Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Relationships

Random musings, part deux

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I was talking about dating in yesterday’s post. Kind of. As with everything in my life, it’s much more complicated than just do I want to date or not? Because yes, I do, but also, no, I do not. Or rather, I do, but I’m not sure I want to go through all the pain and angst to do it.

This is how my brain works. Basic thought: I want to date/have sex.  Tandem thought: I do not want to have anything to do with Trump supporters. Tertiary thought: I hope they all suffer from whatever the next four years bring. Quaternary thought: Shit. That means people I love will probably suffer as much if not more. Then my brain is off to the races, and I’m no longer thinking about dating.

It’s because I’m probably neurodivergent. I have not had that tested and/or confirmed, but at my ripe old age of 53, I am fairly certain I have one kind of neurodivergency, if not more. It’s been a relief to realize that because it means that my brain isn’t broken the way I have always thought it was.

I could go deeper into the weeds, but I shall not. I want to get back to dating.

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I used to do the personals for dating. At the time, the biggest ones pused were Plenty of Fish and Craigslist. Both of which were like dating in the Wild West. No quality control, no options other than what was on the front page, and just a bunch of ugh. It was discouraging because as soon as I said I was Asian, that was all the responders focused on. This was in the category of W4M, which was what I was looking for at the time. Well, I also had an ad in the W4W, but I did not get any answers for that ad.  I don’t want to get into why I think that is.

I cannot tell you how many guys told me how much they loooooved Asian woman and sent me dick pics, even though I was very explicit about not wanting either. Worse, at that time, most of them said they loved ‘Oriental girls’, which was a sure way of making sure you would never get a piece of this ass.

That was a quarter of a century ago. I am even more strident about what I want and don’t want now. No straight men, especially white men. Does that cut out a huge portion of potential dates? Yup. Do I care? Nope.


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Random musings for the hell of it

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Checking in with my feelings.

*Several seconds of internal checking*

Yep, still furious. And with the news as to who Trump is going to appoint when he’s president, scared as fuck. Again, not necessarily for myself as I have options, but for all the people who will be hurt by the upcoming administration.

I don’t want to talk about that, thoughh, because I don’t need that agitas in my heart right now. I want to talk about something related, though, and that’s what I plan to do if I start to date again. It’s tangentially related because there is a bit of politics in it, but it’s more about what I want for my future. If there is a future.

My brother was just here, and we talked at length about what the fuck is wrong with America right now. Or rather, in general. I don’t want to get into it, but we’re pretty much on the same page.

Back to the point at hand. I don’t know if I want to keep living in this country. I know that’s a very privileged point of view, but it’s painful to live in a country that hates me. I mean, I’ve been doing it my whole life, but this election made it painfully clear how hated I am. Not me in particluar, maybe, but people of my ilk.

The sad thing is that if you talked to many of the people who voted for Trump, I’m sure they’d say that they voted for him despite his repugnant stances (suuuuuuuure) and that they voted for him because of his business acumen (what??). The thing is, though, that the fact that they could brush off the repugnant viewpoints says a lot about them. They don’t think they’ll be affected by his hate, but they will. Trump doesn’t care about any of them. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. Hell, I would say he doesn’t actually care about himself, either.

Anyway. I am not here to talk about that directly. I’m here to talk about dating/sexing. I am not sure I want to do the former, but I’m pretty sure I want to do the latter. As I’ve said in recent posts, though, I do not want to hook up with cishet dudes, specifically cishet white dudes. They are the reason we are in this mess, and I have no desire to weed out the good ones from the get-the-fuck-away-from me ones. I just don’t.


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Let’s talk about labels, shall we?

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I was reading an advice column for queer people, and I have to admit, I rolled my eyes a bit at all the labels the person applied to themself. Yes, I know we need heuristics in order to talk with each other (and, yes, heuristics is the word for the week. I’m seeing how many times I can cram it into my posts this week. Deal), but at least for me, there’s a limit as to how useful they are. Also, the more granular we get, the less useful the labels/groupings become.

