Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: life choices

The power of possibility

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Life is strange. That’s not just the name of a video game, that’s a fact of life. It’s been nearly 11 months since I died, so it’s almost my re-birthday. I’ll be 1 years old on September 3rd. At least that’s how I choose to look at it. And since I came back to life, the country has exploded into bullshit. I am still mad about the SCOTUS ruling on Roe (and will die mad), and I hate all the “don’t say gay” bills that are cropping up as well. We know that the religious nuts aren’t done yet and will be going after all the protected classes next.

But here’s the thing. For me, personally, it has really opened my eyes. This is not why I came back to life. It’s not what I want for the next generation and beyond. I gave up the abortion beat because I got tired, and it infuriates me that we are tumbling backwards on this issue as well as others (such as trans rights).

So. This first year back to life has been about adjusting to the fact that I didn’t permanently die. It’s weird. It’s the most momentous thing that’s happened to me, but…and I mean this non-facetiously, it’s not a factor in my daily life. I do everything I did before landing in the hospital and more. My reflexes are even worse than before–I realized this because I’m struggling with a boss in Scholar of the First Sin. It’s widely considered the hardest boss of the game–Fume Knight. I’ve done him solo before, but I’ve mostly fought him with human summons. I can’t do that right now, so I’m limited to the two NPC summons. They’re good, but I’m falling a few hits short every time. I was literally one hit away the second time I fought him and just got steadily worse.

There is no cheese for this guy. He has 10,100 HP and is resistant to almost everything. Slightly less so to magic, but not by much. And I cannot gauge his attacks any longer, especially in the second phase. This is my biggest weakness–I have to be able to tank the damage because I can’t judge space very well. And, yes, I’ve done the plat for this game recently, but you don’t have to do most of the DLCs for the plat. So I have not fought this guy for some time.

I’ve never had an easy time with him without a human summon. He’s just everything I hate about the games. He’s fast and hits hard. He has a half-dozen moves, and there’s a delay on some of them. Not all of them, though. And he does three-hit combos. And there’s a sweep in the second phase that is painfully slow and wide-ranging. You really have to study his moves in order to get them down, and that’s not my strong point.


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Living my life

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It’s been three days since my parents left. I can breathe freely, even though my mom is emailing me every day. Sometimes, more than once a day. That’s much more bearable than having them around, though. My shoulders are already less tense than before. Maybe 50% less tense. I didn’t realize how much tension I was holding in my shoulders until after my parents left. The first night, I had trouble falling asleep. It was because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or for my father to start an argument with my mother while they were half-asleep. That was one of his favorite tactics, by the way. To ambush her while she was asleep to accuse her of all sorts of crazy things. And I’m using the word ‘crazy’ deliberately. I’m not one who is precious about the word because I can apply it to myself quite easily. And because in the view of the normies, I’m pretty crazy in many ways.

In this case, I mean it clinically. My father has paranoid delusions, including his most prevalent that we (my brother, my mother, and I) are trying to steal his money. He’s made my mom look for trust (their money is in a trust) papers that he swore he put  in a certain drawer (which he didn’t. I can say that with certainty). He’s also accused her of enslaving him (very bitter laugh as he does jack and shit) and various other things.

I want nothing to do with them. I’ll be honest. I can handle a phone call once a month or even every other week, but that’s about it. I feel some guilt for being so relieved, but not much. All I can think is, “I’m free.”

Today, it’s 10 degrees and it’s snowing. It wasn’t snowing when I woke up, but is now. I had decided to go for a little walk (not caring how far I went or if I walked farther than yesterday) and was delightfully surprised when I saw snow. And not just drizzling, either. It’s snowing big fat flakes. My brother bought me unders from Costco that are thin, sleek, and wicks away moisture while retaining heat. In black. I put those on under my clothes to brave the elements.


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Not in This Lifetime

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I saw my last therapist for close to fifteen years. Around the ten-year mark, I said something about regretting that I was still working on some of the same issues that I had been when I first started seeing her. She said something to the effect that if I didn’t work on them then, I would be saying the the same thing in ten more years, except it’d be, “I can’t believe I’ve been working twenty years on this,” instead of ten.

I balked at what she was saying at the time (that’s just how I roll. My first instinct is always to counter what’s being said to me. I’m working on it), and I thought it was trite (which it was, but many tropes have at least a grain of truth), but she’s right. It’s fine to be sad that I haven’t fixed x, y, or z, but unless I work on it, it still won’t get fixed, and I’ll just have wasted more years. Take for example learning a new language. Chinese would be really useful for me to learn, but I would feel weird if I learned it before I learn Taiwanese which is my family’s native language. It would be harder for me to learn it, and I haven’t. I also haven’t learned Chinese. If I had started with that, I would know it by now.

Sigh.

In the past week, I’ve been thinking of my mortality. I’m probably past the half point of my life, and it’s all downhill from here. I jest, but not really. I have a thing that I hate the second half of things because it means the end is nearer than the beginning, and I’m feeling that way about my life right now. There are many things that are probably not going to happen in this lifetime, some for better and some for worse. Let’s start with some of the better ones.

