Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Health

My memory is Swiss cheese (with reason)

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I have been trying to find my passport because–well, reasons. I had a dim memory of it being in my underwear drawer and thoroughly dug through it. It was not there. Then, I thought, maybe I put it in a different drawer? I checked all of them. Not there. Hm. Maybe my desk? I had a hazy memory of putting it in my desk drawer, ‘hidden’ in something. Nope. Not there, either. I checked all the drawers several times.

I thought about it for the next few days, and then it hit me. It was probably downstairs in the safe! I went downstairs, but the safe was not where it usually was. I was so puzzled until I remembered that my brother and I had put it in one of the many boxes on the floor (mostly filled with books). I opened all the boxes, rummaging through them. I could not find the safe. I went through all of them again, and I still could not find the safe.

I called my brother to ask him if he remembered putting the safe into one of the boxes. He said yes. He said we did not bury it in anything, either. I went back down to look yet again, but I could not find it.

I was so frustrated and mad as hell. Mostly at myself! I know that my memory is shit since my medical crisis. I’m not mad at losing my memory because it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make for regaining my life. Easy choice, right?

I compensate by writing shit down if I need to do something or be somewhere at some point in time. However, I have not trained my brain yet that I also need to write down shit like this. Though, to be fair to me, I hid my passport before the medical crisis.

I did know that I had a valid passport in 2018 when I went to Malta. I vaguely remembered that it was new, but I wasn’t sure about that. I hadn’t used it for several years before that, and it’s not something I have to think about in my day-to-day.

I was frustrated, but I didn’t think anything would be helped by me going through the boxes for a fourth time.

My brother was in the neighborhood tonight (kind of ), so he stopped by. I haven’t seen him in a hot sec because he’s been busy, busy, busy–which is his standard MO. We got to talking aabout my passport and my frustrations with not being able to find it. My brother being who he is said immediately, “Want to go look for it?”


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Even more about martial arts and me

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I skipped a post for today becuse my brother came to visit late last night during the time I would normally write the post for that day. In addition, it was daylight changing time last night, which meant we lost an hour during the night.

Side note: Can we please do away with changing the clocks twice a year? There is no good reason for it any longer, and it just throws everything out of whack. I don’t care which way they choose, but just do it. We have indoor lighting and no longer need to rely on the sun.

In addition to that, Saturday is the one day I actually have to get up at a certain time because I have class at noon. These days, that means getting up at 11:30 a.m. or so. I don’t do my individual practice on Saturdays now, but I don’t like that–even though I do have class.

Here is yesterday’s post about how once you know the rules, you can break/bend them. And how exhilarating it is to realize that the rules no longer apply to me. Or rather, that I can follow the principles of the martial art without following the ‘rules’. Basically, as long as it follows the principles, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the form or not.

The bottom line is that the forms are the way they are for health, mostly. Well, that’s how it used to be. Now that Sifu is incorporating Master Choi’s movements into the Solo (Long) Form, there are more applications/combat than before. When I first started, the Solo Form was way more health/flourish-focused. Master Liang loved the tassel form of all the weapons, and he loved putting everything to music. That meant that the counts were always even and sometimes he added movements just to make it look prettier or to fit the music. That’s not to say that he padded the form, but I was appreciative when Sifu cut out the fluff.

In addition, he made it vastly easier. There were some movements that were difficult for no good reason. When Sifu saw everyone fall on certain movements, he modified them or took them out.

I did not finish this post because Daylight Savings is really messing with me. So I’m doing it today instead.

In the last five years or so, Sifu has changed a great deal to the Solo (Long) Form. I think  it’s in part beacuse of the pandemic (having more home time and being able to focus on refinement), and I was frustrated at the time. Why? Bceause when he changes the forms, he doesn’t necessarily articulate that he’s doing it. My teacher has seen him do something differently, asked him about it, and he’s told her that he’s changed the way they did that posture. And then he may change it back a few months later.


