Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: limits

Not knowing where and when to draw the line, part five

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This is yet another post about limits, boundaries, and when to push it and when to rest. In the last post, I touched on not knowing when to do the former and when to do the latter. I will delve further into that concept in this post. Let’s start with Bagua. I’m much more comfortable with keeping my weight back, but it still catches me off-guard from time to time. Early on, I asked my teacher how she remembered what she was doing when (Taiji versus Bagua). She said that she just got used to it and kept them separated in her mind. At the time, I didn’t understand, but now I do.

If I’m doing Taiji, then I’m doing Taiji. I’m primarily forward (meaning my weight is forward), and I’m being receptive of energy. I’m not trying to go hard or be in your face. In fact, I’m just chill and letting the energy flow through me. It’s very much vibes based and not doing too much. Most people can do Taiji (Yang-style, not Chen-style. The latter is really bad for your knees) as long as they just take it slowly and do not try to push themselves hard.

Bagua, on the other hand, I would not recommend to just anyone. If we’re just going by feel, Bagua feels dangerous. In fact, my teacher says that in CHina, people are wary of people who study Bagua. I don’t know how true that is, but I could see it being very true. There’s an aggression to Bagua that is completely absent in Taiji.

When I first started studying Bagua, I wondered how I would be able to make peace with how different they were. I had been studying Taiji up to that point, and the whole vibe of Taiji is to just be chill and not exert yourself too much. Empty step and never be double-weighted.

Bagua doesn’t care about any of that. The motto and mentality of Bagua are to do what it takes to ‘win’. Double-weighted? No matter. No empty stepping? Not a big deal! Take the aggression and run with it. In fact, start the aggression yourself. It’s explosive and a great way to rid myself of any anger I’m feeling (even if it’s only for a few seconds).

Like the yin-yang, Taiji and Bagua are polar opposites that complement each other. One is hot and one is cold. One is light and one is dark. One is day and one is night. They could not be more different from each other, and yet, tthey work really well together.


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When to push limits and when to CTFO, part four

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I’m back to write more about limits, boundaries, and toxic positivity–maybe. That’s what I wanted to write about in the last post, but then I wandered down the road of talking about my poor memory. I am going to get back on track now and write abotu what I said I wanted to write about, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Despite all the blathering I’ve done about being negative about pushing too hard, I’m not totally against it. I know you have to push yourself at times to get shit done. I especially have to do so because I tend to lean towards inertia. When K used to live here, we got together maybe once a month, usually to go out dancing. It took me quite some time to get ready to go. We usually did it like this. Let’s say we were meeting at eight. I would think about getting ready about six-thirty, but I could not make myself do it until seven or seven-thirty. It only took me ten minutes to get ready to go (I didn’t weear makeup at all), so that made it easier for me to drag my feet.

I would leave at twenty to eight because it took fifteen to twenty minutes to make it to K’s house. Then, I would sit on her bed for fifteen to twenty minutes and watch as she agonizehd over what to wear. We were both depressed people, and it took a lot of effort to get us moving. She would usually ask her husband to help pick out an outfit because he had a great sense of style while I just sat there, amused. We would rarely leave her house before a half hour after we agreed to go out. I was fine with it once I realized it was just the way she was.

One of my funniest memories of us going out was the one rare time when we were going to something in St. Paul, which was closer to me than her. So we decided that she would come to my house rather than the other way around. At eight (when we were supposed to meet), just as I was thinking about getting dressed, my doorbell rang. I was flustered as I realized she had come early (for her). In fact, that’s what I blurted out to her as I opened the door–“You’re early!” I’m afraid I said it in an accusatory tone (though I did not mean it that way).

“I’m on time!” She said immediately. “Which is early for you!” It was a thoughtless reply on my part, but fortunately, she laughed. We had been besties for long enough to be able to joke like that.


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When too hard is truly too hard

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I’ve been thinking about American exceeptionalism and how damaging it is. In this specific case, I want to talk about the difference between confidence and arrogance. There have been studies that show that women (and AFAB, I presume) often underestimate their abilities. Or rather, they don’t apply to jobs that they consider out of their reach whereas men do. That’s a gross simplification, but it’ll do for now.

