Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: love

Covered in love for my birthday

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My birthday has come and gone. I bought myself some gluten-free/dairy-free whoopie pies. Chocolate cookies with whipped cream in the middle. So sweet and decadent, I have to eat it in tiny bites. I put some GF/BF peanut butter brownie ice ceram on it, and it was a great birthday treat. Here’s yesterday’s post with my musings about my birthday.

I also had a call scheduled with K. She wished me a happy birthday, and then we just ranted about the current state of our country. Waking up to the news that your president acutally said out loud in his outside voice that he was going to eliminate a civilization tonight was certainly a mood.

Here’s a distillation of what I said to her: This president frightens me beccause I can’t figure out what he’s thinking. I mean, I know he believes whatever he sys in the moment, but that changes from minute to minute. If this were any other president, I would believe that he was bluffing or pushing Iran to back down.

You know what? No. Fuck no. I wouldn’t because I would not fucking expect a president to ever say anything like that. The president was a loose cannon in his first term, and he’s gone completely off the rails now. I have no idea what he is going to say or do, which is not something I enjoy at all. I’m used to being able to read people accuurately, and he’s just–a hot mess.

Did I really think he was going to bomb Iran? I want to say no, but I can’t esay it with any confidence. And that’s a big reason I have such a hard time with this president. There are no limits to what he will or won’t do. I said he was chaotic evil to K, and I was not implying the chaotic was bad (I’m chaotic myself), but obviously, the evil part is bad.

We ranted for a good hour and a half. It’s a breath of fresh air to be able to do it with her. She sent me the most gorgeous bouquet of preserved live flowers in a vareity of shades of purple. They are supposed to last for a year to three years. As we were getting off the phone, she told me that it was a weird gift. I told her I loved her weird gifts because they fit me perfectly. She said it was weird even for her, and I insisted that I would love it.

Which I did. I both grinned and teared up at the same time. She always gives me the perfect gift, especially when they are weird. She gave me a candle that says, “Out of fucks to give.” She’s given me more conventional presents like books that she thinks I will ilke. When she was here, we went out on a date between our two birthdays.


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Looking for lust in all the wrong–well, no–places

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In the last post, I was talking about the possibility of me dating again. I summed it up in the last post, kind of, but I’m going to break it down in this post, kind of.

Here’s the thing. I’ve mostly fallen into my romantic relationships in the past. Meaning, a romantic relationship sprang up out of a friendship. While I have a type (quick recap: short dark hair, nerdy glasses, warm smile, deep voice, square body (thick), a nerd in general, funny, and, weirdly enough, optimistic), it’s not something that I stick to in real life, mostly because as I said, friendship leads to romance, and I don’t restrict my friendships by appearance.

I didn’t really date, either. I started dating my first boyfriend when I was sixteen. That was probably the closest to dating I did. We lived forty minutes apart, so we only saw each other on the weekends. He was a sweet guy and extremely smart, and we dated for two years. That was the closest to a typical relationship I’ve had.

My first boyfriend in college, we were good friends who spent a lot of time together. He asked me out, and I said why not? That ended up being a really complicated relationship that turned me off dating, unfortunately. It also wasn’t typical in that we didn’t go out on dates, really. We just hung out like friends–except with romance included.

I have always been good at sex. VERY good at sex. My motto was that I’d try (almost) anything once. Unless it was truly something I could not stomach, I was good to go. And I liked most of what I experienced. Sex is amazing! Sex is awesome! Sex is life-affirming!

Romance and dating, on the other hand, were hard. The examples I had in my childhood were terrible, and I was deeply and negatively affected by them. I was brought up in a cult-like church that was heavily sexist, conservative, evangelical, and fear/shame-based. Plus, Asian culture is deeply sexist in a different way to American sexism. So I got so much sexism shoved at me on a daily basis.

It’s hard to unlearn that stuff. And I noticed in my last relationship (about fifteen years ago) that I still immediately fell into my traininng as a subservient woman whose only purpose was to please the man* within my vicinity.

I hated who I became, and I realized that dating wasn’t worth it to me. In adidtion, I like being on my own. A lot. If I’m going to be around someone for a significant amount of time, it had better be a very positive experience. I like to say that I’m the cake and the other person would be the frosting. Meaning that the would be additive and not part of the substance.


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Typcasting my love

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Just for a change of pace, let’s talk about something more frivolous than the shitty state of the world. Which, quite honestly, could be anything. Literally anything. In this case, it’s romance sex,  and it’s still related to everything that’s going on.

I have a type. I noticed it decades ago. Alan Rickman.