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Even more about gender and martial arts

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Back again to talk more about gender and martial arts. I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I had to slow down the rate at which I was teaching myself because I was messing some things up. For example, I recently re-taught myself the Fan Form because I realized I had forgotten whole chunks of it. Now, I have found out there are a few places that I’m fudging things. In other words, I need to go watch the videos again.

There are two problems when it comes to me learning martial arts forms. One, my memory is shit since my medical crisis.so I forget that which I have already learn. Not all of it, obviously, but enough to make it disconcerting. Weirdly, though, I am not being hard on myself about it. In the old days, I would call myself names and silently (or not so silently) scold myself for being stupid. This is the pressure of being raised in a hypercritical family.

I feel free, light, and airy when I’m doing my weapon forms. Sometimes, though, I feel fierce, strong, and ready to beat the shit out of someone. Not in real life, but in my mind. I don’t want to get into a fight for real, but I want to be in fighting form.

Working on my weapon forms helps with my depression and anxiety. Both have spiked lately, in a large part because of the landscape of America right now. When I can focus my anixiety and anger on a specific target, even if it’s imaginary, it really helps.

I really groove with combining the karambit and the fan. They could not be more different as weapons.. The karambit is a fast, small dagger that is meant to be used in quick movements. It’s fast, and indeed, furious. It’s dangerous. It’s meant to kill quickly. Maximum damage in a minimal amount of time.

The fan, on the other hand, is languid, slow-moving, and stealthy. You’re not going to see it coming in part beacuse you’re not going to think to worry about a fan. That’s just something you use to cool yourself down when it’s too hot, isn’t it? It’s a weapon that will lower someone’s guard and then I can poke them in the throat with it while their attention is on the karambit.

It really is the yin and the yang of weapons. I picked them to go together because they were roughly the same size (very roughly), but that’s it. They just work well together. I can’t tell you why other than what I’ve already said and good vibes.


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Health, gender, and kung-fu fighting

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I have still more to say about gender and martial arts. That should not surprise anyone because once I get stuck on something, I go on and on and on about it. Yesterday, I talked about gender and what I think of it (not much). I’m so tired of talking about it, but it’s a big deal right now given the state of my country at the moment.

I have been voting for thirty years. I have voted Democratic almost every time*. I have not been happy about it most of the time because it’s just the least worst of two evils. The only times I’ve felt joyful about voting was for Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Take from that what you will. I dutifully voted for whoever had the D by his (and yes, it was overwhelmingly male which says a lot about the Democratic Party, but taht is not what this post is about) name, but I never felt good about it. Or rather, rarely.

I know that I don’t belong to this time or place, but I also don’t think I would have fit in any time or place. And I don’t know how much fight I have in me to try to change the world for the better. I realize that I’m slipping back to where I used to be, more and more each day.

I know it’s because of inertia and because we tend to go back to homeostasis. In other words, we don’t move in a positive direction without being deliberate about it. Some people like my brother do it almost effortlessly. I envy that about him, by the way. If he thinks something sounds fun, he just does it.

When he was here a few days ago, he was telling me about his adventures in Taiwan and Thailand with his GF. Each day, they had a plan, but then they changed it on a whim if something else looked better. I remembered that from when we went to Taiwan together, and it was a nightmare for me.

I digress.

I tend to stick to my routines, and they work until they don’t. One big example is my sleep. I have always had shitty sleep, starting from when I was a kid. When I was six or seven, my mother would put me to bed at seven or eight, and I would put a t-shirt in the crack under the door so I could read until midnight. I have always liked the night better than the day.

When I went to college, I could not go to bed until 3:30 a.m, even though I had a class that was a quarter to eight in the morning. I would get up at 7:30 a.m. and race to class. I was so sleep-deprived that I could not find my portable alarm clock one morning. I looked for it for five minutes, and it was nowhere to be found.


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Health in relation to identity

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Here’s the thing I learned from my debacle about not wanting/not having children. And this took me a decade into my thirties at least to fully suss out. I had no idea why women would be angry at me for not wanting children and being vocal about it. It’s beacuse they had bought into the societal message that they were supposed to have children and they could not tolerate anybody who indicated the lie in that statement. Because if they did,, then they would have to examine the choices they had made in their life. And they did not want to do that. Oh, they did not want to do that.