What do I mean by that? I’ll use myself as an example as related to sexual identity. Let’s say that I identify as queer. That’s pretty broad and, sadly, has come to mean gay. I’ve fought against it for twenty years, but now, I’ve just accepted it. I don’t make the rules, but I have to follow them, begrudgingly, to a certain extent. I still call myself queer, but I have to clarify that I don’t mean gay.

Thirty years ago, I discovered that I was attracted to men and women. Yes, those two categories was what we talked about back in the day. I went through all the different available labels of the day (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual) and decided with great reluctance that bisexual would do. I wasn’t happy about it, mind, but it was the best of the worst. Which is pretty much how I feel about most labels. The least worst rather than the best.

Then, we have to talk about sex v. love. I can sex with just about anyone I’m attracted to (or not, as it turns out. I would not suggest it, but it is possible). Sex is easy. I’m really good at that. When it comes to sex, I would say that I’m aro in that I can easily hook up without romantic feelings. In fact, I prefer that because sex is much less messy than romance. And because I have enough mental health issues that I don’t want to have a romantic relationship. Romance brings out the worst in me, and I don’t want it enough to fight that particular battle.

I explained it to my friends is this fashion. I love being alone. It’s my preferred state of being. Well, I wish Shadow was still with me, but beyond that, I don’t want a human being in my space 24/7. I have my issues; don’t we all? But I’m happy with myself overall. I like what I like, and I don’t like what I don’t like. I wear what I wear, and I eat what I eat. I mention that because there was a thread an Ask A Manager about clothing. A teacher wrote in and said that after she got home from work, she liked to change into her pajamas. Her husband, a CEO-type, came home later and while he would change into comfier clothes, he did not like that she wore her pajamas.


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Keeping it to myself, part three

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I want to be clear. When I talk about knowing I’m intelligent and wishing I could mention it without being a jerk, I don’t mean I want to be able to go around bleating about it willy-nilly. Just when it has relevance and in a thoughtful way. It’s not as if I want to rub everyone’s face into the fact that I’m soooooo smart. But, I don’t understand why it’s verboten to talk about it–or being empathetic. Here is the post from yesterday.

I’ve said this several times, and maybe it’s apocryphal at this point. I am a huge Poirot fan (which is not apocryphal). He is a pompuous, arrogant Belgian (NOT French) man who is not averse to tooting his own horn. In one of the novels, he is saying how great he is while Captain Hastings is dying in very British embarrasment next to him. Hastings says something about how Poirot should not say tihngs like that. Poirot says (paraphrasing), “If I met someone else with the abilities that I have, I would be impressed and say how great they are. Why should I hide it when it’s me?”

Again, that’s paraphrasing and I’m no longer sure it’s something I’ve actually read. Meaning, it could be something I have retconned into existence. But it’s something that Poirot would say, so I stand biy it. Meaning, he had no qualms about talking of his intelligence, though he preferred when Hastings bigged him up rather than when he had to do it himself. What else was a lapdog for? (He’s said things similar to that, too.)

I thought about that long and hard because I was raised to believe that saying anything positive about yourself was not only verboten, but blasphemous and rude. It’s Taiwanese culture in general, but especially for women/girls. Add to that the deeply misogynistic church we belonged to, and, well, it took forever before I could see anything positive about myself, let alone say it out loud.

I am better about it now. Dying (twice) really helped with that. It stripped away a lot of the bullshit that I had grown up with. Unfortunately, some of it has come back because I still live in this world and not some ideal one. But, I know my worth now. I know that  I have worth, which is something I could not have said before my medical crisis. Not with any confidence, anyway. When I came back from the dead (twice), it was as if all the filters had been stripped away.


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Keeping it to myself, part two

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I’m writing about being a weirdo and how I mask it on the daily. Here is yesterday’s post about how I pretty much keep my trap shut about, well, almost everything. In particular, about intelligence/empathy.

