Underneath my yellow skin

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New year, new me, who dis? 2026

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As a new year is approaching, I am musing over my goals. I don’t like to make resolutions, but I am all about setting goals. In this post, I want to talk about the different goals I want to set for next year. They will be moderately lofty goals, but with the realization that I may not fulfill all of them–or any. I will start with the ones that are the most pressing on my mind and then move mey way through the rest.

1. The novel. As in writing it. I have fallen off since my sleep was greatly disrupted last weekend, and I want to be get back to it. My inertia is bad right now along with my depression.  I can barely muster the energy to do anything. I was talking to K today, and we were commiserating about being depressed. It’s been a hard almost-year, and we were incredulous about *waves at the world around me*.

I want to get a rough draft done by April 1st of the new year. Ideally, I would keep up with 2,000 words a day until I get it done. My biggest problem is that I tend to get bogged down in the middle of writing AND that I get stuck editing as I write. I have a hard time just letting shit be shit, but I know that’s how shit gets turned into diamonds. (Well, no, it’s not, but I can’t be fucked to change that metaphor.)

I do have the novemoir (what I’m calling it for now) well in hand–in my mind. Meaning, I have it sketched out and some of it written in my brain. I get too lost in the sauce as I’m putting it down to paper, and I have to try to let that be what it is.

2. A year of refinement. Taiji and Bagua are a big part of my life, obviously. I’ve been working hard on the Double Fan Form, and I’m so close to finishing it. But, I’ve noticed that I already have things to refine in it, which I’ve done a little of, but I’m resisting it until I’ve finished teaching the form to myself. I thought I’d be done with it by now because no other form has taken me more than three months to teach myself. This one, we’re going on seven months with one month break for when I got my triple shots. So, six months I’ve been working on this, and it has felt at times that I would never finish it. I am three postures away from being done (maybe four?), and I can barely believe it’s true.


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Happy re-birthday to me!

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Four years ago (September 3rd, 2021), I died. I was brought back to life and after being kept in a coma for a week, I suddenly came back to myself. I was high as a kite because I wsa stuffed full of drugs, weak as a kitten from my ordeal, but I was alive, damn it. That was a marvel and a wonder, and it’s something I still shake my head at because there was no way I should have survived.

Every medical person I talked to told me repeatedly that it was a miracle I was alive. My favorite story is from when I was back home and had a nurse visiting me once a week to check in on me. One week, the nurse could not get into her tech system (on her phone). We commiserated over how tech is great–until it’s not. Since she couldn’t check on what she was there for, she just quickly ran through a bunch of things that I could have had in the past. I said yes to ‘heart attack/sudden cardiac arrest’ and then had to explain my whole medical ordeal (walking (non-COVID-related) pneumonia, two sudden cardiac arrests, and a stroke) to her.

She went on rattling off more things, and I was only half-listening until my attention was caught by her saying, “heart surgery, yes.” My brain did a mental screech, and I told her that I had not had heart surgery. She lowered her phone and gave me a blank stare. “What?” said she, in a bewildered tone.

“She didn’t have heart surgery,” said my brother. (Remember, gender was very low on my list of things to care about at that point.) “She had an angiogram a few days after she woke up, but that was it.”

The nurse put her phone done, placed her hand on my arm, and said in a tone of awe, “You are a walking miracle. You are very lucky to be alive.”

It was really weird to be treated like some kind of rock star in the hospital. Everyone who talked to me gushed about what a miracle I was. One of the nurses who sat with me while I was unconscious came to talk to me when I was awake. She had tears in her eyes as we talked, and when I thanked her for sitting with me, she cried even harder. This is a nurse from the heart ICU. I imagine that she saw so much pain and grief. I was happy that I could bring some joy to her, even if it had nothing to do with me–not really.


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A new year, a new me?

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Let’s talk more about my birthday and my goals for the upcoming year. Before I do that, though, I am so stoked about the weapons I have ordered. I am working on the Double Fan Form, and I’m not loving it. I don’t know why because I adore the Fan Form. Something about this is not working in my brain. The video I’m watching is split in front and back view ins the same view at half-speed. Theoretically, it should be a gerat way to learn the form because I can look at both front and back–but I think that’s actually part of the problem. I have a hard time focusing on one or the other. I think I prefer two separate videos because then I can focus on one or the other.

Yes, I know I could do that myself, but my brain doesn’t work that way. I have added a few more movements. It’s…fine, but not blowing me away. I can’t help but compare my feelings about the Double Fan Form to how I felt when I learned that I could do the Cane Form with the Saber. Not only did that blow my mind, but it felt so damn good. I gave myself a week to learn it, but it took three or four days. One day per row (four rows).