I must stress as I always do that I did not crow about it or say that anyone who wanted/had children were stupid/ignorant/out-of-pocket or anything like that. I never brought it up because I didn’t think about it except when people asked me about it. I used to explain it like this. I would never bring up not not having a dog because it was not a part of my life. Same with kids. I would never bring them up because I didn’t have them, didn’t want them, and did not have them as a part of my life.

Anyway. I was not ashamed of not having kids nor for not wanting them. I did not apologize or act as if it was a failing on my part. Because it wasn’t. That was my first step to distancing myself from being a woman, though I did not yet know it. If I was going to get so much shit from not doing my womanly duty (including from my mother, oh so much so), then I did not want to be a woman.

The bra thing is the same. Here’s my post from yesterday. Most women/AFAB people do not like wearing bras. Many wear them simply because they’re supposed to.. It’s a societal expectation, and when some people opt out, it triggers the crabs in a bucket mentality/martyr complex in others. “If I have to suffer, so do you!” It’s a terrible way to live life, but many people have that mentality.

So these oh-so-feminist and progressive women could not explain why they were so upset that some women and AFAB people did not want to wear bras. But even more so, they were upset that we weren’t apologetic about it. There were a half-dozen other women/AFAB people who unabashedly declared they would never wear a bra again without a hint of apologia in their statements.

And some women got so mad. SO MAD. Like, you would have thought we came and took their bras so they couldn’t wear them, mad. Just for saying we preferred not to wear bras or wouldn’t wear them.


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Two steps forward, two steps back

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I was going to write about something other than health/weapons today–

By the way. I find it highly amusing that I just wrote health and weapons back to back like they are equal things. Heh. Well, in my mind, they are, of course. Weapons equal health to me–or rather, the former leads to the latter.

A friend of mine asked how I was able to learn more than one form at a time. My very dissatisfying answer was that it’s a vibe thing.. Each wepaon feels different to me so that I do’nt mix up the forms. Not even after my medical crisis. My memory is shit in general, yes. I have to relearn movements from the forms I have most recently learned. Yes. But I don’t mix up forms, which I’m very grateful for.

I mentioned in previous posts that–oh, here’s yesterday’s post. Do with it what you will. I’ve mentioned in previouus posts that I have had trouble loving the saber and the cane, separately. With the saber, it’s because I expected to be the sword–and it wasn’t.Then, when I accepted it for what it was, I grew to be fond of it. Quite fond. But I never felt passionate about it until I started doing the Cane Form with the saber.

Coincidentally, I also didn’t care much for the cane when I first learned it. I think that’s partly because the pandemic interrupted my learning of it, which made it a very fractured experience. Buut, again, it was much different than the sword–which was the benchmark for weapons in general back in the day. I judged everything by the sword, and it was not a smart thing to do. Every weapon is different, and I needed to remind myself of that whenever I got frustrated with one of the weapons.

I love the sword. It is near and dear to my heart for many reasons. One, it opened me up to something that I never would have imagined would be so important to me. I can’t imagine my life without the weapons, and it all started with my teacher’s persistence in insisting that I just hold the sword.

I can still remember the scene as clear as day. I have recounted it several times because it was so important to me. It literally changed my life, and I would not be here without it. So I’m going to tell it again.

A few years after I started taking Taiji classes from my teacher, she mentioned weapons. She said it was time for me to learn the Sword Form. I protested. Vehemently. I was a pacifist at the time, and while I wanted to learn Taiji for self-defense, I could not imagine doing anything as violent* as weapons.

*I have also ranted at length about how women and AFAB people in this culture (and my heritage culture, Taiwanese, as well–even more so, actually) are brainwashed into thinking that the worst thing we could do is dare to be angry at someone. We were supposed to be selflessly (heh. I wrote selfishly at first. Freudian slip) giving to everyone with nary a murmur of protest.

