Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: love

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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An Ode/Eulogy to Valentine’s Day

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Ed. Note: I wrote this on Valentine’s Day, even though it won’t be posted until the day after. Just so there’s no confusion.

I have a complicated relationship with Valentine’s Day. I have always professed to hate it, and I do, mostly, but it’s for more complex reasons than I normally admit. I would tell people when asked (and sometimes unprompted) that I deplored the commercial aspects and being told that I have to buy lavish gifts to demonstrate my love. I firmly believed that you could show your love in many different ways at any time of the year, and I didn’t need Hallmark to dictate when I should display my love, damn it. That was all true and sincerely felt, but there was a deeper, darker reason I hated it so much–it’s because it consistently let me down. Yes, even I, as jaded and bitter as I was, I had bought into the promises and dreams Valentine’s day had fed to me, lies, really, during my teenage years and into my twenties. I wanted the romance, to be wined and dined, and to be made to feel like a queen. I wanted happily-ever-after that was the bailiwick of fairy tales and Harlequin Romance novels. When I was in a relationship during those years, even though I would pooh-pooh Valentine’s Day, I would secretly hope that my partner would surprise me with a magical night. It never happened, and each time it didn’t, I became increasingly bitter. Even though I tried to pretend I was fine with having a low-key Valentine’s Day, I wasn’t. In other words, I was a lover scorned being spiteful towards my ex-lover.

During my thirties, I tried to make my peace with Valentine’s Day, even though I dreaded its arrival every year. I was not in a relationship more often than I was, and each Valentine’s Day was a stark reminder that I was single. Our society is very couple-centric, and it’s not like I need another day to shove my alone-ness in my face. I get enough of that wherever I go–you really can’t escape it anywhere. Back in my thirties, I desperately wanted to be in a relationship, although I would have vigorously denied it. I was an independent, strong woman, damn it, and I didn’t need no man or woman to make me complete. Yet, there was something inside me that longed to be one half of a couple. I couldn’t squash the feeling, no matter how hard I tried. So, much of my bluster about Valentine’s Day was because it made me feel my lack of a romantic relationship keenly, and I hated feeling that way.

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RIP, Raven–You Are Loved

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bestest friends and blood brothers
My favorite picture of my boys. Raven (R) & Shadow (L).

Ed. Note: It’s been a week sine my baby has died, and it still hasn’t completely sunk in yet. I wrote this post several days ago, but I haven’t been able to publish it yet. I don’t know why. I thought now was the right time.

My Raven died Saturday night. I think it was a heart attack, but I’m not sure. Ian tried to revive him, and we rushed him to the Emergency Vet, but it was too late.

That’s how I’ve started the messages to my friends about what happened to Raven. Writing it again doesn’t make it any more real, nor does thinking about it.

The first time I saw Raven, nine years ago, he was named Midnight, and in his picture, he looked like a scared, scrawny black cat. I noticed that he had a brother, also black, named Shadow. They were nine months old at the time. Shadow’s bio said he was psychic and knew that I was looking for two cats. I fell in love immediately because I WAS looking for two cats, and these two looked exactly like what I wanted. In addition, they were going to be at an adoption fair at the PetSmart/PetCo in a city near me the very next day. I felt it was fate, and I hurried to see them at the adoption fair.
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