Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Society

Still sketching out my sleep agenda

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I’m back to talk more about sleep. Here is my post from yesterday in which I did talk about sleep and what I was planning to do (for once! I kind of stuck to the topic). I ended by saying I was planning on staying up for 48 hours, and the minute I typed that, I was so exhausted. I mean, I’m fatigued all the time, but there are spurts of extreme tiredness that lasts a day or two.

There are two ways I can go with this. One is to try the 48 hours staying up and no sleeping route. That is a very hard route. Going down that path would be me trying to keep adding to it and reaching 72 hours. That would be pretty difficult, but I think I could do the 48 hours. Maybe not right now because I’m so tired, but at some point.

The other route is just to sleep whenever I’m about to fall over without regard as to what time it is, which would be easier. I sometimes fall asleep in my chair at my computer, and then I do this weird (and aggravating) thing of sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, and repeat.

I’ve also had it where I was watching a video on my laptop (lying on my couch), and I would have to repeat the same section several times because I kept falling asleep in ten-minute chunks. I was too stubborn to actually take a nap, though, because…my brain is broke? I joke, but not really. I would not say my brain is broken, but I would say that’s the way my brain works.

It’s so frustrating. I’m trying to accept that it’s not me being stubborn or a contrarian. It’s not me deliberately sabotaging myself. It’s how my brain works. That’s not to say that I have to just throw up my hands and say there’s nothing I can do about it, but I do think it would help if I didn’t view it as me being deliberately ‘bad’.

It’s difficult because that’s how I was viewed in my family–and how that kind of behavior is viewed by society in general. There is a narrow range of behavior that is considered acceptable, and woe be to the people who strayed too far outside those lines. These days, there seemed to be a little more tolerance of some divergence, but not much. It’s still a very narrow band of what kind of oddness is acceptable, and it’s rarely much.

I have mentioned the double empathy problem before, which is that it’s hard when autistic people and allistic non-autistic) people talk because of the very different mindset. Usually, it’s up to the autistic person to adapt and try to be ‘normal’ in order to fit into society. And if the autistic person doesn’t mask enough, they are excoriated for being weird, not trying, being rebellious, etc.


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Brain, brain, go away….

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Yes, I’m writing more about my brain and how I’ve thought it was broken for most of my life. When I was talking to my autistic friend (endless gratitude to her for making me realize that I miiiiiight be on the spectrum) about my childhood, I used the phrase, “felt like an alien”. She said that was exactly how she felt as a child and so many autistic people felt the same way. I also said that I always felt as if I was never given the manual for humanning. I really thought everyone else got some kind of instruction on how to be a human being.

“Turn to page 54 for complete instructions as to how to interact with humans at a party.” “And here on page 90, we see how to make small talk when you’re picking up your medicine.”

What I really wanted was David Attenborough to guide me through human life as if he was watching a rare species of, say, wild cat and describing their daily life to people who have never seen them before. I could have really used someone telling me how to be human before I was released into the general public. I used to joke that I was raised by wolves, but it was not really a joke. What I mean is that my parents had no idea what life in America was like, so they weren’t able to guide me. More to the point, they had no desire to integrate themselves into American culture, so they had no interest in teaching me about it.

It was the perfect storm of several negative things that made it so my entry into American society (school) scarred me. 1. I wsa a weirdo. I just was. Now I know there’s a reason for it, but back then, I just thought I was a sad and broken human being who should not have been born. And I was deeply depressed by the time I was seven. 2. My parents had no interest in American society and passed that down to me. We did not watch TV or go to movies or listen to the radio. I like to the apocryphal story of how the first pop song I heard was Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant in 1983 when I was 12. That’s pretty late in life, but it was indicative of how little my family cared about such things.

My parents were very conservative/traditional, which meant I was raised with a lot of restrictive ideas. I’m talking religious rather than politically, but I would not be surprised if the latter was true as well.


