Tag: areligious | A Banana Peeled

Free to be a weirdo, part four

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Let’s talk more about being a weirdo. In yesterday’s post, I wrote about how sometimes, I wished I could be normal. Believe it or not, I’m not trying to be difficult most of the time–it’s just that I was born that way. I was musing about how much easier life would have been if I could have just been ‘normal, but that’s folly.

What I mean is that I can sit and speculate about how different my life would have been if I was normal, but I can’t verify it. It alsways irk me when people state confidently what would have happened if something or the other (big) had been different. Usually, in a toxic positivity way.

The one that really got to me was people who said that they would not change anything about their pasts because it made them who they were. I would ABSOLUTELY change certain things in my life because it would make me better! The heavy emotional abuse? Gone. The nightmare relationship in Thailand? It would be no more. The feeling like an alien and that I should not be alive that dominated my childhood? Erased in a heartbeat.

I also take issue with the people who said that going through trauma made you more empathetic. There are other ways to be empathetic, thank you, and I would like to think I would have been, anyway, without all the abuse.

I don’t know if I would have been a better, more functional person without the trauma I experienced, but I sure as hell would like to have a shot at it. Would I take no abuse and not knowing how it would turn out over what happened to me? 100%, in a heartbeat, no hesitation. How is that even a question?

I know I can’t change my past, obviously, but that trauma still lingers. Taiji has helped a great deal, and so has Bagua. So has love. So has me just saying fuck it to a certain extent. The realization that I’ll never be normal whatever that is was so freeing. I’m not saying it isn’t still a struggle because it is.

Side note: I find it amusing when people advocate for being your true self. What they usually mean is, “Be your true self–oh, not that true self.” What I mean is that most people mean a two-deviation-from-the-norm true self, not a ‘what the fuck is THAT?” true self. Like weird is being a vegan Crossfitter. Weird is not being agender, areligious, into Taiji and Bagua weaponry, and being ENM. Not to mention bisexual. And just not giving a damn about 90% of things society deems important. Oh, and neurodivergent.

Any one of those things would be considered weird. Some of them are considered deviant, evil, vile, disgusting, etc., by a huge chunk of people. Not just Americans, but that’s the society I know best. It’s interesting. I’ve been listening to a lot of Stray Kids content, and while they are pioneers in music and very ‘weird’ for Kpop, they actually adhere quite closely to Korean norms (as I understand them). Personally, I mean.

I’ve watched quite a bit of their content and realized that they would disapprove of me as a person. Yes, they say eveyrone should be their own person, but they have made it pretty clear that their attitudes toward alternative lifestyles (not talking queer, but ENM and gender norms to a certain extent) is negative. They have several songs about what they call ‘very bad guys’, and they’ve had arguments about who’s the worst. The guy who is mean to his ex-girlfriend including telling her how she really felt about him (which they don’t see as mean) or the guy who thought another woman was attractive, didn’t necessarily act on it, but broke up with his girlfriend anyway because he felt guilty.

Why am I like this? Part two

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Alternate title: Playing life on hard mode.

Yesterday, I wrote about how I unerringly pick the hardest choice when it comes to identity. And I tied it in with my dislike for hard games. Then I gushed a bit about Shadow of the Erdtree to make my point as to why I play From games (but, sadly, I probably won’t be able to play them for much longer).

Shadow of the Erdtree epitomizes what I love and hate about gaming. Or rather, the whole soulslike genre. I have tried so many soulslike games, and I have liked exactly one of them. That was Salt and Sanctuary (Ska Studios). And the reason I liked it was because it was almost exactly like a From game except in 2D. In fact the 2D aspect was my least-favorite part of the game beacuse it made rolling difficult. But they preserved the ability to beat the game with just magicks alone, which was why I enjoyed it so much.