In case you can’t tell, I’m still bitter and angry about this. I’m still unpacking the damage this has done to me, and this is one way I am healing that damage. I don’t talk about it much because most people misunderstand. Whenever I mentioned it on Twitter (back when I acutally used it and it wasn’t a trash heap of shit), I would get responses from men and women that were vastly different–but equally upsetting/annoying/irritating.


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Let’s talk about health, bay-bee

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I’m going to talk more about taking care of myself. Here is the post from yesterday in which I explained why I did not care for the Instapot. I think one of the things that I have accepted about myself is that I am not going to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to feeding myself; I just am not. I am not going to cook more than pasta and premade sauce or rice and steamed veggies with rotisserie chicken from Cubs.

I wish I could find joy in cooking; I really do. It seems like something that would be great to get into, and you have a delicious result at the end. The problem is that–well, there are more than one issue with cooking for me.

One. I have so many food restrictions, and while substitutions are better now than they have ever been, it can be hard to find them in my local Cubs. And they’re more expensive than the regular items. I used to buy Lactaid cottage cheese, but for some reason, it’s not made any longer. I can’t find it at Cubs or online. I looked up recipes for something similar and easy to make. I tried it (out of tofu), and it was horrid. It did not taste like cottage cheese at all.

I knew better. Fake food items rarely taste like the real thing. They are better these days than thirty years ago, but you have to keep in mind that they are not the real thing. In other words, you have to try to appreciate them for what they are. There are some that are delicious in and of themselves, and there are some that are really close to what the original tastes like.

The one exception is cheese. Daiya is the closest I’ve found to the real thing, but I still wouldn’t eat it on its own. It has to be on something and melted. It has the right consistency and that boingy spring that cheese has when melted. Eat it on its own and cold, though? Hell, no.

I’m really grooving on the doing the Cane Form with the saber. It’s amazing how much it’s changed my feelings about both the cane and the saber. Before this, I would have put them both at the bottom of my weapons. Now, I have to say I love practicing with them. Would I put them at the top of my faves list? I wouldn’t go that far, but I have a new appreciation for them. I’m including the video of my teacher’s teacher doing it below. Yes, again, because it’s that amazing.


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More about health, mental and physical

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I’m writing more about health, and I’m going to try to stay on topic today. That’s probably not going to happen, but I like to have goals. Hope springs eternal and all that. Here is my post from yesterday.

I will say before I get started that I’m still working on the Cane Form with my new shiny saber. I polished up the second row (out of four) because there’s a move that I was having issues with while using the cane. It’s a simple block the leg move, but you can add a twirl to it. I like to add the twirl, but I felt as if I was doing it wrong. Watching my teacher’s teacher do it with the saber clarified what I was doing wrrong, and now I can do it with relative ease.

I gave myself a week to learn the third and fourth rows because they are a bit mor ecomplicated than the first two (especially the fourth row), but I don’t think that will be necessary. I got the third row with ease in two or three goes, and I’m optimistic about the fourth.

My god. My biceps are getting really hard. I have always been proud of my guns, and that pride has only grown now. My new saber is hefty, and it feels so good in my hand. I still don’t love the Saber Form, but I’m more positive about it than I have been in the past.

Back to health in general. I am trynig to cut down on how much I DoorDash, but it’s hard when it’s right there. In fair disclosure, I ordered tonight, but I did not feel good about it. I hate cooking. I hate it so much. There is nothing enjoyable about it to me, and if I never have to do it again, that will be way too soon.

I can do simple things like cooking pasta and throwing sauce, cheese, and veggies on it. I can bake a pizza, too, but that doesn’t mean I can make one. I have thought about going back to baking, but I’m not sure I want to do that if I’m trying to be healthier.

I think I have to go back to the basics. I can get a rotisserie chicken a week and then make salads and sandwiches to eat. Along with the pasta. These are very simple dishes, and I can throw any manner of veggies on top of them. I don’t mind eating the same food several days in a row, either. It’s just that when it’s six or seven, my lizard brain says, “Hey. I can just order from DoorDash, and it’ll be here in twenty minutes.”