I was trying to tease out why people react so negatively about someone plainly saying they were intelligent/empathetic in a way they wouldn’t with someone who says they are very good at basketball/playing piano, etc. I was saying because the ability to do something is more concrete and measurable, but I think it’s also because…how do I say this?

OK. I’m just going to muse it out as I write.

Everyone has a brain of varying function. I don’t think that’s too controversial to say. But, almost everyone has mobility to a certain extent, too. We can talk about the latter (thoughtfully), but there doesn’t seem a way to talk about the former. I have seen people try to talk about their intelligence in forums while qualifying it every way left of Sunday, and people still jumped on them.

“Oh, you think you’re so smart, do you??”

“There’s someone smarter than you!”

“You’re not the smartest person in the room.”

I’m paraphrasing, but this was in response to someone carefully saying they were oftentimes ahead of other people in figuring things out (in a work blog). The commenter was judicious about what he was saying, extremely so. So many qualifiers about with the gist being that he worked twice as fast as other people and had to find ways to talk to them so they could understand what he was saying.

I nodded my head sympathetically as  Iwas reading. I thought he had put it very carefully and underplayed it as much as he could and still get his point across. But it wasn’t enough for most commenters and there were several angry comments chastizing him for saying anything at all. This was on a blog that skews progressive, which I think is actally part of the problem. There’s been a push in that demographic to downplay anything intelligence-related, including college. Again, I’m talking mostly about the Ask A Manager website. I’ve noticed in the last few years, there’s been an uptick in saying college is overrated. But, at the same time, everyone saying this has gone to college. I find the disconnect amusing, quite frankly.

The other one I find funny is how people will say very loudly that nepotism is bad! But, if they tell a colleague about their (the commenter’s) kid’s job search, that’s completely different! WHich falls into this post quite nicely, actually.


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Keeping it to myself

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The last time I talked to K, we had a very frank talk about things we didn’t say in the gen pop. Nothing nasty or gross, but things that we knew most people would not understand. I have told this story many times, but I’ll tell it again to make my point.

A few decades ago, I was really into buying things on eBay. I was also very into Alan Rickman. I bought a bunch of paraphernalia and media that featured him, and one of the items was a videotape (yes, it was that long ago) of him in a Broadway production. The description said that it was not pirated, which made me think it was a theater-approved videotape. When I received it, it was a personally-recorded video of the performance. I immediately contacted the seller and said that it was pirated. She wrote back saying it was a genuine copy because her husband had videotaped it.

Nowadays, I would have just notified eBay and pointed out that this was against their policies. Back then, I naively thought I could explain to her why she was wrong. We went back and forth a few times before she contacted eBay to complain about me. When I explained the situation, they immediately refunded my money. The seller gave me a negative rating so I did the same in return.

I mentioned it to my therapist because it really bothered me. I told her (my therapist) how I was frustrated because I could not find the right way to explain to the seller and was taken by surprise when I got the notification that she had reported me. My therapist said to me (paraphrasing), “Minna. You talk on a level six whereas others talk on a level two or three. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of need. You’re at the self-actualization level whereas they are worrying about physiological needs or safety.”

She also said to me at a separate time but on a related point, using the Senate as an example in relation to IQ. She said that the average IQ was 100. In the Senate, that means that half of them are over 100 and half are under. Her point was that I was in the top 5% or so, which meant that I was ‘above’ most people in the gen pop. That’s when she mentioned the second conclusion of the Dunning-Kruger study–that people who are much better at something than other people drastically underestimate how much better they are.


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My re-birthday is a day to celebrate!

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The day this is posted is my actual re-birthday. That is, the anniversary of the day of my medical crisis, September 3rd, 2021. Here is yesterday’s post leading up to this post. In yesterday’s post, I rambled about this and that as is my wont. Today, I want to list my goals for my fourth year in my rebirth. I’m going to try to stick to that in this post, but we’ll see how it goes.