Let’s talk about the Dunning-Kruger Effect (I promise you this is relevant). Everyone who has heard of it knows that it’s about people who really overestimate their own abilities and think that they are better at something (or all things) than they really are. What people don’t know, though, is the second result the researchers found. It’s that people who are really good at something (or things) vastly underestimate how much better they are at the thing than other people are.

It makes perfect sense as they both stem from the belief that (generic) you are the norm and everyone else skews towards the norm (you). In other words, it’s putting you at the center of the universe. I’m not even being angry about it because of course people will think of themselves as the norm. At least until they run into enough people who are vastly different than they are. Then, maybe, there might be a glimmer of hope. But, oftentimes, sadly, it’s just them dimissing everyone else as weird or outliers.

Do I sound bitter or pessimistic? Well, yeah. Look at the state of America right now. Why the hell wouldn’t I feel that way? The thing is, though, I have felt that for many decades. I’ve always looked at my country (and the world in general) with a jaundiced eye. It’s just how I am. I have always said that I’m a pessimist or a realist, but I had a friend in college tell me an optimist. When I protested, he pointed out that I expected the best out of people and was disappointed when I didn’t get it.

I opened my mouth to snap back, but then I closed it. Because you know what? He was right. I did expect people to do the right thing,and I was disappointed when they failed to do it. That’s what made me cynical, by the way. The fact that I thought people would do the right thing and then they didn’t. And this happened over and over again.

I, on the other hand, tended to think that I wasn’t anything special in any way and that if I could do something, other people could as well. sometimes, that’s true. Like with From games. If I can finish them, then truly anyone can. I am so bad at them. Astoundingly bad. So bad that why the fuck do I even play them? Ian and I have this argument from time to time. He says the games are exactly for people like me who can struggle with them and then feel real satisfaction when they beat the games.


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FromSoft games and me, part two

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In the last post, I was griping about my dex run in Elden Ring. I have never done a pure dex run, nad there’s a reason for it. Here are the things I am bad at in these games: dodging, chaining attacks without getting hit; melee if I can’t take hits. All three of these skills are important in a dex build.

By the way, this is one of the reasons I did not like Sekiro. This is basically the build you needed to master in order to be good at that game. And, man, was I so not good at that game.

Back to a dex build. Ofd the builds, I think this is the one that relies on natural skills more than the others. For a pure dex run, I mean. With a strength run, you can get away with a lot of mistakes as long as you hit harder than the enemy does. And with a casting build, as long as you can stay out of melee range, you’re ok. But with a dex build, you have to be good erough to get in there, but agile enough to get out without getting hit too much. In the first area, I kept getting stunlocked by the bigger enemies. Bigger meaning beefier. So the first Erdtree Avatar and the Tree Sentinel, for example.

Fighting them on horseback was a nightmare. With the Erdtree Avatar, he does a three hit combo that if he got me with the first, I could not escape the other two hits. You would think the fact that I had more endurance than health would have helped me out, but no. It didn’t help at all.

Some would say it’s a crutch to use ranged options, but those people can shut the fuck up. If it’s in the game, it’s fair play. I don’t understand this needless gate-keeping. If you (general you) want to play that way, so be it! But why do you (again, general you) care how others play the game? How does it affect you in any way? That’s the part that I don’t get and never have. Somehow, just having the options in the game sullies the game itself? That makes absolutely no sense to me. Keep your eyes on your own paper, Chad!

I have added a few points in faith so I can use the basic Heal and the cure poison/rot incantation. I also added enough arcane so I can use the Reduvia (a blood dagger). People in the RKG Discord have been helpfully giving me tips as to how to do a dex run, but it’s just not clicknig with me. I don’t like the starting katana for the samurai, so I switched as soon as I could. I’m using the Great Epee, which is fine, but it’s outliving its usefulness. I did add Bloody Slash to it, but that takes off my own health when I use it.

I just feel like I have to do so much more with a dex build that I wouldn’t have to do on a different build. I gave it a good shot, but I am not enjoying it. I may do a bit more with the pot build, but I’m not sure it’s enough to keep me going.

Let me be blunt.