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Let’s talk more about health in general

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Let’s talk more about health in general. Here is yesterday’s post filled with ranting and ravings about life in general. Despite my best intentions, I went off the rails as usual. Let me try to focus on the point I want to make. Which is that family dysfunction sucks. No, wait! That’s not the point I was trying to make. My point was that it’s hard to tackle health/diet without slipping back into thinking about the eating disordered thinking that my mother has exhibited all her life.

I’m trying to be healthier withouth becoming disordered. I have not been able to do this all my life, so what makes me thinkk that I can do it now?

I think it because I have fifteen years of Taiji under my belt. I think it because I still am thankful to my body for carrying me through my medical crisis–something I should not have survived. Here’s something that many people don’t know; it’s better to be ten pounds overweight than underweight if you suffer a medical crisis. I knew this before my own medical crisis, and it’s something I tell people whenever I can. I feel like a broken record, and most people don’t want to listen. It is so engrained in us that being fat is the worst thing in the world, many people can’t fathom that maybe it’s not true.

I remember several decades ago, I was listening to NPR (or MPR. I’m pretty sure it was NPR, though), and they had a doctor on. She was saying that as you got older, you should GAIN weight, not lose it. Partly for the reason I already said (it cushions your body if anything happens to it), but also for other reasons. Which I don’t quite remember. This reason, though, is the one that stuck in my head. That it’s better to gain weight as you get older to cushion your organs in case something really bad happens to them.

Anyway. I don’t like being fat. I am being truthful in saying that while I can still appreciate what my body has done for me, I don’t like how it looks. There are several reasons for that which I’m not going to get into at this moment. I’ve done it so many times in the past and that, while relevant, is not the point of this post.

I’m trying, yet again, to be healthier without falling into the trap of only carrying about being fat. I’m doing things like walking on the hour when I remember (as I mentioned yesterday). I’m trying to be more consistent with my fruits and veggies, and I think this is a good start.


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More talking about my health in general

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In yesterday’s post, I was talking planning on talking about health in general, but I quickly derailed myself to talking about family dysfunction instead. It’s related to health, though, so  I don’t feel completely bad about it. Let’s face it–family dysfunction is baked into so many things, I could unpack it forever. I’m also still ignoring *waves at the world around me* everything because I have to figure out how to deal with it in a not rage-inducing way.

In yesterday’s post, my intent was to talk about eating more healthily and doing things to better my health in general. That’s not the way it went, but that was my intent. Instead, I went on a rant about how my mother made me feel like shit about my body from thet time of seven and sent me down a very dark and painful path because of her obsession with how the ideal girl/woman should look like.

It got so bad that after my last visit to Taiwan (gotta update my passport ASAP, just a side thought), I had to put my foot down and tell my mother that she could not mention my health ever  again. I had forbade her from talking about my weight at some point, which meant she just changed from talking about my weight to talking about my health–but she meant my weight.

How do I know? Well, first of all, I know her very well. Secondly, when I was in college and anorexic, my junior counselors called her in to talk to her about it. They did it out of good intentions, but it was not a good thing for them to do. Why? Because it embarrassed the hell out of her, and she gets nasty when she’s shown up. Not in the any typical way, but in underhanded, manipulative, guiltt-induucing ways.

I remember my mother sitting there with her face sour. I could tell she was upset–at me. Not for being anorexic and bulimic, but for making it look like she was a bad mother.

Did she have anything to say about me being anorexic and bulimic? No. Did she have any concern to show about my health? No. In fact, the only time she ever said anything about me when I was skinny was during my second dance with anorexia. She looked at me for several long seconds and then said, “Your waist is tinier than mine.” She said it with such hate and jealousy, I internally recoiled.

This is how I know that her concern abouut my health is bullshit. If she were really concerned about my health, she would be worried that my thighs didn’t touch, and I could not make it up a flight of stairs without gasping for breath. Do you want to know how distorted her thinking was on the subject? Before I went to college, I used to blast my boombox (yes, I’m that old) and dance on the living room floor for hours as my exercise. My mother once said, “Should you be doing that? I’m worried that the floor will collapse.”


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