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Thoughts on my birthday…on my birthday

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I have more to say about my birthday–on my birthday. Technically. It’ll be my actual birthday in roughly seven hours I’ll be…ah….fifty…..er……..five? Yeah, that’s right. I honestly had to think about it for several seconds because I don’t really think about it. Again, it’s not because I’m getting older–it’s just because my age doesn’t matter to me.

Fun fact: When I was younger, I used to say I was a year older on January 1st. No idea why I did that, but many East Asian countries start at age 1 or 2 at birth. Maybe it was osmosis. Anyway, I say I have no idea why I started doing it, but it helped me get use to my new age by the time my actual birthday rolled around. As a result, though, I don’t always know how old I am. And, more to the point, I don’t really care. As with everything else in my life, it’s just a detail that doesn’t matter. Age really is just a number, and what I can or can do isn’t defined by it.

Whatever. I find my birthday meaningless, but I’m ok with other people wanted to acknowledge it (to a certain extent). Like, I’m going to be talking to K tomorrow, just so she can wish me a happy birthday. Here’s the thing. We both have April birthdays (hers is a few weeks after mine). When she was here, we would go out sometime between our two birthdays to celebrate them together (or any time near them).

She’s one of two people I actually get a birthday present for, and she gets one for me, too. She’s my soul sister, and I have been friends with her longer than anyone else in my life. I have joked with her that when we are both old, we’re going to be in an old folks’ home together, waving our canes at other prisoners inhabitants. We will shout things at them and just let the  chaos rain down.

I love her with all my heart, and I know she feels the same way about me. A few decades ago, we were talking about the hoary conundrum of ‘your best friend and your spouse are both drowning ten feet away from each other. Who would you save first?’. I was the one who brought it up, though I don’t remember why. She got angry and heated about it (which is unlike her). She said she hated that question beacuse she loved me and her husband equally. I was skeptical, but she insisted it was true. Unlike me, she cannot lie with passion. If she said that, I knew she meant it.

She said that she really didn’t like how society portrayed romantic love as being above all other loves. I didn’t either, so it was something else we bonded over. It’s very specific to Western culture. Eastern culture had a very different view on that, obvioously.


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Not knowing where and when to draw the line, part five

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This is yet another post about limits, boundaries, and when to push it and when to rest. In the last post, I touched on not knowing when to do the former and when to do the latter. I will delve further into that concept in this post. Let’s start with Bagua. I’m much more comfortable with keeping my weight back, but it still catches me off-guard from time to time. Early on, I asked my teacher how she remembered what she was doing when (Taiji versus Bagua). She said that she just got used to it and kept them separated in her mind. At the time, I didn’t understand, but now I do.

If I’m doing Taiji, then I’m doing Taiji. I’m primarily forward (meaning my weight is forward), and I’m being receptive of energy. I’m not trying to go hard or be in your face. In fact, I’m just chill and letting the energy flow through me. It’s very much vibes based and not doing too much. Most people can do Taiji (Yang-style, not Chen-style. The latter is really bad for your knees) as long as they just take it slowly and do not try to push themselves hard.

Bagua, on the other hand, I would not recommend to just anyone. If we’re just going by feel, Bagua feels dangerous. In fact, my teacher says that in CHina, people are wary of people who study Bagua. I don’t know how true that is, but I could see it being very true. There’s an aggression to Bagua that is completely absent in Taiji.

When I first started studying Bagua, I wondered how I would be able to make peace with how different they were. I had been studying Taiji up to that point, and the whole vibe of Taiji is to just be chill and not exert yourself too much. Empty step and never be double-weighted.

Bagua doesn’t care about any of that. The motto and mentality of Bagua are to do what it takes to ‘win’. Double-weighted? No matter. No empty stepping? Not a big deal! Take the aggression and run with it. In fact, start the aggression yourself. It’s explosive and a great way to rid myself of any anger I’m feeling (even if it’s only for a few seconds).

Like the yin-yang, Taiji and Bagua are polar opposites that complement each other. One is hot and one is cold. One is light and one is dark. One is day and one is night. They could not be more different from each other, and yet, tthey work really well together.


