Underneath my yellow skin

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Less is (sometimes) more, part three

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I want to talk more about weapon forms because I can. Here was yesterday’s post on the same subject. When I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form, I naively thought that it wouldn’t be too difficult. After all, I taught the Fan Form to myself with relative ease.

Well, that’s not exactly correct. I did teach it to myself fairly effortlessly I thought. But then, a year or so later, I was going to teach myself the left side. I started running into places where I could not do it because I had been fudging it on the right side. This was roughly halfway through the form. I decided to go back to the video and refresh my memory.

Much to my surprise, I realized t hat I had forgotten whole chunks of the Fan Form. I remember teaching it to myself, but I had no memory of those missing postures themselves. There was a chunk in the middle of the  form and another chunk at the end. I took a deep breath and taught the whole form to myself again. I took extra pains to make sure that I had it in my body and was not just fudging postures when I didn’t get them.

It’s hard because my teacher believes in learning the whole form first and then refining it after. Which is great when there’s the opportunity to practice it in class every week. However, when I’m doing it on my own, it’s harder. Yes, I can watch the videos I have in a pinch, but I will say that it doesn’t completely replace in-person teaching.

Also, the obvious problem with teaching myself is that I can’t see what I can’t see. What I mean is that I can’t tell when I’m making mistakes or not doing a posture right. Of course, I could do the form for my teacher–if she knows it. She does not know the Double Fan Form, which I’m making my way towards in this post.

Once I had the Fan Form in my body, I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form. I also wanted to teach myself the Double Sword Form, but there’s no official form. I also wanted to finish teaching myself the Karambit Form, the Guandao Form, and I’m messing around with a Karambit/Fan Form.

That’s too much. While I can probably teach myself two forms at the same time, I don’t think I would do justice to either. Plus, it would probably take twice as long as it would to teach myself one. So, obviously, doing two back-to-back would take just as much time if not less than trying to teach myself two forms at once.

I’m so impatient, though. I’m like the kid in a candy store in that I want it all. Now! I have taught myself several different forms, or at least part of them. Wu-Li Dancing Sword, which is very short; halfish of the Karambit Form (I thought I had taught myself all but the very end); Fan Form; Cane Form (with the saber, so technically Saber Form); and the second half of the Double Saber Form. Oh, and I’ve taught myself the left side of the Sword Form, Saber Form, Cane Form, and Cane Form with the saber. Oh, and the last third or so of the Swimming Dragon Form, hands only, Bagua.


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Less is (sometimes) more, part two

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A few days ago, I wrote a post about how I’ve pared down my daily Taiji/Bagua routine. For the past year or so, I had been feeling a bit of a slight drag when I did my morning routine. Instead of looking forward to and being eager to do it every morning (well, really afternoon, so it’s morning only colloquially), I did it with a sigh and a heavy heart.

I still wanted to do it, mind. I was just burned out.

Here goes the backstory.

I have OCD tendencies. It’s not full-blown OCD, and it’s probably not diagnosable. When I mentioned it to my therapist a few decades ago (then-therapist), she said to me in a stern tone, “You know you don’t actually have OCD, right?”

Yes, I know that. But I have OCD tendencies, and I am internally obsessed with many things. I have learned to keep it mostly to myself and to gauge how much to let out without seeming ‘weird’. Also, probably autistic, but that’s more likely to be diagnosable.

I could talk about my martial arts weapons all day long. Not the technical aspects, but the beauty of them and what they mean to me. I like to joke that they’re my romantic relationships, but it’s not far from the truth. What I mean is that each weapon stirs something in me that I could conceivably slap a romantic label on it.

The Sword Form is my first love. I have such warm feelings for it. No, it’s not the most exciting form any longer, but it’s the weapon form that started my love for the weapons. I have told this story a million times, but I’ll tell it once again.

A year or two after I started Taiji, I graduated from the Solo Long Form. All that means is that I learned the sequence–not that I was any good at it. Soon after, my teacher mentioned it was time to learn the Sword Form. I resisted. While I had started studying Taiji because I wanted to be able to defend myself and really liked the idea of learning the combat applications, I recoiled from the very idea of doing weapons.

