Tag: different | A Banana Peeled

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Something positive for a change

Posted on February 2, 2022 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

For most of my life, I’ve defined myself mostly by what I am not. I am not normal. I am not like other people. I am not feminine in that I don’t care about fashion, hair, or makeup. Though since the hospital, I’ve been having more fun with my hair. I did it in Chun-Li buns at first, minus the turkey leg cups on top. That was because I had a sore on the back of my head from lying in bed for two weeks and wearing my hear in my usual high bun. It’s cute as fuck and it doesn’t tangle my hair as quickly as before.

Before the hospital stay, I hated the way I looked. I avoided pictures and didn’t look in mirrors unless it was strictly necessary. I hated how fat I was and I’ve always felt I was ugly. Well, until a few years before the medical trauma, at any rate. I’ve had a lot of negative experiences in my life concerning bodily autonomy that made me have body issues across the board. Taiji made me more appreciative of my body and what it could do. It didn’t mean I loved it, but I didn’t hate it any longer.

Then, the medical trauma. I’ve spoken at length as to how being in the hospital really cured me of my body issues. I had teams of nurses and aides looking after me, which included literally wiping my ass after I took a shit. And I didn’t always make it to the bathroom. Before I could actually go to the bathroom, I just shit in my pull-ups and they changed them for me. Mostly women, but some men and maybe some people who identified as nonbinary. They all treated me with compassion and respect, like I was a human being worthy of being treated with dignity. There was one man who was brisk and didn’t show much emotion, but it wasn’t as if he had disdain for me. He just didn’t care for that part of the job, for which I couldn’t really blame him. He was professional about it and good at it, so I didn’t mind. He didn’t make me feel like I was a burden or that he found it distasteful; he just seemed like he’d prefer to be doing something else. Which, honestly, I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to wipe someone else’s ass, either, which is one reason I never wanted children.

Magic? No, Dvorak!

Posted on October 26, 2017 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Today is normally the day I talk about politics, but I’m worn out beyond belief. I can’t take the daily indignation of having the overweening, narcissistic, ignorant, stupid, vain, soulless two-year old as president, and every time I think he can’t get any lower, he does. This thing with the military widow…it doesn’t surprise me, but it disgusts me to my core. I don’t expect better from him, but it’s hard to grasp that even he is this cowardly and venal. He sucks. His people suck. And, irrationally, I LOATHE the Huckabees more than any of this sorry lot. I saw Mike tweet about being in Hawaii and looking for Obama’s birth certificate, and goddamn, I wanted to punch him in the throat. He’s not objectively worse than all the other clowns in this circus, but ever since he ran for president, he’s really gotten on my last nerve. And, his daughter? I hate her. A lot.

Anyhoo, I don’t want to talk about that today or anything serious, so I’m going to write about something that not many people know about me. Many moons ago, my brother was telling me about a typing system that he’d heard of because…well, I don’t remember why, but I was probably complaining about how stupid the QWERTY system was. It’s so unintuitive, and the layout doesn’t make sense. My belief is that it was made that way for the typewriter so that hitting the more common letters (such as t-h-e) in rapid succession wouldn’t get the keys stuck. I just Googled it, and it’s apparently true. Anyway, my brother told me about Dvorak, which endeavors to make typing more natural by putting letters you use in groups closer to each other and by putting the most common letters (such as all the vowels) on the home row. The theory is that this would cut down on typing time, and I decided to give it a try.

It was hell at first, let me tell you. Within a week of learning Dvorak, I had forgotten QWERTY–the latter was that unintuitive to me. And yet, I hadn’t gotten good at Dvorak yet and was hovering around 30 wpm. With QWERTY, I probably typed around 80 wpm, which isn’t bad, but it’s certainly not great. I remember taking typing tests in high school and only doing well because I memorized the sentences and looked at the keyboard. There were certain letters that I never could get a hang of, such as z, x, and q. Once I tried Dvorak, it was like coming home. It immediately felt good. Vowels are on the left-hand home row, and t-h are next to each other on the home row on the right-hand side. the period and the comma are on the top row, left side, which makes much more sense to me.