Fast-forward to Life of Pi (Round8 Studio, now known as Nough, and NEOWIZ). Hahhahahah I just realized I called it Life of Pi. Lies of P, not Life of Pi. People not being me have declared it the best soulslike not done by From. Some have even said it could have been done by From themselves. I strongly disagree with that, by the way. The level design in severely lacking, and I don’t consider it good combat that only relies on one thing (fucking parrying. Goddamn it. I hope this trend goes awaya soon). It’s boring as fuck, and no, that’s not just my bitterness talking. Yes, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole reason

Even within the FromSoft games, the ones I like better are the ones that allow you to play in a variety of ways. I have said time and time again that Sekiro is my least favorite of the From games, and it’s in a large part because you have to play the game the way the devs want you to play. Or rather, it’s no fun if you can’t/don’t.

People like to say this line, “When you click with the combat, it’s makes the game easy.” When I said the combat never clicked for me, I could see their brains screeching to a halt. I was talking to my nibling’s spouse about it, and they were talking about how a certain boss was a hard skill check. “That’s when the combat clicks–or you quit.” I told them that it never clicked for me, and I beat that particular boss the way I beat all the bosses–by whittling away at the health.” They said in all seriousness that they didn’t know you could beat the boss like that. I said, “You can, but it’s not fun.”

Which is true. I beat the game, but the second I beat the final boss and the very brief elation faded, all I felt was relief. I never, ever had to fight that boss again–and it was the best feeling in the world.

I watched a video from a guy who loved the From games, but who was very clear about there being a line between hard bosses that were fun and fair, and being difficult just for the sake of being difficult. He mentioned the last boss of the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, who was a nightmare when the game first came out. It was not a fun fight at all, and I don’t know why I persisted*. But it was an awful boss. I was shocked at how bad it was. It felt like pure fan service, and not good fan service at that.

Now, to be fair, one of my biggest issues with the boss pre-nerf was that I could not actually see the boss with the light show going on in the second phase of the fight. See, every action was accompanied by a holy attack that had light trails errrrrrywhere (and I do mean everywhere). And there’s a specific attack that is nearly impossible to avoid if you don’t start sprinting in the opposite direction the second you see it’s going to happen. Even then, you can still get tag–and if you get hit by it fully, it can one-shot you.

I. Hate. Being. One. Shot. By. A. Boss.

It feels cheap and really discourages me from trying again. It idd not help that I got the boss down to about a tenth of their health bar on my second try–and then did not come closs again for hours. That’s how it goes, I know, with big From bosses, but it just cemented my hatred for the boss.

This boss was so bad, many people respecced just to beat this boss. Think about it. You’ve played the entire DLC with one build, and then you have to change it to a very specific build in order to beat the final boss of the DLC. I did not respec, but that’s becauuse I actually had (sort of) one of the builds best suited to beating this boss.

Here’s the connection. Kind of.

In real life, I often feel as if I’m playing on hard mode. I don’t choose it on purpose, but I don’t really have a choice. It’s not as if I said, “Hey, I want to make my life as hard as possible so I’m going to eschew not only binary genders, but nonbinary genders as well. I’m going to choose nightmare mode and go with agender.”

If I wanted to play on easy mode within the traits that were given to me from birth, I would be a cishet woman who got married and had two children. Working a nice job that didn’t take too much of my energy because I had to devote that to my man and my children. Pilates three times a week, maybe a little ladylike curling of 1-pound dumbbells (I use 15-pounders when I do my Taiji weight-bearing sets. Or 20-pounders for the easier of the movements.)

That would have been easier–along with being a Christian. Which I was born as. Let me clarify. It would have been easier in the sense of blending in with society and not making waves. And maybe I would have felt less like a freak/alien. Well, if I actually wanted those things, I mean. Because I don’t, it would have made me feel even lonelier if I tried to do all that just to fit in. When my mother went on a fifteen year campaign to get me pregnant, the only time I wavered was when she wore me down to the point that I considered doing it just to shut her the fuck up. Which is not a good reason to have a child, honestly.

Fortunately, I came to my senses and did not give into my terrible impulse. It just goes to show, though, how much my mother bugged me to have children.

More tomorrow.

