Tag: beyond labels | A Banana Peeled

Tag Archives: beyond labels

More about labels because I can, part two

Posted on November 5, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I’m still on the label trip because that’s the way my hyperfocus works, and by the way, can I say that for all the bashing hyperfocus gets, it can be really useful, too. I have over 10,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project, and we’re barely into day four. I give all credit to hyperfocus. When I first started learning Taiji weapons, I fell in love with the sword. Once my Taiji teacher placed it in my hand, I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I pushed her to teach me the Sword Form as quickly as possible as I was obsessed with it. Once again, hyperfocus did me a solid.

What? I’m not supposed to be appreciative of hyperfocus? I’m supposed to say it’s bad and makes me lose time when I should be doing something else? That’s not wrong, of course. There are times when I’ve put hours into something I shouldn’t have. Such as FromSoft games. I have made a rule that I can’t start playing one after midnight because there is no way in hell that I will only play for an hour.

On the other hand, it’s a good thing when I use the pressure of something exterior to me to get shit done, such as NaNoWriMo. I have not been able to write (except here) for several months. Many months. So many months. NaNoWriMo was coming up, and a few weeks ago, I thought, “What if I use it to jumpstart my flagging writing?” I decided that was a good thing and started planning what I wanted to do in NaNoWriMo. In the past several years, I had been doing NaNoRebel because that was more my style and I was bored with NaNoWriMo.

Interjection: In yesterday’s post, I wrote about why I don’t date and what labels I could affix to that. It made sense when I wrote it. That’s all I can say in my defense. Back to my musings.

This year, I decided to go back to my roots precisely because I had not written in months. As the old saying goes, writing at all is better than not writing. It was time to go for the basic ‘write 50,000 words in a month’ and call it a day. I had all these ideas of what I wanted to write about with my NaNoWriMo project, but I wasn’t sure how to do it gracefully.

I had planned on doing two simultaneous projects, but now I’ve smashed it into one. A quick description of it would be mystical/surreal, murder mystery, autofiction (memoir because I like alliteration). To put it in friendly vernacular, I threw everything including the kitchen sink. Why? Because I wanted to. Also because I can. Also because why not? Wthi a healthy dose of ‘you can’t tell me what not to do’.

Another layer peeled

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I’ve known since I was very young that there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t like other kids and they didn’t seem to think the way I did. I didn’t have any real friends–not the way other kids had friends. They talked about the tv shows they watched (I didn’t watch much tv) or the movies they went to (I never went to the movies) or the latest songs (I didn’t listen to music. Apocryphal story that I’ve been telling for decades. The first pop song I ever heard was Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant when I was in sixth grade.) I read in most of my free time, which was not popular to talk about.

I was fat, Taiwanese (before it was hot/sexy/in to be Asian), brainy, and had no sense of what would make me fit in. Second-generation American struggles are real, yo. I constantly felt like I was an alien in a strange world. I had no idea what I was supposed to say or do. It was a miserable experience and I became deeply depressed when I was seven. I spent the next twenty years wanting to die, but not having the guts to do it. I learned to act like a normal person, but I felt as if the rules were always changing. And, of course, what was normal for one person or group of people was not the same for others.

One thing I’ve learned in my many decades on this planet. People love to categorize other people. Maybe this is just an American thing, but I doubt it. We tend to be attracted to people who are like us. It’s human nature; I don’t begrudge that. It’s the way to know if you’re safe or not in a quick heuristic glance. But, there are limits to the heuristics, and I’m finding them not useful at all these days.

Here’s the thing. Most people are black-and-white thinkers. They are binary in their beliefs, even when it comes to ideas that don’t lend themselves to being so concrete. When we talk about racial issues, it’s always black and white. MAYBE brown thrown in for good measures from time to time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath as an Asian and forget about indigenous folks at all. We Asians came up for a hot second with the corona virus causing many people to lose their minds and start outright hating on Asians, rather than just doing it quietly. I’ve given up a long time ago about anyone caring about Asian people in America except for the quick sentence when anti-Asian violence happens.