Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: future

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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New year is much like the old one

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I’ve been musing about the end of the year and the beginning of the next. In the last post I wrote about it, I was just more musing about life and movies. Now, as I’m writing this, it’s the actual first of the new year. There has been snow, which makes my cold heart happy. And it’s appreciable enough to be shoveled.

There is nothing like freshly-fallen snow to make it so wintery. It makes everything seem possible (ignoring the fact that it’ll be gray, slushy, and dirty within a few months), and it just makes me so happy.

I don’t make resolutions because I find them artificial and pressure-inducing. I do goals instead because while it may just be semantics, it’s more open-ended to me. Also, I see resolutions more as things you HAVE to do on the regular (like going to the gym three times a week*)

Part of the reason, I assume is because even though it’s a new year, we’re still the same people we were the day before. And the new year doesn’t mean circumstances change. It’s like when people ask how I feel on my birthday. Uh, the same? It’s just one day. I’m aging by the minute–not by the year.

I like to set goals because you work towards them and it’s not immediate. I don’t like gamefying things that aren’t actually games. I know other people do it (like visiting Duolingo every day), but it just stresses me out. It taps into my OCD traits in a very nasty way.

I have a perfectionism streak that tells me that if I don’t do something perfectly, I might as well not do it at all. That is from my mother, honestly. She is a Tiger Mom in some ways. If I do something with a ‘I have to do it every day’ mentality, then I can go to a very dark place.

It’s different with my Taiji/Bagua routine–which, by the way, I went back to doing it strictly today. For the last week, I’d been doing the stretches, but then freestyling it with my weapons. So I’m a bit achy getting back to the actual forms. It’s astounding how quickly the body goes, “NOPE.” But it’s also just as quick to get it back again. Yes, I was achy after doing the full routine, but I’m fine now.


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Life goals

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In yesterday’s post, I was talking about how when I was young, I didn’t see a future for me. I mean that both literally and figuratively. I did not see myself being alive or wanting to be alive. I honestly thought I’d be dead by my mother’s age (which at that time was 55, so I would have been 26. So, yeah, this was all of my youth and young adulthood). No one asked what I wanted to do with my life, but if they had,  I would not have had an answer? Want? As if I had a choice?

I never felt I did. My mother was not a Tiger Mom in the traditional sense of the word (constantly pushing me to be the best and putting me down if I wasn’t), but she did expect me to be busy all the time. And, yes, she did expect me to excel at everything, but she wasn’t pushy about it. It’s hard to explain the difference. She didn’t put me down; she just didn’t accept when I got less than perfect. It wasn’t even disappointment, really. If I got a B+ for example, she asked why it wasn’t an A.

She put me in dance when I was two; piano when I was six or seven; T-ball around the same age and then softball; and cello when I was eight or nine. We also played tennis, ping-pong, and volleyball. My brother played five or six different instruments.

During the summer, we had to go to summer school. I actually liked T-CITY (Twin Cities Institute for Talented Youth), where I took writing for two summers, acting for two summers, and Latin for one. I also met my first boyfriend there as we had after-class activities between the different groups. We played softball, Trivial Pursuit, and something else that I don’t remember. Some other ball sport.

My mother also expected me to go to college. I had no choice in that. Or at least I didn’t feel as if I did. And, then when I turned 26, the 15-year campaign to get me pregnant. There is no other way to put it. She commented when I was 26 that she had my brother at that age. I shrugged it off, thinking nothing of it because I had told her I did not want chldiren. MISTAKE. I learned much later that the best way to deal with my mother was to shine her on. JADE the hell out of her. Gray rock until the end of dawn.

But no. I was naive enough to think that if I just stated plainly that I did not want kids, that would be the end of that. Ha! That may work with reasonable people, but my mother is not reasonable when she has a bone in her mouth and will not let go.


