Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Relationships

My goals for 2026, part three

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Here we are in post three about what I want to do with my life in 2026.I have several goals, but there are three that I consider my priority. In yesterday’s post, I mostly wrote about Taiji and Bagua forms, of which there are several I want to teach myself. The goal for the year is to teach myself the Bagua Knives Form (with the deer horn knives), but in order to do that, I first have to teach myself the left side of the Swimming Dragon Form. Well, I don’t have to, but my teacher highly recommended it.

She told me there really wasn’t a Swimming Dragon Form with the deer horn knives, which made me sad. That’s really my ultimate goal in Bagua, and she said that basically, I would have to cerate my own. I’m up for it, but just not yet. Frist step is to teach myself the left side of the Swimming Dragon Form. I’m halfway done with that, and I should be able to finish it in a month or so. Or two. I want to be generous to myself so let’s say two.

My third goal is perhaps the hardest one of all. Well, that’s not true, but it’ll be difficult for different reasons.

3. I will find a queer/genderqueer Asian group, probably online.

I feel a lack of Asian people in my life. Asian American, to be more specific. And queer people. And genderqueer people. Ideally, I would like it to be all at the same time because it’s combining race, gender, and sexuality is a tricky triple combo. As with everything else in my life, I have to pare down what I’m looking for. If I was going to be unrealistic, I would add areligious to the mix, along with body positive, into martial arts, and black cats. In other words, people a lot like me. Oh! And autism and/or ADHD. Again, asking for all of that is a tall order, so I’m trimming it to gender, race, and sexual identity.

This will be hard because of my specific wants. It’s not just queer–it’s bisexual/polysexual/whatever you want to call it. In other words, not gay. I know that everyone thinks queer means gay, but it doesn’t. Bi erasure is real (or whatever you want to call it these days–bi, I mean. I’m not sold on it and never have been, but I can’t think of anything I like better. So for now, bi means people like me and people not like me. Said with a grumpy sigh), and it’s so fucking tired.

It’s the same with gender identity. I don’t mean nonbinary–I mean agender. They are different things, or at least they are to me. I don’t fluctuate in my gender like some people do. This is something that I have such a hard time explaining because I can’t make it make total sense in my own bran.


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More about my goals–and the Double Fan Form

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Ok. Let’s talk more about the Double Fan Form first. I wrote about it yesterday and how I’m struggling with it. By the way, I’m getting so engrossed with it, I’m spending up to half an hour on learning it–and we’re talking about a new posture or two at a time. In other words, it’s been ROUGH. I messaged Ian, saying I’m struggling with it. He asked if there were different things to do with each fan, which would give him trouble. That’s part of it, and today, I learned a posture that had the two fans facing the opposite ways and doing distinctly different things.

Even before that, though, the form was fucking with my brain. I was trying to figure out why that is, and I think it’s beacuse I have to hold the two fans in one hand for several postures. This is unlike the Double Saber Form in which you immediately separate the two sabers. You have one in each hand from the first posture after the bow, and you continue along in that fashion until the last posture.

With the fan form, you start with both fans in the left hand (this is common. You start with the weapon/s in the opposite of the dominant hand for the form). You transfer both to the right a few postures later. Then, a few postures later, you separate the two. One fan is facing forward and one is facing backwards. Of course, this means that you have to hold them the opposite way in the beginning when they are in one hand. I have tried it the way it makes sense to my brain (with the front sides facing out), but that doesn’t quite line up with where I need them to be by the time I separate the fans.

Side note: I was just browsing fans. Yes, I just bought a new set, but I’m curious as to what is out there. One thing that is guaranteed to make me NOT buy from a seller is them not including the dimensions of the weapon. I have seen this far too often, especially with the fans, and it’s simply not acceptable. I think one reason it happens so much with the fans is because fans are in that gray area between weapon and toy. Well, not toy, exactly, but accessory. Plus, you can do dances with them. So it’s not strictly a weapon. Still. If you are selling a fan as a Taiji weapon, then you MUST include the length. That’s not negotiable, and it boggles my mind that sellers would not automatically include that information.

I was looking at a pack of ‘large’ fans, and I could not find the size in the description anywhere. Granted, I did not peruse it carefully, but it did not show up in the description, which is where I would expect it to be. I get all my martial art equipment from Kungfu Direct, but their fan selection is limited. I wanted to see what else was out there.

Back to the Double Fan Form. I have watched half-a-dozen versions of the official Yang-style Double Fan Form (that’s what I’ve dubbed it in my head), and they are the same with small flair/tweaks. I have decided that this will be the first one I learn and that it’s good for me to persevere with it.


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Leap into the unknown

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One of the things I wanted to do in the new year (which is now a quarter done) is to widen my circle of, not friends, exactly, but acquaintances/cohorts/etc. Oh, yesterday’s post was a shambling mess. Expect more of the same today. I have not done this. Instead, I have just keenly felt more and more alone. I know my brain is broken (and my depression is getting worse) because I feel like no one loves me. And I objectively know this is not true. Yet, my brain weasels are whispering that maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t come back from dying (twice!).

By the way, I find it hilarious to say it that way. That I had died (twice!) with twice in parenths and an exclamation point following it. I can recite all the reasons why I know it’s not true (there are at least a half-dozen people whom I know love me and about a dozen more who would be sad if I were to disappear. That’s not many, but it’s still some.

And yet. I feel sad and lonely. It’s partly because I can’t comfortably drive. Not that I went out that much even before my medical crisis. But it’s hard not to look back and think that I should be further than I am now. Before I ended up in the hospital, things were opening up after the haze of the pandemic. I got my first vax and optimistically thought that I could go out and do things. Within the first month or two of going out, I caught walking (non-COVID-related pneumonia) and ended up in the hospital. That’s the short version.

Once the vax was available, I had high hopes. Right before the pandemic hit, I wanted to start dating. Or rather, I wanted to find a fuck buddy. Netflix and chill without the Netflix. I looked at my OKCupid profile, intending to clean it up and maybe  get my bro to take new pics of me. And then I had my medical crisis and that took care of that.

A little over a year ago, I started thinking about it again. Then I had a personal tragedy (which I’m still not over yet), and I put it on the backburner yet again. While I would love to find someone to have sex with, it’s not at the top of my list of thinghs to do. I can tell because I’m not doing anything to find someone. There are many reasons for that, but the main one is that while I would like to have sex again, I don’t w ant to go through all the shit to find someone. I have other things that are more important to me.

One is to find a community of other genderqueer Asian queers, as I mentioned yesterday. One of my problems is that I tend to start adding all the things I want, which are basically people like me. Narcissistic? Yes. But also, it’s because I feel so unseen. This is putting aside the medical crisis because there is literally no one else w ho has gone thorugh what I have. People like to say there are no unique experiences, but this is simply not true.


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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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