Category Archives: Family

In yesterday’s post, I mostly focused on martial arts. I want to set that aside for this post and contradict what I had said in yesterday’s post about not having any more goals for this upcoming year. This is going to be family-focused, and it probably isn’t going to be pretty. Because family isn’t pretty. At least not mine, especially not now.

My father has dementia, and it’s getting worse. He’s almost eighty-six years old, and his decline in the last six months has been rapid and alarming. I talk to him maybe once every other week or so, and we Zoom (with my mother) once in a long while. We did that a few days ago, and my father was clearly not having a good day. Usually, he can hold it together enough to talk to me–and he almost always remembers who I am–but this time, it was clear that his mind was wandering.

Dementia is a cruel and ugly disease. It strips the person of everything–especially if the person is…look. My father was self-centered and self-absorbed before he got dementia. It’s only gotten worse because that’s what dementia does to you. It makes you a toddler who can only think of themselves, and it seems to be worse in my father because of his proclivities prior to getting it.

In addition, it emphasizes the dysfunction that already exists in my family. My mother has devoted her life to my father, and now, she has a valid reason for doing it. But she also resents it at the same time, and she has some pretty rigid ideas as to what he should and shouldn’t be doing.

The problem is that she’s hoping against hope that he’ll return to ‘normal’, and she cannot accept that dementia only goes one way. She told me about a promising new medical study for early-onset dementia, and I could hear it in her vocie. She knew that my father was beyond that, and yet.

I don’t blame her for hoping, honestly. Most people hope for miracles when something really bad happens. It’s the fact that she pushes my father to do things because she wants him to get better, and the things she pushes him to do border on cruel. Like when we were talking on Zoom, he suddenly decided he had enough. He abruptly stood up and started to leave. My mother protested and tried to stop him from leaving. He was pretty insistent on going, and she was equally insistent on him staying.

I broke in and told her to let him go because it was distressing to watch. And, there was no need for him to stay if he didn’t want to. That’s my mother, though. Once she gets an idea in her head, nothing is stopping her from executing it.

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I’m back with more actual goals. Here is my last post, and, yes, I’m still talking about my re-birthday. Hm. It’s really late (early in the morning), and I am exhausted. I t hink I’ll skip it and come back to it tomorrow.

I’m back. A quick side note (yes, this early): My sleep has been so fucked in the past two weeks. It’s the vaxxes and my bloodwork, and I really should not have done all of them on the same day. Yes, it made sense to do them all at one time just to get them done, but given my outsized reaction to shots, I should have known better.

It’s been a week-and-a-half, and my arms are almost 100% better. I’m still tired, though. Very much so. I was able to do the whole Swimming Dragon Form (hands-only, Bagua) after completely forgetting the beginning of it yesterday. I was also able to do the whole Double Sword Form, though I did have to peek at the videos now and again.

Here is the post from day before yesterday in which I listed four goals for this year. I struggle to make them realistic because I swing from making very small goals that I easily do and goals that are so big, there’s no way I can reach them.

In addition, I don’t know what is realistic, really. Like before my medical crisis, I could confidently say I could write a rough first draft of a novel (100,000 words or more) in a year. hell, I did that during NaNoWriMo several years in a row without breaking a sweat. Now, however, I don’t know if that’s true. I think I can still write 2,000 words a day? But I haven’t been able to do that in ages, either.

I want to set goals that I can conceivably achieve, but I just don’t know what that means any longer. I think it’s better to set ongoing goals when I’m unsure about the results. I think I can say that I will finish teaching myself the Double Fan Form. I have 11 movements left, so I could even possibly get it done by the end of this calendar year.

If that’s the case, then I need to start thinking about what I want to learn next. I do want to teach myself a Double Sword Form at some point, but there are several problems with that. One, there is not an official Double Sword Form–at least not one I could find. My teacher’s teacher hasn’t done one, either. She did ask him about it, and he said that you can do the Sword Form with two swords, doing the guiding hand mmotions with the off hand with a sword in that hand, too.

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I am back to write more about, well, my lack of writing. I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I had said to myself a few weeks after I got home that if I never wrote again, that was a fair trade-off for being alive.

I stand by that, but…

It’s hard. Before my medical crisis, I had stories in my head all the time, and I had no problem writing furiously for hours on end. I had a goal of two thousands words a day, and I had no problem fulfilling that goal. This is not a humblebrag or a brag, but 2,000 words was no problem for me. It took maybe two hours if I was really on a roll, and it was usual decent writing. Not end game writing, of course, but it was at least usable.

Now, I have tried to write the first two or three chapters of one, ah, yes, we can call it a novel I guess over and over again. The first ten pages or so? Great! Then, it just goes flat, and I cannot inject life into the words no matter how hard I try.

I gave up after writing the first few chapters four or five times. I have another idea in my head that is pretty far from the first one, but I would love to find a way to bring them together.

This is my strength and my weakness. I like to bring together disaparet ideas and make it work as best as I can. I don’t like to hear that something can’t be done because why the hell not? When I took a murder mystery writing class from a local mystery writer I really enjoyed (her work), I was pretty disappointed when she said I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I usually write from the first-person perspective, and for that class, I decided to have scenes in which the “I” character did not appear.

My teacher was adamant that this could not be done. She said if the book was in the first person, that character had to be in every scene. When I asked her why, she had no real answer for it. She just reiterated that it wasn’t possible/acceptable.