I could leave it there, but I won’t.

Let’s add to him, Rachel Maddow.

Those were the gold standard for so long. I added to my list Erika Ishii because they are just my everything. That voice. That personality. That bod. That face. That hair! Just, they are the whole package.

Ever since the hell started in Minnesota, I’ve been watching way more news than I used to (and than is probably good for me). I glommed onto a local news anchor, Jana Shortal, who has short, curly hair, is acerbic, yet warm, has a lovely deep voice, and is a lesbian.

I mention the last because that’s been a theme, starting with Rachel Maddow. Dark short hair, wonky glasses (wonky as in wonk, not as in broken/weird), deep, warm voice (of course, these days, a reporter has to have a great voice), nerdy, and a sarcastic yet rousing sense of humor.

Next up was Kara Swisher. Pretty much rinse, lather, repeat. Yes, I know that it should be lather, rinse, repeat, but I’ve always said rinse, leather, repeat–and I won’t ever stop. It’s gotten to the point where I’ll send K a name and a bio with a wry, “So my type!”, and she’ll quip something back in return.

Side note: K and I are both pretty passionate about politics. We agree on most everything just to different degrees. I can count the number of times we’ve flat-out disagreed on something on one hand. We can tell each other things we would not share to the world at large. We’ve been friends for thirty years, and I still learn things about her that I didn’t know before.

We’ve discussed our love lives, sure. She’s been married the entire time we’ve been friends and had her child about ten years into our friendship. I told her that she got the first year free to talk about the baby as much as she wanted. This is the thing I say to all my friends when they have something momentous happen to them. After that, I expect them to return to a more balanced conversation.

K never needed that time. She and I kept on as we always were with her talk of her kid being an additive. I commented on it from time to time, and she said that she was glad to be talking about other things with me. What I inferred was that she wanted to retain her identity as K and not just as L’s mom. I could dig that, and I was happpy to be that person for her. Everyone needs the friend who will just let you be you. And, I love her (now young adult) child as if they were one of my niblings.

K has been my rock throughout my, well, rocky dating history. She’s been there for my heartbreaks and thrills, and she’s not judged me along the way. She’s not coddled me either, though. She’s a straight-shooter, which I appreciate. She’s also been my wingwoman when we went out dancing, back when she lived here. A best gal pal who will hype you up is to be treasured.


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Looking for ways to make my life better

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I was talking in yesterday’s post about my writing. I would dearly love to be able to write fiction again, but it’s a struggle. The words still come fairly easily, but they are not catching fire like they used to. I have mentioned before how if my writing is going well, then there’s a sparkle to the words. A lightness that I can tangibly feel–and see. when it’s not going well, the words are flat and lifeless. Sometimes, I can find ways to spice it up, but oftentimes, I just have to trash it and start over.

I don’t know what to do with my writing, honestly. I know what I want to write. I know what I feel compelled to write. These are not the same thing, though I might be able to meld the two together.

I have to say that it’s time to sort my family shit out. It’s a bit crude to point out that my parents are in the last stage of their life/lives, but it’s true. And it’s wrought/fraught because of my father’s dementia. But, that’s not the only reason. There’s also the fact that my parents are broken people. They have been my whole life, and they’ve only gotten worse as the years have gone by.

I clearly remember having an argument with my mother about social justice issues. This was since my medical crisis. We’ve had plenty of arguments about all the ‘isms’ beforehand, but this was after, I think. My mother said she was a traditional/old-fashioned person and tried to justify it by saying she had been born in 1942.

This argument drives me batshit insane. It’s always given as an excuse for attitudes/beliefs that are frankly horrible. In addition, though, it’s the laziest, most contemptible excuse one can give. Yes, she was born over eighty years ago. But you know what? She was not cryogenically sealed for the ensuing eighty years, only to be defrosted in the last three years. She lived in America during the Civil Rights years. She saw the ERA movement in America, and got to witness marriage equality in both Taiwan and America. Well, she wasn’t here (America)when it happened, but she got to see it happen. She got to experience Taiwan elect its first female president (something America hasn’t managhed to do), and many more progressive things in her eighty years on this earth.


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Taiji–loving something that actually loves me back

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More about Taiji (and maybe Bagua. We’ll see). In yesterday’s post, I highlighted some of the differences between Taiji and Bagua. Today, I want to talk about my love for Taiji because I can. And because it’s deep. And it’s one thing I love that actually loves me back. I’m not talking about people–there are people I love who love me backI’m talking about hobbies/things. And I mean love in a looser sense, not actual, sentient love.