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When to push limits and when to CTFO, part four

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I’m back to write more about limits, boundaries, and toxic positivity–maybe. That’s what I wanted to write about in the last post, but then I wandered down the road of talking about my poor memory. I am going to get back on track now and write abotu what I said I wanted to write about, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Despite all the blathering I’ve done about being negative about pushing too hard, I’m not totally against it. I know you have to push yourself at times to get shit done. I especially have to do so because I tend to lean towards inertia. When K used to live here, we got together maybe once a month, usually to go out dancing. It took me quite some time to get ready to go. We usually did it like this. Let’s say we were meeting at eight. I would think about getting ready about six-thirty, but I could not make myself do it until seven or seven-thirty. It only took me ten minutes to get ready to go (I didn’t weear makeup at all), so that made it easier for me to drag my feet.

I would leave at twenty to eight because it took fifteen to twenty minutes to make it to K’s house. Then, I would sit on her bed for fifteen to twenty minutes and watch as she agonizehd over what to wear. We were both depressed people, and it took a lot of effort to get us moving. She would usually ask her husband to help pick out an outfit because he had a great sense of style while I just sat there, amused. We would rarely leave her house before a half hour after we agreed to go out. I was fine with it once I realized it was just the way she was.

One of my funniest memories of us going out was the one rare time when we were going to something in St. Paul, which was closer to me than her. So we decided that she would come to my house rather than the other way around. At eight (when we were supposed to meet), just as I was thinking about getting dressed, my doorbell rang. I was flustered as I realized she had come early (for her). In fact, that’s what I blurted out to her as I opened the door–“You’re early!” I’m afraid I said it in an accusatory tone (though I did not mean it that way).

“I’m on time!” She said immediately. “Which is early for you!” It was a thoughtless reply on my part, but fortunately, she laughed. We had been besties for long enough to be able to joke like that.


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When do you know you’ve reached your limits, part three

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I have one more post in me to talk about limits, sunken cost fallacy, and American toxic exceptionalism. Yes, I know it’s American exceptionalism and toxic positivity, but they are one and the same to me. It’s not that I don’t think you shouldn’t strive to do well–wait. Let’s stop there a second. I have to qualify it by saying that it’s good to try to improve yourself. That’s what I’m doing with the different weapon forms. But, in other ways, I have no desire. Like jobwise, I just don’t care. Then, there’s my personal flaws. I want to improve some of them, but others, I have just accepted. I know I’m not changing them, and that is perfectly fine.

The problem is when people feel like everything you do has to somehow work as an improvement factor. Like taking your kids to the park, you should walk briskly so you get in some exercise. It’s beacuse in America, most people are so busy. They need to squeeze in exercise whenever and wherever they can. So many Mom magazines includes ways to use your baby in your exercising.

Which, I mean. I’m sure it’s practical, but not every moment has to be a learning/teaching/exercise moment. This is something I have learned with Taiji. (And now, to a lesser extent, Bagua.) I chose it because it was the lazy person’s martial art. My teacher expressly tells us that the purpose is to exert as little energy as possible in order to have as maximum an output of energy as possible. She talked at length about how bad the American ‘give 110%’ mentality was, and I slowly came to agree with her.

I had a classmate back when I first started who told me an aggravating story. He said that every spring, he would feel inspired to run. Now, mind, he did nothing to prepare for that throughout the year. He would just go out and run like ten miles on the first day of spring that he felt was warm enough to run outside. Inevitably, he would pull a muscle and then not be able to run for the rest of the spring. He did this year after year, and then was always surprised when he injured himself on his first day out.

It’s so American, though. The belief that you have to hurt yourself when you exercise, otherwise you’re not exercising hard enough. “No pain, no gain” is one credo. So is, “Give 110%.” The latter really annoyed me beceause you literally cannot give 110%. I know it’s just a saying , but it’s always bothered me, anyway. It’s been known for quite some time that you cannot give your all at all times. Not just that–it’s not optimal to always push to do your best. Let me draaaaaag out another hoary chestnut–“Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.”