Here’s something you need to know about me. If someone can’t give me a solid reason for whatever they’re saying, I won’t accept it at face value. Let me rephrase that. I can’t accept it at face value; my brain just won’t allow it.

So when teacher was saying it wasn’t possible/correct to have the “I” chaaracter missing from scenes in a novel, I pushed back. I could not see why it wasn’t possible/proper/correct, and she kept saying it wasn’t done. Yeah, I know. But that’s not telling me why it can’t be done in the future.

You want to know the ironic bit? A few years after that, it became the rage to have murder/mystery novels with different perspectives. An “I” character could be missing from several scenes, and no one would bat an eyelash.

In other words, I was fucking ahead of my time. I often am. My brain doesn’t work the way other people’s brains work, and at some point, I resigned myself to just being a freak. Until that point (late twenties/early thirties), I just thought my brain was broken. I knew about neurodiversity, but I didn’t fit the stereotypical symptoms, so I thought it couldn’t be me.

In addition, many of the things that are empathized with auutism (lack of empathy, the inability to read social cues/situations, not being able to do extended eye contact) were not things I had an issue with. In fact, I excel at the first two and can (kinda) do the third. It wasn’t until an autistic friend told me to take the online test as unmasked as possible that I realized how much I was performing for the gen pop.

I’m excellent at social cues unless I’m really tired or sick because I have had to do it since I was a small child. Same with empathy. I am exceptionally good at it, but it’s something I developed and honed over the years. I do think I have some natural ability for it, but I can’t say for sure because I have been my mother’s emotional support person since I was eleven.

I think I will have to add to my goals something about finding a therapist/psychologist to help me sort out my shit. I have a lot of shit to figure out, and I tried to find a local therapist. The problem is that I need someone who understands straddling American and East Asian culture, the difficulties of living in a dysfunctional Asian family, queer and gender identity issues, AND autism issues.

If I had to choose, I would put the first two as the most important right now, but I would like at least a glancing knowledge of the other two.

I live in Minnesota which is predominately white. You can see my difficulty in finding someone who would have an in-depth knowledge of diaspora issues, especially for an Asian person. Especially during the current troubled times.

Another thing I really want to do in the next two months is finish teaching myself the Double Fan Form. I have taught myself 39 out of 48 postures, which means I’m more than three-fourths done.  I can’t tell you how agonizing it’s been and how I’ve doubted that I’d be able to do it. It’s the hardest weapon form I’ve learned/taught myself by far, and I was stuck halfway through for a very long time. I have never taken this long to learn a form, and I was oddly grateful when my teacher validated my feelings out of the blue. I sent her videos of the form, and she emailed me back saying, “Wow, this is really difficult.” That was unprompted, so it made me feel so much better.

I’ll be interested to see how many movements I’ve lost when I start practicing it again (have not done it in over a week before of my mulitple shots/vaxes I had on one day). I think with a little watching of the videos (three!), I can get back to where I was pretty quickly. That still leaves me with 9 or 10 movements left to go.

I do not doubt that I will learn it this year. But I’m curious to see how long it will take me. I have no idea. It could take me anywhere from another month to half a year. I hope it’s not the latter, but I would not be surprised if it did. After that, I’m not sure which weapon I want to learn next. Before I started teaching myself the Double Fan Form, I was thinking that I would want to teach myself a Double Sword Form. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an official one, and I’m not sure I want another really hard form after learning this one.

I may focus on refining my Double Saber Form. I think I’m getting a bit sloppy in my execution, and it’s not a bad idea to tweak a form every now and again. That’s all for today. One more post tomorrow.

 

 

I’m thinking about the next step in my life. This is the fifth year of my re-birth, and it’s time for me to start thinking about what I want to do with my life. In yesterday’s post, I talked about how I had been given the miracle of life, and I was so grateful for it. I will say, I was high as a kite while I was in the hospital, so everything was absoluutely amazing.

My brother ribbed me because I was fixated on ice water. Any nurse who came into my room, I asked them to bring me a glass of ice water. I’m talking several times a day so that by the end of the day, I had five to ten glasses lined up on my lap tray (not on my lap, though. Like an airplane tray that is raised and goes ever your lap) with varying levels of melting ice.

My brother laughed and told me that I did not have to thank each nurse for bringing me water because it was just their job. I retorted that it wasn’t their job to bring me ice water every two minutes. I didn’t think to say it, but als, even if it was their job, there’s nothing wrong with thanking them for doing it.

Side note: That water was fucking incredible. I raved about it to anyone who would listen. When I got back home, I raved about it on Twitter. I had people agreeing with me, and one woman who’s a nurse said it was because of the specific ice chips offered in hospitals. She said that she had colleagues who went in on their days off, specifically to fill a cooler with ice. K told me that their adult child had commented how great the ice was when they stayed in the hospital, too. So it’s not just me!

Best thing in the hospital by a country mile. The second-best thing was the oxygen tube I had to wear in my nose. About a decade ago, oxygen bars became a popular thing. I would see them around town and laugh because the idea of paying for oxygen to breathe was just ridiculous. Once I had pure ox (as I called it) coursing through my veins, I got it. I felt like I could do anything with the pure ox I was getting. It was sooooo good that I joked I was going to smuggle it out with me.

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