For example, I love FromSoft games (and have made that very clear), but they do not love me back. Ian has said that he thinks I’m the perfect recipient for the games (the average player who tries really hard), but I disagree. The games are brutal, despite the current retconning by From lovers to deny this. The recent meta in soulslikes is to make parry king, which is so not my jam at all. It’s also ironic because FromSoft themselves have moved away from the parry. In Elden Ring, they added a guarded counter that works the same as a parry (allows you to do a riposte), and is oodles easier than a parry.

I have known for some time that the FromSoft games would outpace me at some point, and I fear that we are at that point. The last boss of the last DLC of Dark Souls III pushed me to my limit. and I don’t want to even talk about Sekiro. Yes, I beat the final boss of that game, but I knew that it was at the very top of my skill ability, if not past it. I cheesed that boss by running around in circles and waiting for one particular move by the boss.

You have to know that this boss has *spoilers* four phases. The first phase is Genichiro, whom you fight earlier. Twice. Once in the very beginning when he slices off your arm (or not. You can avoid it if you’re really good. I don’t think I got a single hit on him the first time I fought him), and then once about a fourth of the way in (or later depending on what you do), there’s an epic battle on top of Ashina Castle. It’s supposed to be a hard skills check, and boy, was it ever.

In this fight, the Genechiro phase is fairly easy (in comparison to what comes next), but I realized after several attempts that if I had to use a…ah, gourd during this phase, it was better to let him kill me and try again.  I had to make it to Isshin, the Sword Saint, with all my gourds to have any chance of beating him.

As I said, I had no hope of actually beating him with my skills, so I raced around in circles in the arena, baiting out one attack. When he did that attack, I would hit him twice, and then resume running around. For three phases. Whilst having to dodge ever-increasingly difficult attacks by Isshin. If you can deflect properly, the fight can take a minute or two. Because I could not deflect, it took me fifteen minutes to beat him. And if I went back to do it again, I would lose to him another hundred times, I’m sure.


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Love in all its various forms

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Today is Valentine’s Day. I used to hate this day, even when I was in a relationship. It’s a manufactured holiday and one that has morphed into (in the het-norm) ‘Buy an expensive gift for your ladyfriend, otherwise you don’t love her’. There are just too mayn expectations for it to ever hold up.

Side note: That’s my issues with traditions more generally. They just cannot live up to the expectations. Weddings, for example. So many people put in so much time, money, and effort into planning their perfect wedding and then it never goes how they want it to go. Also, so many people say they don’t remmeber anything from their wedding. It always puzzled me because it’s just one day whereas a marriage, presumably, will be for the rest of one’s life. (In theory, anyway.)

Side note to the side note: I read an article many moons ago about how everyone these days is entitled to a starter marriage, as it were. Meaning one marriage that ended in divorce. They made a convincing case for it, including the fact that people live so much longer these days. (Which, not exactly true, but let’s go with it.)

To which I say, “Why restrict yourself to one person?” I am someone who does better when I am not in a monogamous relationship. I think it’s because I don’t feel pressured to be the one and only (read, doing all the emotional support). I get way too focused on the other person in a monogamous relationship.

Anyway. back to Valentine’s Day. When I was working at the county, my boss came in on V-Day in a terrible mood. She showed me a new leather briefcase she had, and it was really nice. Soft, supple, and obviously top quality. It turned out that her husband had given it to her for V-Day. I thought it was a lovely present! Her old briefcase had been in tatters.

She was furious because she wanted a tennis bracelet. She had left out magazines opened to tennis bracelet advertisements around the house, hoping he would get the hint.

I didn’t say this to her (because she was my boss), but I thought she was being ridiculous. First of all, she was a grown woman who could buy her own tennis bracelet. Secondly, if that’s what she really wanted from him, she should have just told him. Yes, I know it’s not as romantic, but depending on him to take in context clues was risky on her part. Thirdly, his actual gift was thoughtful. He had noticed that her old briefcase was falling apart and got her a really nice new one.

I get that some people don’t want something practical, so I can’t totally blame her for that. But again, if she really wanted the tennis bracelet, she should have simply told him.


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What am I thankful for?

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It is Thanksgiving today. I don’t celebrate, but I don’t mind thinking about what I’m grateful for. My brother is having his dinner tomorrow, and I had been planning on going. for the first time in several year. Obviously, in part because of the pandemic, but also because, quite frankly, his (now ex) wife made everything so unpleasant.

She sat around with her face looking like she was sucking on a lemon. It was clear that she was not enjoying herself and that she wished everyone was not there. That may or may not include her children.