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When something is truly too hard, part two

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I want to talk more about where is the line between giving it your all and sunken cost fallacy. Here is my post from yesterday in which I was talking about my struggles with the Double Fan Form. I think back to when I laughingly assumed it would take me three months, tops, to teach it to myself.

Remember when I said yesterday that there were two results from the Dunning-Kruger study? One is so well-known, it’s called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In a nutshell, that posited that people who were really bad at something vastly overestimated their skill and didn’t understand how much worse they were at it than other people. People basically boil it down to people who are bad at something think they’re great, which, of course, is heavily dependent upon different demographics.

The second result they found is the other side of the same coin–that peoaple who are really good at something underestimate how much better they are at it than other people are. Again, that’s vastly simplified, but it’ll do for my  purpose. Which is, most of the time, I am the latter. I always think I suck at something, no matter what. If I can do it, anyone can. Or rather, that’s for things I know I’m no better than mediocre at.

That would include FromSoft games. I am horrible at them, and I think  that if I can finish them, anyone can (within reason, of course). It takes me twice as long to finish one for the first time as it does the most pedestrian of players. That would also include drawing, sadly. I tried to do it when I was a teenager/in my twenties, and I was very bad at it.  I saw no reason to keep trying because I suuuuuuucked at it. Could I have gotten better? Oh, yes. Did I want to put in the effort? Oh, no.

See, this is where it gets fuzzy. My brother and I have argued over the years about nature versus nurture when it comes to the creative arts. Thirty years ago, he was on the side of nurture while I was on the side of nature. That’s too simplified, though.

My brother is extremely talented in photography. I have long maintained that he could do it professionally (and he has done some side hustles as a photog). I, on the other hand, am a person of words. Writing is my thing–or at least it was. Not as sure any longer. I’m trying, and I’m hoping to find a way to break through whatever is blocking me (not a writer’s block, sadly. I would at least know how to deal with that. Even though I’ve only had it two or three times).


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When too hard is truly too hard

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I’ve been thinking about American exceeptionalism and how damaging it is. In this specific case, I want to talk about the difference between confidence and arrogance. There have been studies that show that women (and AFAB, I presume) often underestimate their abilities. Or rather, they don’t apply to jobs that they consider out of their reach whereas men do. That’s a gross simplification, but it’ll do for now.

Let’s talk about the Dunning-Kruger Effect (I promise you this is relevant). Everyone who has heard of it knows that it’s about people who really overestimate their own abilities and think that they are better at something (or all things) than they really are. What people don’t know, though, is the second result the researchers found. It’s that people who are really good at something (or things) vastly underestimate how much better they are at the thing than other people are.

It makes perfect sense as they both stem from the belief that (generic) you are the norm and everyone else skews towards the norm (you). In other words, it’s putting you at the center of the universe. I’m not even being angry about it because of course people will think of themselves as the norm. At least until they run into enough people who are vastly different than they are. Then, maybe, there might be a glimmer of hope. But, oftentimes, sadly, it’s just them dimissing everyone else as weird or outliers.

Do I sound bitter or pessimistic? Well, yeah. Look at the state of America right now. Why the hell wouldn’t I feel that way? The thing is, though, I have felt that for many decades. I’ve always looked at my country (and the world in general) with a jaundiced eye. It’s just how I am. I have always said that I’m a pessimist or a realist, but I had a friend in college tell me an optimist. When I protested, he pointed out that I expected the best out of people and was disappointed when I didn’t get it.

I opened my mouth to snap back, but then I closed it. Because you know what? He was right. I did expect people to do the right thing,and I was disappointed when they failed to do it. That’s what made me cynical, by the way. The fact that I thought people would do the right thing and then they didn’t. And this happened over and over again.

I, on the other hand, tended to think that I wasn’t anything special in any way and that if I could do something, other people could as well. sometimes, that’s true. Like with From games. If I can finish them, then truly anyone can. I am so bad at them. Astoundingly bad. So bad that why the fuck do I even play them? Ian and I have this argument from time to time. He says the games are exactly for people like me who can struggle with them and then feel real satisfaction when they beat the games.