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Where to draw the line

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Yesterday, I talked about being at the crossroad in my personal life. Today, I want to muse about where I draw the line when it comes to problematic creators of art. Yes, I know that no one is perfect and that it’s easier to know someone’s ugliness these days than a hundred years ago. I’ve heard that argument more times than I care to count. Along with ‘cancel culture’ and that tired trope.

News flash: Cancel culture is not a thing! I wish to god it were. Can you imagine if minorities actually had that power? To get companies that we disapprove of to disband or abolished? Hell to the yes! I would be all over that.

In the RKG Discord, there was a passionate debate about the Hogwarts game. I would like to note that British people are terrible about trans issues. Not to say Americans are good, we aren’t, but British people like to claim the high ground when it comes to isms (they often say with a straight face that there is no racism, which is utter bullshit), so it’s notable that they are particularly terrible about trans issues.

There was a guy who declared that poor JKR was just misunderstood and really trying to defend women. He was the one who brought up ‘cancel culture’. I said it wasn’t a thing, but if it were, then it would actually be in line with capitalism. I mean, capitalists always liked to say, “Let the markets decide.” If the markets decided that JKR was reprehensible and no one wanted to buy her books because of it, then that’s capitalsm.

Here’s the depressing thing, though. JKR is a billionaire. She’s not hurting at all or in any way. Cancelled? I think not. Also, she is not defending women because trans women are women. If she can’t accept that, then she needs to GTFO.

Also, ever if she were being cancelled, she is not owed my money. I am nnot obliged to buy anything from her, nor is anyone else. Again, that is capitalism! I spend my money where I want. And it’s definitely not on anything associated with JKR.

In addition, I can’t unknow what I know. Like, Woody Allen sexually abused his wife’s adopted daughter, brainwashed her, and then married her. I’m supposed to pretend this isn’t the case? Or that Roman Polanski didn’t rape a thirteen-year old? Nope. That’s not going to happen. I know this about them, and it’s reprehensible. Again, I don’t have to give money to anyone I don’t want to. In the case of these two men, whatever art they’ve done (and I don’t like what I’ve seen of Woody Allen’s movies. I’ve never seen one of Roman Polanski’s) has been tainted by what they have done as men.

I don’t like Woody Allen’s movies, by the way. Even before the aforementioned issue. I think of them as a man whining and negging the women around him. But for some reason, he’s seen as inexplicably attractive. So not my thing at all.

More to the point, there are millions of books, moovies, music, etc. I will not be able to see/hear 1/100th of all the pop media available. Why would I want to spend my money on someone I loathed?


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Hidden buttons

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In the last post, I talked about feeling like compassion, empathy, and undrestanding only went one way. I have a knee-jerk reaction to being told to look at the other person’s point of view because, well, I do that on the regular. It’s nearly automatic for me. When I read letters in advice columns, I can come up with half a dozen reasons why people act the way they do. As a minority in many ways, I have to know more about other people’s ways of thinking than they do about me. It’s always the case. People in the minority need to know how people in the majority think, but not vice-versa.

So, miss me with telling me I need to think about other people. It’s somewhat faulty reasoning on my part because I sill have my biases, of course. But it’s not unreasonable of me to be tired of people demanding I pay attiontion to their issues without giving one whit of a shit about mine.

I know a trans man who turns every conversation into a mandate about him. If someone is talking about a bad date and describes how the woman did not interact with him at all, dropping her end of the conversation, the minute we empathized with the commenter, the trans man would write a long screed about how he was that woman–and why being trans, autisitic, and ADHD (and also an alcoholic, but he won’t admit that) was so hard when it came to dating.

I’m not doubting what he said. I know it has to be hard for him to date. But we weren’t talking about him, and somehow, he made it all about him again. And several people spent several minutes reassuring him that it was different for him and that he would find love one day.

I took a different route because he was displaying incel behavior, which made me uneasy. He had imbibed enough of toxic masculinity to believe that if he was nice to someone, he deserved a boyfriend in return. While I believe that everyone deserves love on an individual level, no one is owed it from any given person.

I tried to be diplomatic, but I said (wrote) from my own experience. I have been rejected for a long list of reasons, and there are many people who don’t date Asians. That’s just one of them. I said while in theory, yes, it’s racism and people should not NOT date someone simply because of their race, I did not want to date someone who wasn’t enthusiastic about dating me.