1. Finally write my damn memoir/murder mystery/novel about my medical experience. I have loosely held this goal in my head ever since I got back home from the hospital. I have tried to write both a memoir and a murder mystery (several times), but I just could not do it. Not that I couldn’t write; I could do that. But…

How do I explain this? Before my medical crisis, I wrote several murder mysteries. The way I would do it is I would come up with an idea in my head. Within a day or so, I would have the perp, the victim, and the general circumstances surrounding the murder. In another couple days, I would have the chronological events (the important ones) lined out in my head. Then, I would start writing and not stop until I was done.

I know the conventional wisdom is to write an outline before you actually start writing. I don’t do that. Nor have I ever held to a writing schedule. Well, I mean, I have a rough one–I write at night. That’s a whole nother topic, how I come alive at night. I do my best writing after midnight. But I don’t set a certain time to write. I feel constricted when I do this. I write when I feel like writing, and that’s worked for me in the past.

Now, however, it’s time to admit that my own ways don’t work for me any longer. I did NaNoWriMo last year (I’ve done it every year for a decade or more. I think I might have skipped 2021 or done editing, but I don’t remember). I had a good idea for…2022 or 2023? Again, I don’t remember which one because my memory is shit now, but one of them. It was a rom-com/murder mystery mash-up.

I knew the perp, the victim, and the other main people. I knew how I wanted to have the meet-cute. I just couldn’t make it work. In part because I hate rom-coms. I probably should have taken that more into account when I started writing, but I thought that made it the perfect thing for me to try.


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Compersion, not competition, part three

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In the last post, I ended by musing about how I sort of fell into polyamorous relationships. It was never my idea, but I wasn’t against it, either. In fact, if I had not been indoctrinated into the belief that monogamy was the only way to be, I probably would have gotten into nonmonogamy/polyamory sooner.

Side note: My mother and I used to have arguments about tradition. She would mention a tratdition I happened to disagree with (which, to be fair, was most of them), and I would state my disagreement. I know I should have just kept my mouth shut and played along–or rather, I didn’t know at the time, but discovered it through years of painful failure. The best thing to do is just nod and smile. If I can’t make myself agree (which is really hard for me when I abjectly disagree with something), then at least I can keep silent.

Theoretically, anyway.

This is something I was told that neuroatypical people have difficult with–lying. The thing is, it’s complicated with me. I can lie with ease about things that don’t matter to me. And with the social lying like, “No, that dress doesn’t make your butt look big.” Anything I deem as inconsequential, I lie with impunity.

With my mother, I will lie (or avoid the truth as hard as I can) when it’s something I really don’t want to talk about because it’s painful to me. She makes everything about her (or my father), so ifd I’m already in pain, then I don’t want to have to caretake her along with dealing with my pain. In addition, she’s the type that if something happens to you, oh, it happened to her as well–but worse. I mentioned that I fell and hurt myself once, and she came back with how she fell and dislocated her shoulder!

I’m not doubting that it happened, but did she have to tell it at that very moment? To be charitable, my story of my fall might have spurred her own memory, but still. She did it all the time. If I had a cold, then she had to talk about the cold she recently had.

Related, tangentially, she mentioned that she thought she might have autism (after we talked about my brother having it). I thought it was yet another way she was trying to glom on to other people’s lifestories as her own, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me. Tangentially to the tangential, my brother once asked if I thought my mother was a good psychologist. I automatically said yes, but then walked it back. I thought about it more, and I had to come to the conclusion that no, she was not. At least not overall.


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Compersion, not competition, part two

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At the end of the last post, I was talking about how the reach of family dysfunction is long and tortured. One of the problems with abuse is that it gets passed along, generation by generation. It’s the same with societal norms, actually. What we consider normal is usually what has been codified into society over the centuries. It’s usually smart to look at who benefits and take it from there. In the case of monogamy, well, society would fall apart if people didn’t settle down and procreate right?

I’m being sarcastic, but that is what many people believe. Look at the current crop of Republicans. JD Vance is obsessed with ‘childless cat ladies’ and how they run the Democratic Party. My hdude. Brah.