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Shifting perspectives

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My brother once told me that he doesn’t regret any decision he’s made. This was about a decade ago, and it blew my mind. I pushed a bit, and he said there was no point in regret as he couldn’t change anything he’d done in the past. He’s not wrong. Regret in and of itself is useless and can be harming if it causes shame. Shame keeps you stuck in bad behavior more often than not. On the other hand, it’s hard to learn from the past if you refuse to study it at all. I think there *may* be a truism about that floating around the interwebs. Since then, he’s made indications that there are things he might have changed or that he wished had gone a different way, but in general, he is an eyes-forward kind of guy.

I admire that about him. I also envy that about him because I regret almost every decision I’ve made in my life. Where I want to college. Going back to a certain boyfriend twice. Not questioning the narrative he laid out for me because I thought he was trustworthy.

Side Note: I recently talked to my mom about this ex of mine, let’s call him Todd because that’s most definitely not his name. I always held a slight grudge because she and my father had dinner with us once, and they both did not like him at all. I attributed it to my father not liking anyone who wasn’t properly effusive/deferential/in awe of how amazing he is plus a shitload of other unspoken expectations and my mother deferring to him. I found out during our recent talk that the reason she didn’t like him was because he took my love for granted (ironic given her own marriage) and because he caused me so much pain. She said he was using me and he was selfish.

We discussed a bit about how he dumped me three times and came back to me twice and how he lied to me in our relationship about having dumped his ex before she went abroad for a semester. In reality, they were in an open relationship, but only because he insisted. I found out by reading a letter from him to her. Yes, a physical letter. I was looking for something else on his desk, and when I saw a letter from her, I read it. When I brought it up to him, he got mad that I read it. Which, yes, invasion of privacy, but it allowed him to neatly sidestep the fact that he fucking lied to me. Why? Probably because he knew I wouldn’t have agreed to going out with him if he told me the truth. I was very straight and narrow at that time, and I would not have agreed to be in an open relationship. Funnily enough, though, when the girlfriend came back the next semester, he was ‘dating’ both of us at the same time to figure out what he wanted. I started dating someone else, and Todd couldn’t take it after a few weeks.

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Think of the Children; Vote Against Hate

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I saw my niece recently. She’s eighteen, graduated from an arts high school, has a full-time job, and has moved into an apartment with her boyfriend and his friend. She also got two tattoos recently. A small one on her hand and a larger one on her arm. She asked me if I had heard about her getting tattoos, which I had from her father (my brother). I asked if I could see them. She showed me the small one, then shrugged off her jacket so she could display the other. It’s on her arm in a similar place to the one I have on my right arm. It was beautiful, and she told me she had to get it touched up because all the color hadn’t taken. I asked if she was going to get another one, and she said, “Oh, yes!” with eagerness. I laughed and said that you can’t stop with just one, and she nodded in agreement. Then, she said something about getting it because of me. I didn’t really register it, and we kept talking about tattoos as I walked her and her father to the door. She repeated that she had gotten her tattoos because she’s liked mine* ever since she was a small child. I was touched, but also concerned. It’s not a good reason to get a tattoo, but I can’t deny that it was flattering to hear.

She looked like me when she was a little girl. People used to think I was her mother, and my family would sometimes confuse her name with mine. We used to tell stories to each other for hours, with her being the Fairy Princess and me being the Fairy Queen. She wasn’t waiting around for her prince to come, however; in fact, many of our stories were about how she would save her prince from perils. I watched as she grew up to be a creative, artistic, sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, striking young woman. She’s always been more feminine than I am. In fact, I remember when she was eleven, she wasn’t happy that her mom wouldn’t let her shave her legs until she was twelve. Boys like it when you shave your legs, she informed me gravely. When I told her that not all boys felt like that and that I didn’t shave my legs, she said with as much scorn as an eleven-year-old could muster, “You’re not married, so it doesn’t count.” It made me sad that she had gotten that message from society, but the only thing I could do was continue to model a different way of thinking in the best way I could.


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