I just did a quick practice of what I know for the Double Fan Form. My brain still can’t grasp it completely. I’ve looked at a few different forms. There are three that seem to be the most repeated. One might be the official one–the one I’m trying to learn. Another one is a bit more aggressive, which I like, but not what I’m about right now.

I feel like I should learn the official one first before branching off to the other ones. I need to be patient with myself, but I’m used ot learning new forms pretty quickly. Why is this one so hard? My impulse is to say that it’s beacuse the two fans do different things, but up to this point, they really don’t. Also, in the Double Saber Form, the two sabers do different things, and I did not have too hard a time with that form.

The Double Sword Form has been fun, but it’s just me messing with two swords. For whatever reason, though, it feels much more natural than the Double Fan Form (formal). There is not an official Taiji Double Sword Form (that I can find), but there are two that I’ve found that are pretty cool. One is Taiji and the other is labeled Taiji/praying mantis.

Ha. I found a cool video of one man with two swords fighting another man with a spear. It turns out to be someone I subscribe to–the guy who reviewed the twin straight swords I bought. I’ve included the video below.


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Refining (and redefining) my martial arts (weapon forms/goals)

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Several posts ago,  I was talking about my goals in martial arts. Here’s the last post I wrote in that series. That post was about how martial arts have changed me for the better, which is not what I want to talk about here. I mean, it is part of the deeper meaning, but it’s not what I want to focus on here. In the first post I wrote on this topic, I talked, amongst other things, which weapon forms I wanted to teach myself. I had a list as long as my arm, and then, something interesting happened.

My Taiji teacher sent me a video of her teacher’s student (who is also a teacher now) showing practical applications of the Fan Form. Which was really cool. At the same time, I’m teaching myself the left side of the Fan Form (as I mentioned before). I reached near the end of the form, and then I realized that I was fudging things in a way that meant I had messed something up. This is something that is common while practicing because we are human. Humans make mistakes. Plus our brains are prone to shorting out, and memories are porous.

You have to know that this was the last weapons form I had taught myself before I had my medical crisis. Which meant I had to reteach it to myself afterwardls. Or wait. It might have been the first weapons form I taught myself after my medical crisis. I think it was the latter. Either way, that meant that my brain was not quite ready for it, and I forgot…well, a lot.

In the first half, it was just a few little things here and there. No biggie. But then I got to the place where I was struggling to teach myself the left side, and I discovered that I had left out several movements in a row. I had muddled them all together and completely dropped some of them. We’re talking five or six movements in a row. Once I realized that I had fucked up that whole section, I stopped teaching myself the left side because I knew that I had to reteach myself the right side.

You know what? I’m glad this happened. Why? For a few reasons. One, because it reminded me that I need to look at my forms and refine them. Two, because even though I messed up a lot of shit, I also taught myself most of it just fine. It cemented my decision to teach myself weapon forms, and I’m pleased that my teacher has faith in me in this endeavor. In fact, she recently told me that she was proud of me for going down this path. That made me feel good because I had been thinking I was pretty lax with my practice. It’s only recently that I’ve gotten serious about learning more weapon forms.


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An eye to the future

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I’m writing this on Christmas Day, and I’m contemplative. I don’t celebrate Christmas, but everyone else in my life does. It’s another thing where I don’t mind that I’m different from everyone else, and I’m not bothered by people wishing me a Merry Christmas. it’s taken me many decades to be truly neutral about Christmas, and I still have a reflexive instinct to wish people a Merry Christmas.

I went through a period of time where I wished people Happy Holidays, but that never felt natural to me. We all know that it’s Christmas today–and, indeed, the month leading up to this day. No one thinks about Hanukkah, let alone Kwanzaa (interesting note, Hanukkah started on December 25th this year). I had to roll my eyes when some Christians got so upset about salespeople saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’ because ‘They’re taking the Christ out of Christmas!’.

Um.

I hate to break it to them, but if Jesus really did exist, he probably would have been on the side of the people salespeople who were working their asses off for peanuts during the holiday season and dealing with entitled assholes screaming at them because they could not find a PlayStation5 anywhere and little Timmy would be sooooo disappointed when he did not get one under the tree. The only thing that Christmas really celebrated these days was crass commercialism and capitalism.

Hm. Maybe I’m not as neutral about Christmas as I thought I was. But the idea of gathering with friends and/or families and/or other loved ones is a lovely one. Winter is fmy favorite season so I see nothing wrong with letting people know that I love them–even if it’s on an overly saccharinely sweet holiday.

