, as I said yesterday, my forms are decent. I can finally admit that. In context of her classmates and just on my own. My weapon forms are solid. And my teacher has actually said that she trusts me to choose whatever I want in weapons. That’s a big compliment. I think I am the only student of hers who is so into weapons. I have classmates who like them, but not to the extent that I do. I can’t think of any who know more than the Sword Form and maybe the Cane Form.

Skeaping of the Cane Form, I have shorn mine up, thankfully. My teacher’s teacher has a video of him doing it (well, at least the first row. I’m assuming he has the other rows, too), and I’m doing another polish up from watching his video.

That in tandem with using the saber to do the Cane Form has me feeling happy. I need it given the state of the world around me. There’s something about learning a new form (or an old form with a new weapon) that really takes the weight off my shoulders. i can get absorbed in it like nothing else, and I don’t have to think about anything else.


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Lunar New Year martial arts demo, part two

In yesterday’s post, I was talking about the Lunar New Year’s demo that my teacher’s teacher’s school had done for Lunar New Year. They do it every year, and I’ve attended more years than not in the past fifteen years. I particularly remember the one in 2020 because it was right before the pandemic hit–and it was in this demo that my teacher’s classmate did the Double Saber Form.

Side note: This classmate started roughly the same time I did, and she’s the one I always compare myself to. She might have started a bit earlier, but I’m pretty sure it’s roughly the same time. And she is so much further than I am in terms of forms learned. She loves the weapons as much as I do, so I have thought about asking if she teaches. I don’t think she does, and I don’t know if it would be weird for me to learn weapons from her.

I dok know that my teacher does not care about the weapons the way I do. She hid it well for many years, but when I saated taking a real interest in the weapons, she had to come clean that they were not her baliwick.

It was a relief to find out. Well, not a relief, but instructive. I loved the Sword Form, but did not love the Saber Form. I have come to respect it, but it’s not my favorite. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I came across a video of my teacher’s teacher doing the Cane Form…with a saber. It blew my fucking mind. Once I watched it, it made sense (I have included the video below), but it wasn’t something I would think of on my own.

This is one of my limitations–I don’t just think I can make up a form just because. Come to think of it, it’s mostly the male students who think they can do this–for better and for worse. My teacher had a student who decided to make up a…I want to say Sword Form(?) after a year or so of studying. And that he could teach a friend how to do the Sword Form. He did the Sword Form at the demo and it was…not great.

It’s that culturalization thing again. AFAB ppeople are taught to be modest and not show-offy. The trouble is that show-offy often means drawing any attention to oneself when people from on AFAB people doing it.


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Lunar New Year martial arts demo

Today (Sunday) was the day my teacher’s home school had their Lunar New Year demo. It was broken up into three parts–the Taiji section followed by the Xingyi chunk and lastly, Bagua. I was watching on Zoom.

The demo started with everyone who wanted to participate doing the first two sections of the Solo (Long) Form.. It is always interesting to watch a group of people do it because of course, no one is going to do it exactly the same. They only do the first two sections because the third section is longer than the first wo sections put together, and there ain’t no time for that. The audience, I mean–not the students. My teacher’s teacher has learned over time that people get really restless after two sections.

Yes, Taiji is about patience and being chill, but we’re still Americans under it all. What with the TikToks, the Instagrams, and all the other short forms of entertainment, no one is going to sit for nearly twenty minutes of very slow movements.

They did the Sword Form, and I was pleased to see that I would have been fine doing it with them. I know many of them have studied as long as I have if not longer. I have seen several of them at many of the demos.

I was drawn to one short guy with a mohawk because of how beautiful his form was. I thought it was a certain person I had seen do different weapons in past demos, and I knew he loved the weapons as much, nay, more than I did. He guest-taught for my teacher once about a decade ago, and I was so intimidated by his prowess that I flubbed up a simple sword movement in front of him. He was the kindest guy ever, but something about how good he was with the weapons flustered me.

I found out it was him because the next demo was him doing something he had designed himself. IHe was drawn to sheathing and unsheathing a katana. He asked his teacher (also my teacher’s teacher) about doing that with a Chinese sword, and his teacher said that he (the student) would obviously have to design one and do it for the next demo. Which he, the student, did.

And it was fucking incredible. He demonstrated with two other students, and I was instantly struck with how regal and lethal it looked. It’s not what I’m mainly interested in, but it was really cool. There’s one that is based on an escort mission, and I wanted to learn that one. They were not all Taiji sword movements, which made it even more interesting.