In other words, people are allowed not to date you for any given reason. You are not owed a date from anybody. Demanding it is messy and, quite frankly, creepy. This is all without minimizing how difficult dating is, especially when you start adding differences to the pot. But this guy was so unrelentingly woe-is-me and wresting attention no matter what, I could understand why he was having a hard time finding dates–apart from the very obvious isms he faced.

I think we need to be allowed to say out loud that just because someone is in a minority or three, they are not a saint or above reproach.  I’ve said it a time or ten. Being a minority and being an asshole are not mutually exclusive. You should not attack someone’s identity, obviously, but that doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with anythinng they say.


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Political Fatigue

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zip it, goddamn it!
Enough already!

I’ve reached my limits as to how much political bullshit I can deal with. Actually, I reached my limit during the election campaigns with all the mudslinging back and forth between Sanders supporters and Clinton supporters. As I’ve said many times, I was a Sanders supporter in the primaries, and then I voted for Clinton in the general election. I’m ideologically a progressive but I’m a pragmatist at heart. When this president became the Republican candidate, my mentality became, “Anyone but him.” More specifically, any Democrat but him. I think Jill Stein would have been arguably worse, but that’s not the point of this post.

Once this president won, I naively hoped Democrats would present a united front against him. I knew better, of course, but still, I hoped. Democrats are our own worst enemies, and we’d rather punch each other in the face than compromise with each other. It’s so funny that we preach tolerance and open tent, but we don’t practice it. As someone who wasn’t enamored with either Democratic candidate, I feel as if I’m stuck in the middle. I can see the positives and negatives of each candidate, and it’s frustrating to see both sides (truly both sides in this case) hunkering down in their respective bunkers. I know both sides feel attacked because I’ve heard it from both Sanders supporters and Clinton supporters. “They started it!” each side cries, pointing their fingers vigorously. I got into it (mildly) with a FB friend who was a Clinton supporter, and he said Clinton supporters only started attacking in response to attacks by ‘BernieBros’.

Side note: I loathe that nickname because it’s dismissive and reductive. I know several people who were Sanders supporters, and only two of them were white dudes. The majority are women, and there are more than one PoC I know who supported him. Also, people who are not straight. Yes, I fall in three of those categories, but I’m not the only one. It was infuriating to see Clinton supporters sneer about only white dudes supporting Sanders when it wasn’t true. Then, anyone who was a minority who supported Sanders was similarly dismissed, though not quite as easily. It follows the liberal pattern in general of trumpeting the voices of the oppressed–until said voices disagree with their own opinions. Then, it’s internalized blah, blah, blah, not just a matter of different perspectives.

In addition, it was amazing to watch Clinton supporters attack Sanders for being tone-deaf about race, for example, then shrug off instances of Clinton’s own racial problems. I know it’s human nature to indulge in confirmation bias, but it’s still disheartening to see by people who claim to be open-minded. By the end of the campaign, I pretty much kept my mouth shut as a bisexual, Taiwanese American woman who supported Sanders because I felt so alienated by the Clinton supporters who didn’t want to acknowledge I existed. Any time I mentioned this on Twitter, I had other minorities DM me to tell me they felt the same way. It was really unpleasant, and it jaded me even further on politics.

Anyway, back to the FB friend who argued that Sanders supporters started it. I said he felt that way because he’s a Clinton supporter, so of course he’s going to hone in on examples of Sanders supporters acting badly. I said I saw way more Clinton supporters acting like asses, but that’s because I supported Sanders. The truth is, it probably was equal, but it just depended on what you were looking for. Plus, more people I followed were Clinton supporters than Sanders supporters, so there’s that, too.

I tried to make HillaryHunks happen, but it didn’t catch on. I felt there were Clinton fans who were just as dismissive of Sanders and his supporters as vice-versa. I lost respect for several people during the elections because they showed their asses by being rude and gross to and about Sanders supporters. It reached the point where anything Sanders did was considered defective or wrong in the eyes of Clinton supporters. Vice-versa, too, but I’m speaking from the perspective of a Sanders supporter.

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