See, I may be against traditions for the most part, but I believe in love. Love is what got me through dying (twice) and me fumbling back to some semblance of normal afterwards.

There is one holiday song duo that I like, one Christmas carol that I love, and two other Christmas-related (sort of) songs that are quite lovely, indeed. The first one is Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy by Bing Crosby and David Bowie. It’s just really beautiful.

The rest of them, though, can mostly get in the bin. Not because they’re necessarily bad songs, but because they have been so overplayed. Christmas music starts being played in the stores any time after Halloween (and one horrible yer, it started in early October). I hated that year, let me tell you what.

Note: I didn’t feel like finishng the post on Christmas, so I wrote the rest of it the next day.

I still hate the commercialization of Christmas (which started when I was in high school. I wrote an op-ed in 9th grade about how Christmas had become one month-long, overpriced commercial. That was over thirty years ago!) , and I get so tired of the forced cheer.

I don’t hate it the way I used to, but I don’t understand why people are so into it, either. Here’s Jennifer Hudson singing, O Holy Night. I actually sang that for church one Christmas. A solo. This is the only traditional Christmas carol that I love with all my heart. I get chills every time I hear it.


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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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Firm writing goals for this year

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Goals. That is what is on my mind right now. In the last post, I started actually talking about my goals for this year. I delved into the issues I was having, including the fact that my fiction writing has dried up.

I don’t think this means that it’s gone completely, though. I think I just have to rethink how I actually write now. It used to be so easy. I would get the idea in my head–

Side note: I don’t use outlines. I may have to in the future, but I haven’t up to this point. Yes, I know that this is the accepted way to do things, but it never worked for me. What usually happened was that I would get an idea in my head and let it percolate for days or weeks. I write murder mysteries (or at least mysteries. Usually murder was included), and I would start with the main character. Not a private detective, but a normie who stumbled their way into a situation, much like Jessica Fletcher. I usually wrote trilogies because that seemed to be the right amount of time with a protagonist.

Once I had the protag, then I came up with the victim. In doing so, the perp usually sprang to mind as well. I doen’t think I’ve ever changed the perp as I was writing, but I have changed circumstances, relationships, and almost everything else.

As I wrote yesterday, I know my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Strengths: characterization and dialogue. Weakness: descriptions and transitions. I don’t like the latter two in part beacuse I can see everything in my mind, so why couldn’t everyone else?

I can be super self-indulgent about dialogue or world-building because those are the things I enjoy. I can write for pages about psychology and relationships, and I have to take a sterner hand with those. On the other hhand, I struggle with describing physical things other than in a “She has black hair and large brown eyes” kind of way. I envy people who can make the descriptions flow, but I just cannot.

Side note: I have to start considering that the reason I can’t write fiction the way I used to is because of my medical crisis. It didn’t affect me much in my day-to-day, but there were things that were affected that maybe I wasn’t able to see until later.

Such as: I have almost no peripheral awareness now. My eyesight is not as good as it used to be. My reflexes are shit(tier). All of these could just be because I’m getting older, but I think at least two of them (peripheral and reflexes) are a direct result of my medical crisis. Obviously, I can’t say for sure. I am not a doctor. I know what I experienced, but I don’t know what it actually did to my body.


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Goals that I most definitely will meet this year

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I still want to talk about my goals for this year. In the last post, I mostly talked about my medical crisis that reshaped my life. Nothing is too hyperbolic to state about that experience. And it’s not something I can talk about with many people because it’s just not relatable at all.

The more time that passes, the less it stays in the front of my mind. Don’t get me wrong. I’m always aware of it, but it’s slowly become just a part of me. I don’t need to think about it as it’s embedded in the fabric of my being. As I would say that I’m Taiwanese American, bi, agender, and bisexual (not to mention areligious),  I would add that I died twiec and came back to life, better than even. Sure, there were a few netgative side effects, but for the most part, I’m fine.

That’s what blows my mind when I think about it too much, but I don’t do that these days.

I want to write about the experience, but I’m grappling with how to do it. Sure, others can relate to having a life-changing experience K thinks I can focus on that and the history behind it rather than the actual experience.

But here’s the thing. The actual experience is the attention-getter. Sure, other people have had had near-death experiences, but I have yet to find anything similar to mine. I would definitely have to rely on other hooks–dysfunctional family, how I overcame it, etc.

But it’s been burning in my mind since it happened. I want to write about it; I just don’t know how to do it. Part of the problem is that at the time, my mother was pushing me to write a movie script about it. When I demurred, she got upset and almost angry, saying it would be such an inspiration to other people. As if that was my duty–which in her mind, it is. My duty, I mean.

