Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: new me

What needs an upgrading

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It’s my brithday today as I’m writing this. My real birthday, I mean. I think of September 3rd as my rebirthday, which is more important to me than my actual birthday. I have never cared about my real birthday. In fact, I used to hate my real birthday because I thought I should not be alive. In addition, I would think of all the milestones I had yet to meet and feel really depressed.

For many years, I refused to tell pople when my birthday was. When I first joined Facebook, I had to give a birthday. I didn’t want to because they refused to make it private. So I chose a day in January–just a random one. Then, every year I was surprised when I received birthday wishes on my FB wall on a random day in January. Now, FB doesn’t make you announce your birthday, thankfully.

I hated, hated, hated my birthday. I refused to tell anyone when it was, even if they asked me directly. It made some people mad that I wouldn’t tell them, which didn’t make sense to me, either. Why did they care when my birthday was? I mean, I do get that they want to celebrate it with me, but still. If I did not want to celebrate it, then why should they? That’s the part I did not understand.

Then, there was a phase when I didn’t care about it, but I saw no reason as an adult to celebrate it. Why announce it like a kid? I didn’t hate it as much as I did, but I certainly did not see any reason for it. If I were to be honest, I slightly looked down on people who were really excited about their birthdays. As an adult, I mean. Birthdays, like Christmas, were for kids. It was silly to care about them, but each their own.

Now, I don’t care about my birthday at all, but I also don’t look down on people who do. And I appreciate people who wish me a ahappy birthday because they love me and want to acknoledge my existenvce. That’s a nice sentiment and one that warms my heart.


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Two days into the new year

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It’s funny. I’m not a holdiay person or a traditional person by any means, but I cannot escape the trappings of societal beliefs surrounding certain days. New Year’s Day is one of those. I don’t know why as intellectually, I know January 1st is just another day. I don’t feel like a birthday is a big day, so why do I put so much importance on the first day of the new year? It’s just the same as the old year, really. It’s not as if there is some big change on the day itself.

Saying this, I do want to do the goal a month thing. It has to be big enough that I’m not going to shrug it off, but it can’t be so big, it’ll be impossible for me to complete.

Before I get to it, let’s talk about Elden Ring a bit more. That’s what I ended the last post on, and, let’s face it–it’s the game I obsessed over for much of last year. I probably will play it more this year as there are a few things I had’nt done before, but not much. I am looking  forward to Armored Core 6, but I’m curious to see what FromSoft will be doing with it.

Let’s talk about Malenia some more. She is in an optional section that is really difficult to access in the first place. You have to light these three beacons or something like that in an optional ‘town’–which, in and of itself isn’t that bad. But, this is the town of the Black Knife Assassins, and–a little-known fact: the BLack Knife Assassins are all women. I love this. There is always a faction in the From games that is made of women. In the Souls series, it’s the butchers. In Bloodborne, it’s….ah….OK, this is not a thing in BB, apparently. Of course I looked it up. In Sekiro, it’s the Sunken Valley Clan. They are all women, including the two mini-bosses, Snake Eyes Shirafuji and Snake Eyes Shirahagi. They are badass shooters who are really hard. The enemies, I mean. The mini-bosses are…not fun. And also optional.

In Elden Ring, it’s the Black Knife Assassins. They are insanely hard, and they are invisible until you’re right up in their grill. There is a torch that can reveal them, but that means not having a shield. I mean, you can equip it in your weapon hand, but then you can’t attack them, obviously. Or maybe you can, but it’s not going to do that much damage. They do an incredible amount of damage themselves, and they do bleed, which will quickly build up and take a chunk of health at a go. One weapon I used for a time was the Black Knife, it’s a dagger that does bleed damage and you have to beat a really difficult Black Knife Assassin in the Altus Plateau to get it. It’s fast and does loads of damage, though.


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Happy New Year!

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I am missing an entire post. I know I wrote one for today (New Year’s Day), but I cannot find it anywhere. I have done all the tips and tricks to recall it, but it’s not to be found. So, I’ll mentally brush it off and move on. We’re still talking about my goals for the new year. Someone in Ask A Manager asked what people’s NY resolutions were. One person said they didn’t do resolutions, but they wanted to make monthly goals. That perked up my ears. They had done it before and they said that it had to be simple and concrete (basically) because of their ADHD brain.

I liked the idea. When I used to do resolutions, they were your usual ‘lose a million pounds in two weeks’ or ‘walk ten miles a day’ because I’m an all-or-nothing kind of person. That truly is not a humblebrag beacuse I know that it’s not a good way to be. Taiji has helped me chill out a bit, but there’s still the tendency for me to go way too hard.