*Insert heavy eyerolling here*

I’ve said it before, but I’m going to say it again. I fucking WISH we had that kind of power. Do you honestly think if minorities had the powers they have invested in us, we would let them be in any kind of power/ability to gain power? It’s so enraging that they have managed to convince their base that the ‘libtards’ as they like to call us are in total control.

Again, if this was the case, do you think we would have let Roe v. Wade be overturned? Do you think we would let them anywhere near the White House? Or us in general? Do you think we would let all these anti-trans laws pass without slapping them down?

For decades, I was confident that they wouldn’t actually overturn Roe v. Wade beacuse it’s their bread-and-butter. They used it to stump about how terrible liberals were and how they needed more money to defeat us and our dastardly plans. I still think that’s true, but what I didn’t account for was batshit bananapants Trump becoming president. And putting really radical rightwing justices on the Supreme Court. Two of them who truly believe the bullshit and didn’t just mouth it for political reasons.

I was right, though. The Republicans didn’t really want Roe v. Wade overturned, but they had no choice. They were feckless in going along with Trump, and they are reaping what they sowed. I think there was a time when they could have put down their foot and drawn a line in the sand. They could have said, no. This is too much. I know many of them don’t agree with Trump, but they are too much of cowards/too power-hungry to say so.

Now, they have to ride-or-die with him because the Republican Party is his party now. And if they want to stay in power, they have to put up with him. At least, that’s their thinking. I think if they made a stand, they could take back the party. They might lose a few election cycles (in other words, it could take a decade or more), but that’s their only chance at reclaiming their party.

Damn. I went all over the place, didn’t I?


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Compersion, not competition

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I’ve been thinking recently about life. I know that sounds boring and pretentious, but hear me out. It has to do with family dysfunction, but maybe not in a direct way. I’ve been talking about my parents and their beliefs in very rigid (and outdated) gender roles. Because of this, I grew up thinking that I had to get married and have children. That was the macro for my life. The micro was neverending ‘thou shalt nots’ that grew increasingly restrictive.

Thou shalt not climb trees.
Thou shall not sit with your legs spread.
Thou shall not laugh too loudly.
Thou shall not show any negative emotion.
Thou SHALL tend to everyone’s needs around you.
Thou SHALL take less than your share so that the boys/men around you can have more.
Thou shall not have any wants or needs, come to think of it.
Thou shall just smile prettily and do what you’ve been told.

In general, I was not supposed to be a human being with wants and needs.

In addition, my mother made it clear that I was to go to college, meet a nice boy, settle down, and have children. All by the time I was 26. The timeline wasn’t something she expressly said, but the rest of it? Well, maybe not Explicitly said, but very clearly underscored in everything she said and did. The college thing was very clear. It seems strange that she would be so insistent that a female child go to college because that is emphatically not a thing in Taiwanese society, but her mother was very forward thinking on education. She was the first woman to graduate from a certain college in Japan, which is surprising that she went at all.

People contain multitudes! Even rampant internalized sexism misogynists can be progressive in some ways. At any rate, my mother made me take all sorts of–you know what? Tiger mother is a thing, and it probably has something to do with the East Asian belief that you’re a piece of shit no matter what. That’s East Asian parenting for you. Never tell your kids that they are doing anything well. It’ll make their heads swell.

My motehr also believed that you should be doing something every minute of the day. I was a dreamer and preferred to read than to do an activity. I started dance classes at two when my mother noticed that I could do a somersault by one. I was too young for classes, but she somehow convinced the teachers to take me (probably with her unparalell ability to nag someone into submission). I started playing t-ball around four or five and taking piano lessons around seven (didn’t care for it). I’ve been playing ping-pong and tennis for most of my life. Don’t remember when I started playing either. Softball at seven, and then the cello at nine. I had quit the piano by that time, and my mother insisted I had to play an instrument. I liked the string instruments better than the brass ones, so this is how my brain went.


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