Ever since I was a child, she never considered me a person in my own right. I was supposed to be a mini-me of her–but it’s worse than that. I wasn’t supposed to be like she was as a person; I was supposed to be the ideal version of herself.

So all of that would have to be in the memoir in order for it to make any sense at all. I have no problem writing about my past, but I don’t know how to structure this memoir. That is my isuse.


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Actual goals this year

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In my last post, I was going to talk about my goals for this year, but mostly went on and on about what my medical crisis was like. Which is in part because it’s the most important thing that happened to me. It changed my life in many ways, even though in some ways, it didn’t change a thing.

It’s not something I talk about much or often, which is part of the problem. Someone can’t really know me if they don’t know about that experience because it has left an indelible mark on me. At the same time, I hesitate bringing it up because no one can relate to it. This is not hyperbole. I researched situtions like mine, and I could not find a single one. It’s hard to find someone who has survived one cardiac arrest and/or stroke without side effects, let alone two cardiac arrests, an ischemic stroke, and walking (non-COVID-related) pneumonia.

I could not find any groups for people like me–not even close. K suggested I go to a group for people who went through any kind of medical crisis, but I would not want to make other people feel bad. My issue is not dealing with the ramifications of the crisis itself (difficulty walking, talking, thinking, etc.), but dealing with the fact that I’m still alive when I shouldn’t be.

The chaplain I talked to in the hospital asked if I ever asked, “Why me?” about the experience. I told him candidly no because why not me? I didn’t take great care of myself, smoked a few cigarettes a day, was fairly sedentary except for my Taiji routine, and had bronchial/immune system issues. For whatever reason, I have never thught of myself as exempt from bad things happening to me the way other people seem to do.

I did mention that I hoad some survivor’s guilt. At the time, I thought there was a young woman–in her early twenties–who was on my same floor and had COVID. Her family did not believe in thevaccine and she died from it–along with her mother. I realized months later that this never happened, but at the time when I was talking with the chaplain (which I’m pretty sure did happen), it was a reality to me.

I told him that I thought she should have lived instead of me because she was young and had so much of her life ahead of her. I, on the other hand, was nearer to the end of my life than the start and hadn’t really contributed anything to the world. I wasn’t being self-deprecating; it’s true. In a global sense, I mean. Whether I live or die doesn’t really matter. Especially now.

I want to change that now. I’m in my 53rd rotation on this earth. I probably have less than that left in me. If I’m going to do anything with my life, the time is now. I have had a few ideas in my mind for writing projects, and I’m not getting any younger.

Side note: I’m a very good writer. I am shitty at editing and holdinwg myself accountable. I said this yesterday. I have never had a problem with NaNoWriMo because 50,000 words a month is a sneevze to me. I can do that in my sleep. Again, that’s not a humblebrag or a brag–it just is.


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Happy birthday to me, I guess

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It’s still my birthday as  I write this. It will be for another hour and fifteen minutes. My mother called me around this time last nigth to wish me a happy birthday, and I was fine until she started moaning about my father again.

I know dementia is really cruel and very hard to deal with as a sole caregiver. Plus, she’s over eighty hereself, tiny, and in not the best health. but she makes things harder on herself by one, insisting on doing everything by herself; two, she is holding out hope that he will get better. She tells me about this article she read or that with ways to increase brain usage.

I have told her so many times  in so many ways that this was not possible. the cruelest thing about dementia is that except for a very few rare cases, there is no getting better. It’s a slow, steady decline with one ending.

She was saying that he just wanted to sleep most of the time, and he got upset when she tried to make him go for walks. The physical therapist insists on making him work harder than he wants, saying it would be better if he could go to the bathroom by himself and not have to depend on my mother.

Which, I mean.

Here’s the thing. My mother told me that Taiwanese people don’t believe in dementia, really. Or rather, they don’t believe that it’s an ailment–they think it’s a moral failing. So of course the PT thinks if my father tries hard enough, he can do things he literally can’t do. My mother protested and said he could do them when the PT asked. My brother said the same thing about when they went somewhere like the bank. My father could pull it together for that, so my brother thought he should be able to control it all the time.

I tried to explain to them that being able to do something for ten mminutes or even half an hour didn’t mean he could do it all the time. It wsa important to him to appear with it when he was in front of non-family members, so he put all his effort into doing that. That didn’t mean he could do it all the time, and in fact, his acting up later was probably as a result of wearing himself out.


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