I think goals will be better for me. The problem is, though, that if I set them too rigidly, I give up hope and quit. If I set them too loosley, however, then the chances are that I will never get it done. There has to be a sweet spot of holding myself accountable without getting too anal about it.

I took 2022 just to marvel at being alive and to come to grips with…well not being dead. I know that sounds glib, but I should be dead. I. Should. Be. Dead. I’m made my peace with it for the most part, but that doesn’t meant it doesn’t pop up in my mind every now and again. I can be just sitting on my couch, not doing anything much, when I’ll think, “I should be dead.” I know that sounds like a negative, but it’s not. It really is a positive thing. It’s wonderment and awe that I did not die that night a year and four months ago. And, that I did not die any day since.

Most people who have a cardiac arrest die immediately. 90%. 80% if it happens in a hospital. 70% if the patient receives CPR as it’s happening. That’s the percentage that dies, not lives. So even in the best-case scenariio, the chance of surviving a cardiac arrest. That’s one, by the way. A singular event. I cannot find anything about people who have had two in quick succession.

That’s not completely true. My home aide who washed my hair every Friday after I went home from the hospital, She told me about this guy she was….ah, dating, I guess you could say. An ex-boyfriend of hers who was a hockey coach. He had been on varsity hockey when he was in high school (which was when she knew him), and they had reconnected in the last year or so? I’m not exactly sure, but it was recently.

He had three heart attacks and was in a coma for months. When he came out of it, he would never work again. I don’t quite remember, but I don’t think he could walk, either. He had necroticizing flesh on his feet, which is pretty grim. She was pretty not-understand as she talked about how he weighed something like 400 pounds and lived with his brother. He was very involved in his niblings’ life, which she also scoffed at. I was amazed. The man had survived three heart attacks. I think he was allowed to do pretty much anything he fucking wanted to.


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Sliding into a new year like….

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In the last post, I talked about my mother and how she was not going to change. Which means it’s up to me to adjust how I react to her. Before I ended up in the hospital, I had managed to find a faux-equilibrium. I say faux because I still did not want to deal with her and dreaded it, but it didn’t send me into a deep depression the way it did when I was in my twenties. We talked maybe once a month and then I put her out of my mind for the rest of the time. She would send me an email once a month or so when she wanted me to edit something.

Then, they came here and everything was thrown into chaos. I found out how little they actually cared about me–or rather, it was confirmed. I already knew, but it had never been clearer. And it made it nearly impossible for me to go back to being fiercely noncommittal.

Theoretically, nothing had changed. I already knew that my parents didn’t see me as an individual person with thoughts, feelings, hopes, and emotions of my own. I was simply their child and everything that they foisted upon that ideal.

My mother has commented in the past about all the ways I have disappointed her. As much as I don’t care on a conscious level, there is still a part of me that wanted that approval. I was tweeting about it a few months ago (before the Eloning), and a Twitter friend responded that his mother had been dead for years, and he still did things to try to happy. He knows he wouldn’t (even if she were alive, she would not look at him with anything other than utter disdain). If I remember correctly, he had not been talking to her when she died.

The idea of ‘but, faaaaamily’ is so endemic in our society. In most societies, probably. There is a reason for that, naturally. Strong families would be the foundation of a strong society. I actually don’t have a problem with that. There should be ties between people who have the same blood–at least I guess that makes sense.

Honestly, I have seen so much family fuckups, I’m not sure that’s even true. Here’s the thing. Should it be the case? That people with the same blood should be closer, I mean. It’s something people don’t want to talk about much, and in fact, many people would not be happy if you brought it up (that blood is not necessarily thicker than water).

I wonder if we would be happier if we let go of that fiction. I read several advice columns, and there is always the obligatory lip service to how important family is. Unfairly so, I think. Especially over at Slate. I appreciate that Alison Green of Ask A Manager is very pragmatic about family. She doesn’t waste time chastising writers for having familial issues. In fact, she’s often the one to tell them to, well, not cut the cord, but not talk to their parents about work stuff that isn’t their business. She’s very frank about how parents often don’t understand the working world, and sometimes, she strayed into personal life as well. Such as with the letter wrtier who got a job as the personal assistant to her father’s girlfriend, and it went spectacularly horribly. The boss/girlfriend wanted the LW to go to therapy with her (the boss) and the boyfriend/father, which was what caused the LW to write into Ask A Manager. The LW’s mother was downplaying it, and Alison said the LW may need to cut down on info to her mother as well.


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