Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: cultural norms

Dementia is terrible, part two

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I was talking about my father’s dementia yesterday. In my own meandering way, I was grieving for…what exactly, I’m not sure. Not my relationship with my father because that’s always been strained. That’s putting it politely.

I’ll be blunt. We don’t have a relationship; we never have. My father spent most of my childhood not in the house. I am not going to get into all that, but he and my mother had a very fraught marriage from the start. He cheated on her constantly, and he never bother keeping it a secret. I knew about it once I hit my teens–maybe even before that–because my mother made me her emotional support person when I was eleven.

My father claimed to be working until midnight every day. Yeah, right. ‘Working’. Is that what the kids are calling it these days? He was fucking around–and he never found out. It was an open secret at our church that he always had a piece on the side–from the church.

My father never went to any of my activities. I was in dance, orchestra, softball, cello, and theater at various times in my life. I can count on one hand the number of times he showed up to one of my activities, and that was when my mother made him go.

I didn’t mind, honestly. He was such a negative presence in my life–holy shit. I just thought of something. My ex-SIL was someone who sucked the joy out of the room. She was so unhappy all the time, and she made it her life’s mission to make everyone aroundher miserable as well. I don’t think it was a conscious decision on her part, but she was just so unrelentingly negative. And I’m saying that as someone who is fairly negative myself.

My father is the same. He doesn’t find any joy in anything. There are things that he likes doing, but he rarely smiles unbidden. He doesn’t like any food. Well, he likes Taiwanese food, and very few specific American dishes. The cod dinner from Culver’s and the burger from Smashburger were two of them. His favorite, though, was the brisket my brother made the last time they came. This was Thanksgiving after my medical crisis. Keep in mind that my father never praises anything. After he ate the brisket, he said it was the best thing he had ever eaten. Unprompted.


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In an ideal world (hidden disabilities, part seven)

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In yesterday’s post, I started talking about the minority town I would build as a way to improve DEI. More to the point, it would be to let people in the majority expeience what it’s like to be in the minority. None of the truly cruel stuff like physical attacks or sustained emotional harassment because that’s not ethical or moral. More to the point, I most emphatically want anyone to experience that.

Except. The problem is that for many people, it’s not possible to truly empathize with someone until you actually go through what they did. There’s a mystery book I read several decades ago in which the female protagonist was a cop. Her boyfriend was also a cop. One side plot was that her boyfriand had to go out on a case of a woman being mugged at midnight. He came back and said that she should not have been jogging at midnight, which really got under the woman’s skin.

Putting aside whether anyone should be running at midnight, the boyfriend had been implying that a woman specifically should not be running alone at midnight. This was in the ninties or the early aughts, so it wsa quite a feminist statement that the womna decided not to stand for it.

Her boyfriend had a little garden in the front yard that he was meticulous about. Or lawn. The details are fuzzy, but the main gist is that the woman started messing with the garden–pulling up flowers and things like that. The guy lost his mind and started plotting how to catch who was doing it.

She confessed after a week or so, and he was furious. She explained her thinking, which was that she wanted to give him a taste of what women had to go through all the time (constantly being vigilant about all the things that could happen).

I’m explaining it terribly, but it made sense to me. I appreciated it at a time when women were given a long list of things that they should and shouldn’t do. It becomes second nature. Some of it is reasonable for anyone (giving the name and number of a first date to your bestie, for example), but is overly emphasized for women.

When I think about my mythical town, I immediately run into problems. It’s easy to say that it’s for cishet white men (to have the ‘experience’), but what about, say, cis gay white men? Many of them are almost as privileged as cishet white men, and they have many of the same blind spots. If they are middle/upper middle class, that is.

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When ‘Fat’ Feels Like a Four-Letter Word

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this is a meal, isn't it?
Measuring my self worth

I am fat. I’m not fluffy or padded or zaftig; I’m fat. I’m not saying this to slag on myself; I’m simply stating a fact.  I don’t like that I’m fat, but I’m at a loss what to do about it. Oh, I know the usual advice. Eat less (and more healthily) and exercise more. This is the twin mantra of anyone serious about losing weight. The problem is, I’ve dealt with eating disorders for most of my life, and any time I try to diet, I slip into disordered thinking. The two times I lost an appreciable amount of weight, I ended up being anorexic/bulimic both times. The first time, I just dove straight into anorexia with the bulimia evolving later as a chaser. The second time, I was determined to lose weight sensibly, only to find myself passed out on a the floor of First Avenue because I hadn’t eaten all day and had two drinks within half an hour of arriving. I don’t drink much which accounted for part of the problem, but the bigger issue was my refusal to eat in order for me to have those two drinks. That night, I realized if I kept going on the way I was, I would die. I had a 23-inch waist and was eating roughly 1,500 calories a day. A woman my height needs to ingest 1,200 to 1,300 calories a day just to survive. At that time, I was working out for 2 to 2 1/2 hours per day, which means I should have been eating almost twice as much as I was. True to my nature, I quit everything cold turkey. I stopped watching what I was eating and all the exercise. In those days, I didn’t do anything in half measures. If I couldn’t be OCD about losing weight, then I wasn’t going to do it at all. I’m not proud of this mentality nor am I saying it’s healthy, but I can’t deny that’s how I thought. I tend to be a person of extremes, and while I’m better at it now than I was then, I fear that if I started dieting again, I’d be back to square one.

I know, you’re saying why don’t I just make lifestyle changes instead of dieting? I am doing that, but it’s very slow-going. I’ve cut out baked goods such as muffins (which I love), chips (except Lay’s had their name the chips contest, and I had to try the final four because I’ve done it every year for the past few years), and cheese–for the most part. I’m slowly adding back fruits and vegetables. My mom used to make me and my brother eat them several times a day when we were kids, so I rebelled against them when I hit my thirties. It’s a shame because I like fruits and vegetables, so I’m making a conscious effort to put them back in my diet. I eat an orange every day, partly because my taiji teacher told me they’re good for removing lactic build up (which is why you ache after a workout), and I’m trying to eat more salads. I’m also trying to cut back on my Coke Zero consumption, but that has not been easy this summer. The minute it’s eighty out, I’m mainlining that shit. My eating habits are pretty atrocious when I’m in my overeating phase, and this current ‘phase’ has lasted almost twenty years.

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