I love Taiji. I will always love Taiji. I am happy to be adding Bagua to it, and I could see adding other martial arts at some point as well. My teacher is currently learning XingYi (she demonstrated the Sword Form at the demo), which is based on animal movements.

Every time I watch the demo, I want to learn every weapon form I see. I started the Double Saber Form because one of my teacher’s classmates did it at the demo right before the pandemic hit. That really ignited my passion for weapons, and I just can’t get enough of them.


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Martial arts are my life

I have been studying Taiji for over fifteen years. Yesterday, I was writing about how I did some light sparring with my teacher in our last private lesson. And how much I loved it. I am still in the midst of realizing that I am not a newbie any longer nor someone who simply studies Taiji. In class today, everyone was on Zoom because it’s been snowing (yay! Three or so inches. It’s not much, but it’s sure pretty). The other three students who were in class are all newbies to novices. It’s interesting to see them for once because it reminds me of when I was a newbie.

It’s hard to know what you don’t know, of course. And I still have major issues with my form such as having my hands too high andnot bending my knees. I’ve had my teacher give me refinements because it’s hard for me to see what I’m doing wrong, obviously. I’m not looking at myself as I practice and even if I were, I wouldn’t necessarily see what was wrong. When you do the same thing over and over and over and over again, you don’t necessarily notice the flaws.

It’s similar to how when you’re editing your own writing, you may not see your mistakes. That’s why it’s always better to have someone else editing your work for you.

I don’t know why it is that me re-learning the Fan Form is what has made me realize that I was not a dilettante any longer. I think because I was no longer just floating from form to form, dreaming about what I would do next. Instead, I made a concerted effort to clean up the forms  I knew. For whatever reason, that took it from me practicing Taiji to me being serious about Taiji.

Yes, it took me sixteen or so years to get there. What can I say? I’m a slow learner. Actually, the issue is the opposite of that–I’m too quick a learner, so I take it for granted that I can learn things easily. When  I can’t, my mind rebels.

It doesn’t help that my upbringing is within the Taiwanese culture, which is very strict on good and bad (what is which and what the standard should be for good). It’s either an A+ or an F. There is no in between. I have tried to move beyond that, but it’s hard. I still feel like I’m failing at life for many reasons, and it’s something that I don’t know if I will ever escape completely.

My mother sometimes laments the fact that I don’t tell her anything. Well, that’s when she’s not dumping her problems on me–which, admittedly she’s doing every time she calls. About two decades ago, she blamed my therapst for putting a wedge between her (my mother) and me. she’s not wrong that my therapst helped me individuate, but she’s wrong in blaming my therapist or thinking it was a bad thing*.


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Martial arts saved my and gives me life

I am studiously ignoring waves ot the world around me, well, everything. Glances at news and shudders in rage, disgust, sadness, and anger. There is only so much I as an individual can do, and I am just done. I have never been a super partriot because that’s just not my style, and now, I’m really disdainful of America. Not just the president, but also the people who voted for him or did not vote at all. I am feeling fury like none other, not even the first time he was president.

That’s not the point of this post, though. If I start on that, I. Will. Never. Stop. And nobody wants that–not even me. Instead, I want to talk about something that makes me feel good–Taiji. And Bagua. I will note that my teacher had said about a month before the election (after Biden dropped out, whenever that was) that there was no way Harris was going to win. I thought she was being unnecssarily pessimistic, but as I told her in our private lesson (Thursday), she was spot on. She said she hated being right, and I agreed–but it was stil impressive.

Anyway. My goal in martial arts in this year was gonig to be learning new forms or teaching myself the left side of forms I already knew. I started by teaching myself the left side of the Fan Form, but then realized about halfway through that I wassn’t fudging some of the movements in the right side of the form. Like, badly.

Side note: We all do this in Taiji–fudging movements we don’t know. Why? Because it gets worse and worse over time if you don’t correct it. Now that I’ve been looking at videos of my teacher (and her teacher) doing different forms, I can see where I’ve gotten sloppy. I’m big on watching the videos now, especially since my memory suuuuuuucks. I can watch it and then immediately forget what I just saw. In fact, I can watch a clip three or four times in a row and still have to watch it once more.