She was Shrodinger’s asshole in that you never knew when she was going to snipe at you and for what. I have said in the past that living with my father was like living with an alcoholic. We had to tiptoe around him and his moods, always on edge that he was going to take offense at something or the other.

It’s a truism that we marry our parent, especially the one with whom we have difficulty. My brother married someone who was the combination of both our parents. From my mother–the crippling anxiety that made her question everything and averyone. Except in my mother’s case, it just made her really annoying in that she constantly questioned everything and everyone. She did not trust her own opinion on anything–and she had to ask so many people what they think (while not listening to anyone).

Ian commented to me once that she really didn’t listen to my opinion, did she? No, she did not. It wasn’t because sof me, though. Well, not exactly. Yes, she was sexist in that she trusted men’s opinions more than non-men people’s opinions. So, yes, it was partly that. And because I was the baby. But it was also (in this case) because she had to ask at least two people about everything, and when she was here, she was in the house with me. So I was the first person she was talking to. Then she would call my brother, and he would be the second person she would talk to.

She couldn’t just make a decision on her own, oh, no. That would just not do.

Another example of her anxiety. She had a shirt shipped here. Fine, right? All she had to do was let me know, and I would bring it inside. My brother and his family are going there for Christmas. He could bring it to her. No problem! Right???

It should not have been a problem. In fact, it’s one of the easiest things in the world. Delivery, I mean. I take it for granted, probably bbecause I do it often.


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Silence and space are my love language

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There’s a thing called love languages and it’s horse shit. The end. I’m just kidding. Not about it being horse shit, but I can’t really say that because I haven’t read the whole book. I know it’s heavily Christian and has rigid gender roles, which is pretty much all these books. Like The Rules back in the day. I actually read it and laughed out loud because it was so ridiclous. It was even funnier that by the time it got published (or the second edition or something) there was a note that one of the authors had gotten divorced. It was a bunch of really restrictive ‘rules’ that a woman (and, yes, it was targeted at women–of course) had to follow to get a man. Including not excepting a date for Saturday after Wednesday and not calling the guy back to make him chase you. It was really regressive and, as I said, funny as hell if you did not take it seriously. The last line was an ominous, “The rules don’t change once you get engaged” and there was a sequel to it for a married woman.

I got a lot of guffaws out of it, but there was no way on earth I would actually follow the dicta to get a date. Because, as I said at the time, the problem with using The Rules to get a guy is that you then have a The Rules guy as a boyfriend.

Back to the Love Languages. They are, to paraphrase, words, acts of service, touch, ah, gifts, and time. Which, fine. All of those are fine to a certain extent. But for me, my impulse is similar to why I didn’t want kids–space and silence. Shut the fuck up and get the fuck away from me. This mentality is a big reason I didn’t want children–because I knew I would shout that at them when I was fed up. Which would be every other day. I often joked that if I had kids, I would have to pay thousands in therapy for them so they could unpack why their parent didn’t love them.

There are very few people I can be around constantly and not want to run screaming from the room. Ian and K are two such people. Being in the same room and not talking is my idea of heaven. Parallel activity is important to me. When Ian and I visit each other, the bulk of our time is both of us being on our respective computers and doing our individual thing. One of us might bring something up, but then we’d go back to our own thing.

Here’s the problem, and I fully admit it’s on me. I have poured so much energy in showing empathy for other people that I’ve run dry. Let me be more specific. I have had to be the emotional repository for my mother since I was eleven. I was parentified before I even knew that word or concept existed. My mother had a daughter in order to mold her (me) into her (my mother’s) image. She has rigid ideas of what women and men should be, even if she doesn’t fit into that herself. Which is exactly like her mother–and she pushed back against her own mother’s rigidity (my grandmother).


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Cause and effect in the wrong order

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After I got out of the hospital, I had to deal with my parents. This was by far the hardest part of the whole ordeal. My mother sent my brother and me this long email about Taiwanese culture and respecting your elders. She said that my brother and I needed to love and respect my father more. She actually wrote that down without wincing at how gross that was.

I’m not saynig that Taiwanese culture is not heavy on elder respect. It is. It’s a patrilineal society–at least it was back in the day. Countries change in time, much as people do. Taiwan was the first Asian countrty to make same-sex marriage legal, and though there have been legislation proposed to change this, it’s still currently legal–more or less. Since that’s not the purpose of this post, I’ll leave it at that for now.They also have a female president and have had her since 2016. In other words, they are more progressive in some ways than we are.