I was a pacifist at the time, and weapons seemed too violent to me. It was only when I was walknig the circle with the deerhorn knives (Bagua, not the point of this post) as my meditation that I had an ideology-changing moment. I was focusing on the ‘opponent’ in the middle of the circle as I walked. In a second, I thought, “If it’s you or me–it’s going to be me.” Meaning, if it was the opponent’s life or mine, mine was going to win.


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Less is (sometimes) more

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I have been doing my Taiji/Bagua routine every morning (well, early afternoon because I don’t get up in the morning), and I have slowly been adding to it in the last decade.

It’s amusing to me that I couldn’t force myself to do five minutes of practice when I first started studying Taiji. For whatever reason, my brain just rejected any thought of practicing at home. Because of that, I added another class per week to attend, and then one more. Then, pandemic and everything went online.

That was when I got serieous about my weapons. Before that, I loved them, yes, but I wasn’t intense about it. Scratch that. I was intense about it, but I wasn’t yet obsessed. During the lockdown, however, I got very into the Double Saber Form–which was what my teacher had been teaching me when we went into lockdown.

I still had my private lessons with her, but they were online rather than in person. Plus, her Double Saber Form was not the best as she does not care as much for the weapons. It took me a long time to realize that because she was careful to be enthusiastic about them when I gushed over my love for them.

About halfway through the form, my teacher just stopped teaching it to me. It took me a while to realize that it was because we had hit the limit of what she knew of the form. Her classmate had done the Double Saber Form at their school’s demonstration a few months before the world shut down. I had fallen instantly in lust, and I knew I had to have that in my life.

I bugged my teacher to teach it to me until she gave in. When we reached the point where she was no longer comfortable teaching me the form, I starting it to myself. I asked my teacher if she was ok with it, and she was. I don’t know why I asked her, but the best I can come up with was that I felt it was the respectful way to deal with it.

I have continued to ask her before teaching myself a form. Again, I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s out of respect. And  I have acknowledged to myself that not only am I more interested in weapons than she is, but…I have a hard time writing it or speaking it into existence, but it’s true: some of my weapon forms are better than hers.

It sounds like heresy to me because she’s my teacher.  She’s been studying Taiji for over thirty years (I think). How dare I say that any of my Taiji is better than hers? Here’s the thing, though. I have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into my weapon forms, and I know that she pays more attention to her hands-only forms. It’s just a case of difference preferences.


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Being adventurous in different ways

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I know the Myers-Briggs test has been debunked, with good reason. How valid it’s going to be is based on how well you really know yourself (and how not delusional you are). One thing that stuck out to me when I took it was that I split evenly on J and P. Meaning that I was equally capricious and regimental. Which is pretty much true.

I have a schedule that I keep to and it’s the same every day, but not at the same time. What I mean is that I do things in the same order every day. That has gotten shaken up in the last two weeks because of Shadow’s illness, but in general, it’s the same. I get up and take my meds save the one I have to eat food with (because I have one I can’t eat food with). In the past, I would do most of my Taiji next and then before the very end, feed my cat. Also, I would brush my teeth in there as well. Now, I take my meds an dthen feed my cat, then do my Taiji.

The reason I waited in the past was because I didn’t want him bugging me for breakfast the minute he woke up. Now, however, I’m pretty much feeding him whenever he’s hungry because I’m a softy and he was so sick. He’s being more picky these days, and I think it’s because his sense of smell isn’t quite back yet. He’ll sniff at his food and then not eat it. Or eat it, depending. Sometimes, he’ll be happily scarfing down the food and then stop. Then he won’t eat any more, but he will eat treats. Or not.

If I add hot water to it, sometimes he’ll eat more and sometimes he won’t. In the past, he would eat it if I put hot water on it more often than not. This is all wet food, by the way. And with treats, he’ll eat them some of the time and not other times. Before, he would almost always eat treats (meaning Temtations, Greenies, etc.). It could be he’s still not quite completely over his cold. It might be that he’s just gotten pickier since being sick. Or maybe he just doesn’t need the increase in food now that he’s better again. Or that much increase I should say because he’s still eating more than he did in the past, just not as much more as he was right after he started recovering from his sickness.

Anyway, then I write my blog post for the day. If it’s the weekday, I follow it up by doing my work for my bro. In between, I might play my day of Cozy Grove or I might do it before the post. Then I’ll fuck around for a bit before writing my 2,000 words of fiction/memoir for the night. Those are the broadstrokes to my day, around which I fill in the blanks.