I’m very happy with how I’m cleaning up my forms. I still have a few things to iron out with the Cane Form (my least-favorite form), but I’m feeling pretty good about the Fan Form (fast becoming one of my favorite forms). I’m still marveling at how much of the Fan Form I had fucked up the first time around. it’s a lot, by the way. I fucked up a lot. I’m not too hard on myself about it, though, because I was just recovering from my medical crisis so I’m astounded that I remembered any of it at all.


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Balatro–my final review, part seven

It this point, I’m just amused by my neverending review of Balatro (LocalThunk). We all kknow that I will write another post about Balatro at some point because that is how I do. In fact, I am going to write one now and give my completely arbitrary rating for this game. I explained my rating systnems in the last post, but I’ll briefly sum it up here once again.

I have two different systems. One is for FromSoft games and the other is for all other games. The lowest rating I’ve given a FromSoft game is a 9.0 for Sekiro, and the highest rating is a 9.75 for Elden Ring and Dark Souls III. I am not gonig to go into it again about why those two games are basically tied at the top for me.

On the other list, at the top is Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall). I would give it a 9.5 off the top of my head. Then Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games), which would be roughly the same. Maybe a 9.4 as NitW is the absolute pinnacle of non-FromSoft games to me. Spiritfarer is very close behind. Both of them made me crry buckets and think really hard about things. I platted the latter, but not the former because the former included a really difficult video game within the video game that was just no fun to play.

I’m grading Balatro in the non-FromSoft ranking system, of course, as it’s not a FromSoft game. It’s funny because before I started the grind, I probably would have given it a 9.3 or so. It’s really good and quite addictive. It has that ‘just one more run’ feel to it, and one run turns into hours. It’s such a good game.

I just…wish it could be a bit better. That’s not a knock on this game specifically beacuse you could say that about any game. Any game could be a bit better, really. Even Elden Ring, probably my favorite game in the world, I gave a 9.75. That’s just me–I will not give a game a 10. Nothing is perfect, and I know that most people use 10 to mean a game is as good as it can possibly be in relation to other games, but that’s not how I see it. To me a 10 is inattainable, and I’m fine with that.

Back to Balatro. I just got Big Hands (the achievement for which you have to get 80 cards in your deck), and it felt very hollow. Why? Because it was all down to chance. I got the Magic Trick voucher early on which allowed me to buy playing cards in the shop. Then, I got the Rocketjoker that gives you a dollar at the end of every round, and it increases by two dollars after beating every boss. Plus, I had Midas Mask which makes every face card gold, and if you hold them in your hand at the end of the round, each one gives you three bucks.


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Balatro–my final review, part six

Yes, I’m back with part five of my ‘final’ review of Balatro (LocalThunk). Today, I have been grinding out the Big Hands achievement (getting 80 cards in a deck), and I haven’t geotten close. Well, I have gotten maybe 70 once? There are not as many useful tips when I Google as there were for Tiny Hands, the last achievement I grinded/ground out.

By now, I’m decent enough at the game that I had a vague idea of what I needed to do. Adding 38 cards to the deck meant, once again, radically changing up my play (and the deck I would use to do it). Also, I had to be careful because I was looknig for the Hanged Man tarot card and the Immolation spectral card when I was going for Tiny Hands. I did not want either of these for my current achievement hunting, obviously. Both these cards got rid of cards (2 and 5 respectively), which would be counterproductive for my current purposes.

Instead, I was to eschew the tarot cards completely as none of them add cards to the deck. Instead, spectral cards are my best friend, and only the Ghost Deck gives you a realistic chance to get them because they have spectral deck packs and spectral cards can show up in the shop. There are no spectral cards that straight-up give you more cards. You have to destroy one card to get two enhanced aces, or three or four enhanced cards (depending on the spectral card).

The other meta is to hopefully find the DNA joker because that duplicates one card per round and either Blueprint or Brainstorm (copies the joker to the right and to the leftmost, respectively) to copy that one card. Or both! Then you get two cards. Of  course, if you’re using your Blueprint and/or Brainstorm to copy a card, that means it’s not helping you win the hand. No, I’m not trying to win these runs, but I have to survive long enough to get the achievement.

The other other meta is to get really lucky and be able to buy the Magic Trick voucher in the shop. That allows playing cards to appear in the shop, which, obviously, means you can buy them. And they’re only a buck, so it’s usually pretty feasible to buy them. The upgraded version of Magic Trick can only be unlcoked if you buy 20 cards in the shop (doesn’t have to be in one run, fortunately). But you have to find Magic Trick on a run and then be able to last the run until you have the economy to buy the cards you need–and they show up.. There are playing card packs, too.


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