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Last post about labels; no, really, part five

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I have one last (ha) post about labels in me. The ha is beacuse I have way more than that in me, but that’s what I’m going to limit myself to fro now*. I’m so tired of talking about labels, but I feel I have to as long as they have such an outsized effect on on society and what happens to marginalized people.

Side note: I’m playing a demo, a walking sim/graphic novel/something along that line, and it asked me for my gender. I sighed in hopelessness because  I have never–wait, what? I can put in my own pronouns? And I can just put in my name (my character name–mulan rogue. I always use that name as my character name), mulan when need be? The only one that tripped me up was possessive because it’s not an easy one to get around. I mean possessive as in “Dana said the house was _____ (hers, yours, his, theirs). I just put a period. Or maybe I just put ‘mulan’ again. Plus Mx. for a honorific. I considered not putting any (which I assume you could also do), but I like Mx. as a honorific. I mean like as in I would actually choose it, and not reluctantly.

Of course, it’s not used very much and most people don’t seem to like it. Story of my life, really. Me choosing the thing that people don’t like. Or being a part of a group that is most overlooked. I wish I was doing it on purpsoe because then it wouldn’t frustrate me as much–or at all. Instead, I just sigh quietly to myself–or not so quietly because I live alone–and just go about my day.

I have tried all my life to find labels that I didn’t hate with all my heart. I mean, at first I wanted to find labels that actually described me, but I tamped down my expectations after struggling for so many years. I just gave up on even trying after a while. It was less frustration, that way, believe me. Except bisexual/bi. That one still annoys me enough that I revisit it now and again.

I keep thinking I can find a better term, but I can’t. I would love to just leave it at ‘queer’, but as I have said, that’s been taken to mean gay. Yes, I could explain every time I used it that I hdidn’t mean gay, but that’s not something I want to do. I really dislike pansexual (common) and omnisexual (not common). I can’t think of anything else, sadly, so I reluctantly keep bi. I use it to mean those like me and those not like me. I have said that I would just like to use ‘sexual’, but we all know that would not work out well. At all.


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Put a label on this, part three

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I’m down for one more post about labels and why, while I hate them, they are necessary. I guess. The “I guess” is for the last part, because I’m not sure they are necessary. Or rather, I know we have to have them in general, but do we need to use them to the extent we do? I’m honestly not  sure. That’s what I want to explore in this post. I’m frustrated with, well, everything right now. The state of the world is shitty. I mean, that’s a given at any time, really, but there are times that are worse than others. This is most definitely one of those times. Here is my post from yesterday in which I mostly talk about how I don’t fit in with society. How that’s related to labels you’ll just have to wait and see.

I check the news one or two times a day, and it’s always grim. At least in the States. Every bit of news is more depressing than the last, especially for certain demos to which I belong. It’s just bleak and bleaker with no hope of relief. Sure, there are brief rays of light like when Noem got canned, but the person who’s going to replace her isn’t any better. Maybe less of an an attention-seeker, but that’s not necessarily better.

It’s hard. I don’t necessarily want competent people in these positions because then they can do more damage, but the incompetent people do a ton of damage as well. I guess it’s just what kind of damage I want them to do (ideally, none, but that’s not going to happen).

It’s just really depressing that we have regressed so much in the last year. It’s only been a year and a bit! But even more depressing that more than half of the people who voted actually voted for this hellscape. they can tell themselves any lies they want, but they did this. No, I’m not accepting the bullshit we all caused this to happen. My brother tried to pull that on me. “This is what we voted for.” No. Hell to the fuck no. I did not vote for this. I have voted against this kind of thing ever since I could first vote. I have consistently voted agains this kind of thing. I don’t accept any responsibility, and it’s this kind of false equivalence that we need to stomp out.

Do Dems need to do better in recruiting for our side? Yes. Do we need to make our message fresh and relevant? Also yes. Do we need to crunch our message down into  easy to understand bite sizes? Very much yes. But what we do not need to do is accept blame for something that is not our fault. I did NOT get this guy elected. I reject that will my whole body, heart, and soul.


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