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The more things change

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The more things change, the more they really stay the same. Ian is here and it’s as if there has been no time between the last time I flew out to see him (spring of 2019) and now. The last time he was here was probably the summer before that. So, four years.

Here’s how it goes. He sits on the black recliner that is on the left in the room (which is from my vantage point of my couch). He is on his Steam Deck (which is new) while wearing sweats. I’m on the couch in my booty shorts (new) and a t-shirt, looking at my laptop. Shadow is in his bed in the corner of the room, taking his tenth nap of the day. I have one ear bud in to listen to a YouTube video so I won’t disturb him. We both do our own thing, but then one of us will say something, and we’re off to the races. Right now, he’s playing a game while I’m typing away. This is how we spent many hours.

Earlier, we actually went out and did things. Went to a vape shop (for him), the T-Mobile store (also for him), and then Target (for both of us). It’s true that you can’t walk out of Target having spent less than a hundred bucks. Even if you go in to buy one item, something else will catch your eye. You WILL buy rubber plates, tumblers, and bowls on steep sale. Or is that just me?

But we just slipped into our easy way of interacting that we’ve always had. When we got to Target, I made him push around the cart because that’s one performative gender role construct that I have no problem exploiting. I don’t like pushing around carts, so if he’s fine with it, great.

In general, that’s how I feel about chores. If there’s one that someone doesn’t mind doing, then they can do that. Like I hate the thought of doing laundry, but I don’t actually hate doing it. I used to not mind doing dishes. I don’t like doing them now, but if someone cooks for me, I most definitely will do the dishes.

On the other hand, I hate vacuuming. So much. It’s probably my least-favorite chore of the daily ones. That’s not true. Cleaning the toilet is the worst. And the fridge. But vacuuming is up there. I also don’t like tidying up in general. I’m a slob, and it’s my shame, honestly. I can’t seem to make myself clean, no matter how much I exhort myself. I know it’s a sign of ADHD, which I have suspected I have. It’s not something that I’ve ever tested for, but I have the suspicion that I have a mild form of it. I have the hyper-focus thing, daydreaming, and procrastination. I know that the inability to make yourself do things, i.e., considering yourself lazy, is a hallmark of ADHD. I know that I should probably get tested, but I…just don’t have the energy right now.

It’s been almost a year since I died. sitting with Ian makes me feel like nothing has changed, but everything has. But nothing really has. But everything has. It’s a strange feeling.


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Getting meta with it

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Hi, I’m a writer. I have been a writer since I wsa seven. I have written poetry, short stories, novels, novellas, screenplays, and more experimental works. I read House of Leaves back in the day (did not care for it) and really dug the idea of it. I also read other experimental authors, less famous and female, queer, of color, etc. I like the fresh perspectives, but it’s not for me. I will say that I was turned off poetry because it seemed so antiquated and stale. Plus, I had a teacher who told me I had to capitalize and punctuate (never heard of e. e. cummings, apparently), must have a title (I just used the first sentence of each poem as the title), but at least she didn’t say I had to rhyme. It was a terrible class, though, and nothing Advanced or Creative about it.

I’ve read books about writing and suggestions from authors about how to write. The most common are tips such as write at the same time every day, write first thing in the morning, and have an outline. In fact, the latter is one of the most consistent pieces of advice I see given about. Make an outline. You have to have an outline. Outline all day long.

Now, I want to make it very clear that I am not anti-outline. If it works for you, have at it! I’m sure it’s helpful for many writers in part because it’s given so frequently as the number one tip. So there has to be some value in it. What I AM saying is that I don’t use outlines. Ever. I don’t find them useful and in fact, I find them restrictive.

Here’s the thing. I always have scenes racing through my brain. Before my medical trauma, it went like this. I would  get a germ of an idea. Say different species of beings (not necessarily aliens) who live in our world and interact with humans. They are superior to humans, but are treated as lesser. I really wanted to do a contemporary urban fantasy (NOT sci-fi) murder mystery. The main character was an Asiatic-looking creature who was part of the patrol for her species. And then it was revealed over time that many nefarious things were happening at the agency, oh, and it’s a trilogy. A very loooooong trilogy. But it started with a germ of an idea that festered and simmered in my brain for weeks.


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