  1. Have kids. WHEW!!! Enough said. Ha! Just kidding. About enough said, not about putting kids on this list. I can’t help but be smug when I remember an argument with a friend twenty years ago about having kids. There were three of us, all in our mid-to-late twenties, and one friend was insisting that I’d be the first of us to have kids. I don’t know why she thought that, but it really pissed the fuck out of me. I’ve known since I was twenty that I didn’t want kids. It’s the only constant in my life. To have someone who didn’t even know me that well tell me that I was going to have kids, aw, hell no. At the time, I thought to myself that I would send her postcard after she had a kid to gloat about it. She has a kid now and so does my other friend (my BFF), and me? Gloriously child-free.
  2. Get married. This is another that I assumed would just happen because isn’t it what every girl dreams of? Not me. I never made my Barbies get married–just have sex. I didn’t dream of my wedding because it seemed more like a nightmare to me. When I got older, I had political problems with it as well. The sexist origins of marriage, the taking of the dude’s last name, etc. Add to that the fact that marriage equality was but a dream when I was a young bi lady, and it was a big fat nope for me. Still, there was a tiny corner of my mind that wanted it for…reasons! I couldn’t articulate why, but I began to see it was to normalize my freak-ass self. I was such a weirdo and had no place in polite society. I had shed vestiges of an acceptable persona all throughout my twenties. I gave up religion, the idea of being a mother, and I had a hard time letting go of walking down the aisle in wedded bliss. What changed my mind? Over time, I realized I didn’t want to be with someone 24/7. I like living alone. I don’t like compromise. I like sleeping by myself. Well, maybe with my cat, but dassit. Any time I thought of marriage, it just seemed like a millstone around the neck. By the time I was thirty, I was done with the idea of marriage.
  3. A romantic relationship. This is in a gray area, but I’m leaning towards the idea that I’d prefer not to have a monogamous, primary romantic relationship. I’ve written about this before, but I’m not good girlfriend material. In addition, I don’t want to commit so deeply to one person. I have great friends that fulfill many of my emotional needs, and all I really am missing is sex. I’ve said it many times, but my ideal sex buddy would be someone with whom I could laugh, talk, eat, watch a sportsball game, then fuck for hours. Then, I’d kick them out and sleep the way I sleep best–alone. I wouldn’t mind having a few of these relationships. The idea makes me smile. When I think of a romantic relationship, there’s a constriction in my chest, and I have a hard time breathing. It feels smothering, which is what I tend to do in relationships.

Those are the ones I’m comfortable with. There are others that I’m less happy about. Let’s start that list now.


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Meet Me at the Crossroads

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I’m having a midlife crisis of sorts, and I need to talk it out. I’m dissatisfied with my life, specifically, well everything, but right now, I’m focusing on my lack of a career. I don’t want to be a freelance editor any longer, and I’m struggling as a writer. It’s not easy as a writer out there, what what? I knew it wouldn’t be because anything creative is gonna be a hard row to hoe, but writing in this day and age is capricious and whimsical. The great thing about the internet is that anyone can write. The bad thing about the internet is that anyone can write. I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a lot of shit on the webs. A LOT.

Let me hasten to say this isn’t new, the shit, I mean. 90% of pop culture is pure shit. Music, books, TV shows, video games, whatever–it’s mostly shit. It always has been, and it probably always will be. It’s just that the proliferation of shit is easier online. Any yahoo (see what I did there) can start a blog (ahem) and rant away. Yes, pot meet kettle.

The other problem is that because of the sheer volume, it’s harder to get noticed in this day and age. I can wade through twenty posts and maybe find one nugget of truth. I have up to fifty tabs open at a time, but I read maybe a fifth of the tabs I have open. I’ve been blogging on a daily basis (weekdays only) for nearly a year, and while it’s been beneficial to my writing chops, it’s not really gone anywhere professionally. I have a very small faithful band of readers, and I appreciate every one of them. Seriously. Learning that someone reads almost everything I write is humbling and gratifying. Hearing that someone remembers something I wrote years ago is amazing as well.

My problem is that I’m terrible at self-promoting. There are several reasons for it. One, in Taiwanese culture, you’re not supposed to brag about your achievements. There’s a superstitious reason for it–if you brag about something, the gods will be offended and punish you for it. In my family, it’s even worse. My father thinks mentioning anything you’ve done is bragging, even though he inside, he’s very prideful about his work, and it’s a complicated mess. In addition, women in American society get called bitches on the daily if they’re deemed as getting too big for their britches. This is the short answer as to why I have difficulty promoting myself.

In addition, I don’t like to intrude, and I don’t like to be a pest. Endlessly promoting my own work feels like both, but I know that’s something I have to get over. It’s also hard because it feels like my child  has been rejected every time I circulate a post and it gets little to no love. I already have a low self-esteem, and that doesn’t help. It’s also frustrating when I read a lot of the shit being passed around as wisdom on social media.

Anyway.


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