In addition, even though my mother likes to pull out Taiwanese culture like a trump card when she wants to get her way, she refuses to recognize that my brother and I were born and raised in Minnesota. Which, in case you can’t tell, is in the United States of America. We don’t give a shit about elders here! That’s not true, but I’m tempted to say that to my mother when she trots out Taiwanese culture.

The other thing is that not everything about every culture is good. Obviously. There are bad things in every culture so just saying something is part of a culture does not automatically make it worth venerating. I am not against showing respect towards elders, but…and I say this as an elder, it shouldn’t be mindless respect. I’m not saying you have to be disrespectful until they prove their worth, but so many things are covered under the guise of ‘respect your elders’. It’s adjacent to ‘but faaaaaaaaamily’.

 

My point, though, is that you can’t make someone respect or love someone else. It’s galling that my mother would even think that she had the right to order my brother and me to do that. It’s not surprising, mind, as she’s spent her whole adult life catering to my father and slavering over him. She has made being subjugated to him her entire identity and it’s only gotten worse with time. But it’s frustrating that as a therapist, she cannot understand that you can make anyone feel positive about someone.

She seems to think she can order my brother and me to have different feelings for our father. It smacks my gob that she can’t see that my father is getting the amount of love and respect he deserves. They both think that as parents, they should automatically get both because they are our parents. It’s circular reasoning at best. And, yes, this is probably a more Western way of thinking about things, but I don’t give fealty for no reason.

If my parents were not my parents, I would feel more pity for my mother. She has spent 55 years scraping and bowing to my father, who has only taken it as his just due and gets mad when her attention is off him for even a second. She has bent herself into an unrecognizable pretzel, and she doesn’t even realize it.

Making excuses for him is like second nature to her by now. There is an unspoken code in the family that he is not to be upset in any shape, matter, or size. My mother treats him like a baby/toddler who cannot self-soothe. To be clear, he has a low frustration tolerance (so do I, actually), but I do wonder if back in the first years of their marriage, what would have happened if my mother had put her foot down to my father’s nonsense.


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If only I could see what others saw

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a soup of negative emotions.
A peek into my brain.

Recently, I received two compliments from two women I admire and respect (my BFF and my taiji teacher), and I was really taken aback. For some background, I grew up believing that I was a toxic presence who had to earn my right to live on a daily basis. I believed that every day, I started with a negative number (never could ascertain what that number meant, exactly, but it wasn’t good), and I had to do good enough to get to zero and have no effect on the world around me. Then, I would go to sleep, and the counter would reset. Why? Well, that’s a story in and of itself.

Part of it was childhood trauma. Part of it was being Asian in a very white world. Part of it was family dysfunction, and part of it was culture expectations taken to the extreme. In Taiwanese culture, it was heavily frowned upon to say anything even remotely positive about yourself lest you look as if you were bragging. In the white cultural, I was ugly, weird, and a freak. I’m still a freak, but that’s beside the point. In my family, I was taught that my only worth was what I could do for others, and I had no intrinsic value in and of myself. Add to that a deep depression and an impressionable brain that twists everything into a negative, and it’s not surprising that I ended up firmly believing I had to earn my right to live.

In addition, I had all these elaborate rules as to what counted as a positive, and it was extremely hard for me to make it to neutral. I don’t think I ever did, actually, because I rigged the game in such a way that I was bound to fail. When I talk about it in the past tense, it’s clear to see how ridiculous it is, but at the time, it felt as real as the sun on my face. I was miserable because I was constantly failing, and I just wanted to die. I spent much of my childhood well into my thirties wishing I had the courage to kill myself.

I hated myself. I couldn’t find anything about myself that I liked except my hair and my intellect (though I saw the latter as a curse oftentimes). I couldn’t believe that anyone would like me for any reason when it was obvious that I was pure toxicity. I’m not saying it was reasonable or rational, but it governed my thinking for longer than I care to admit. I truly thought I was a worthless human being (while at the same time having an exaggerated sense of the impact I had on others around me, which is common with people who have low self-esteem), and I was miserable every day of my life.

Then, sometime in my thirties, I slowly started shedding this idea. I’m not sure how or why (probably because of taiji and therapy. I attribute most of the positives in my life to taiji with a shout-out to therapy), but a few years ago, I realized that I no longer had that mindset. I didn’t think I had to earn the right to live, but I wouldn’t say I had a healthy self-esteem, either. I still didn’t like myself, and I still didn’t like what I saw in the mirror (literally and figuratively), but at least I wasn’t actively thinking of ways I could passively allow myself to die.

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