*I know why. I’m a glutton for punishment. And I’m stubborn AF. And I would feel like a failure if I didn’t beat the boss.

Bah humbug is a holiday spirit

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

When I was in ninth or tenth grade, I wrote an opinion editorial (“op-ed” in the biz) about how Christmas had become so commercialized. This was over thirty-five years ago, and I was such a naive child back then. I thought I had seen the height of consumerism, but I had seen nothing yet.

I loved Christmas as a kid, of course, because I got presents. That was it. No other reason. Just the presents. My brother and I would snoop around to find them before Chrismas. We also found things I’d rather not know existed, but that’s the danger of snooping.

Christmas was oddly disappointing, though, even back then. Well, not oddly. It makes sense when you think about it. When you’re a little kid, a year is such a big chunk of your life. It takes forever to get from one Christmas to another.

Then, Christmas lasted a couple hours an was over for another year. Even if you got everything you wanted for Christmas, there was still the yawning emptiness afterwards because material goods did not fulfill you permanently. This was obvious–now. Not to a little kid who waited all year to get whatever the toy of the year was. To be honest, I didn’t even remember what I got for presents. I knew they were what I asked for or what my mother would think a girl would want (if it was the latter, then it wasn’t what I wanted). I didn’t really remember.

What I did remember was one year, there was nothing in my stocking. I told my mother about it, and she told me to go back to bed. Fifteen minutes later, she called me to the stocking (and my brother, too, probably) and there were things in it. That was my first inkling that Santa wasn’t real.

Then, I started hating Christmas. There were two reasons for this. One, my fractious relationship with Christianity. I left it when I was twenty and had sex for the first time. I didn’t really believe before that, but I tried so hard. But my mother’s particular brand of hardcore fundie evangelical Christianity never sat well with me–especially the terrible sexism of it all.

When I realized they were lying about sex (that premarital sex was the worst thing you could do and would cast your soul into eternal hell), there was no going back. When someone llies to you that consistantly, persistantly, and without remorse, all the trust was gone.

Invisibility is my superpower

Posted on January 20, 2023 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I’m used to being ignored. It’s a fact of life that people tend to think in the binary. It’s one reason it’s been so difficult to broaden the public consciousness on gender diversity. It’s also a fact that people are territorial. Us and them is pretty much innate (we can argue whether it’s more nature or nurture, but most people feel it to some extent).

I belong to several groups that are outside the binary. I am not black or white. I’m Asian (Taiwanese), so I get ignored when the question of race arises. I’m bisexual, so again, neither gay nor straight. It’s interesting because in the post about trans and gender-diverse people that I wrote about yesterday (at Ask A Manager), there were several bis in the comments (including me) who have said that we’ve gotten shit from gays and lesbians, and it hurts more than the shit we get from hets.

Side note: I am not happy with the term bisexual, but I don’t like pansexual or omnisexual, either. If I had my druthers, I would call myself sexual and leave it at that. I reall ydon’t like labels (and not in that smarmy ‘no labels’ way), but it’s because I find them constraining. I’m a sloppy, messy person who doesn’t fit into any one category. That’s why I’ll default to the broadest category possible, but still not be satisfied with it.

I’m also areligious/agnostic, rather than an atheist–and I’m certainly not a Christian, I don’t know if there is a god (though I don’t think there is is a Christian God), but at this point, I don’t care. Not in a negative way, but in a ‘I don’t want to think about it any longer’ way.

I have a similar feeling about gender. I just don’t care about it. I had been chewing it over before I ended up in the hospital, and my brain went in many different directions. The reason I started stepping away from ‘woman’ was because of other women. All my life, I had been told that I was not acting properly as a woman.

This included, but was not limited to–not having children (the big one); not wanting children (a bigger one); not wanting to get married; not wearing makeup; not caring about fashion, cooking, or cleaning; liking to climb trees; dislkiking dolls; picturing strangers on the street naked and how they’d be in bed; liking sports; and that’s just the short list. I’m sure some people would put Taiji weapons and video games on that list, too.

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