Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: well-being

Even more about martial arts and me

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I skipped a post for today becuse my brother came to visit late last night during the time I would normally write the post for that day. In addition, it was daylight changing time last night, which meant we lost an hour during the night.

Side note: Can we please do away with changing the clocks twice a year? There is no good reason for it any longer, and it just throws everything out of whack. I don’t care which way they choose, but just do it. We have indoor lighting and no longer need to rely on the sun.

In addition to that, Saturday is the one day I actually have to get up at a certain time because I have class at noon. These days, that means getting up at 11:30 a.m. or so. I don’t do my individual practice on Saturdays now, but I don’t like that–even though I do have class.

Here is yesterday’s post about how once you know the rules, you can break/bend them. And how exhilarating it is to realize that the rules no longer apply to me. Or rather, that I can follow the principles of the martial art without following the ‘rules’. Basically, as long as it follows the principles, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the form or not.

The bottom line is that the forms are the way they are for health, mostly. Well, that’s how it used to be. Now that Sifu is incorporating Master Choi’s movements into the Solo (Long) Form, there are more applications/combat than before. When I first started, the Solo Form was way more health/flourish-focused. Master Liang loved the tassel form of all the weapons, and he loved putting everything to music. That meant that the counts were always even and sometimes he added movements just to make it look prettier or to fit the music. That’s not to say that he padded the form, but I was appreciative when Sifu cut out the fluff.

In addition, he made it vastly easier. There were some movements that were difficult for no good reason. When Sifu saw everyone fall on certain movements, he modified them or took them out.

I did not finish this post because Daylight Savings is really messing with me. So I’m doing it today instead.

In the last five years or so, Sifu has changed a great deal to the Solo (Long) Form. I think  it’s in part beacuse of the pandemic (having more home time and being able to focus on refinement), and I was frustrated at the time. Why? Bceause when he changes the forms, he doesn’t necessarily articulate that he’s doing it. My teacher has seen him do something differently, asked him about it, and he’s told her that he’s changed the way they did that posture. And then he may change it back a few months later.


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Even more about gender and martial arts

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Back again to talk more about gender and martial arts. I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I had to slow down the rate at which I was teaching myself because I was messing some things up. For example, I recently re-taught myself the Fan Form because I realized I had forgotten whole chunks of it. Now, I have found out there are a few places that I’m fudging things. In other words, I need to go watch the videos again.

There are two problems when it comes to me learning martial arts forms. One, my memory is shit since my medical crisis.so I forget that which I have already learn. Not all of it, obviously, but enough to make it disconcerting. Weirdly, though, I am not being hard on myself about it. In the old days, I would call myself names and silently (or not so silently) scold myself for being stupid. This is the pressure of being raised in a hypercritical family.

I feel free, light, and airy when I’m doing my weapon forms. Sometimes, though, I feel fierce, strong, and ready to beat the shit out of someone. Not in real life, but in my mind. I don’t want to get into a fight for real, but I want to be in fighting form.

Working on my weapon forms helps with my depression and anxiety. Both have spiked lately, in a large part because of the landscape of America right now. When I can focus my anixiety and anger on a specific target, even if it’s imaginary, it really helps.

I really groove with combining the karambit and the fan. They could not be more different as weapons.. The karambit is a fast, small dagger that is meant to be used in quick movements. It’s fast, and indeed, furious. It’s dangerous. It’s meant to kill quickly. Maximum damage in a minimal amount of time.

The fan, on the other hand, is languid, slow-moving, and stealthy. You’re not going to see it coming in part beacuse you’re not going to think to worry about a fan. That’s just something you use to cool yourself down when it’s too hot, isn’t it? It’s a weapon that will lower someone’s guard and then I can poke them in the throat with it while their attention is on the karambit.

It really is the yin and the yang of weapons. I picked them to go together because they were roughly the same size (very roughly), but that’s it. They just work well together. I can’t tell you why other than what I’ve already said and good vibes.


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Gender, martial arts, and me (and society)

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Am I really going to write more about gender and martial arts? Why, yes, yes I am. Why? Because I can. And because I have more to say about it. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talked about finding a therapist. Mostly, I focused on how diufficult it is for me to find a therapist, even when I whittle down my epectations. However, as I was writing about it yesterday, I did another quick (five minutes) Google and found someone who fit very well. Except.

E is not a psychologist. I touched on why this is an issue for me yesterday, but I wanted to expand on it more in this post.

Look. I’m going to sound snobby, but so be it. I have run rings around my therapists in the past except for the last one. She was a Jungian psychologist whereas the others were social workers. And it’s easy to see the clear difference in the training. At least it is for me. I was a psych major in college, and I’m very adept at reading people. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

It can’t hurt to at least talk to E, though. E has a free consultation and does both online and in-person sessions. I would do the former, which is not ideal, but the best I can do at the moment. And it’s better than nothing.

I have been expanding my weapon time because there is so much I want to learn. I got my new fan–the frame is metallic rather than plastic or bamboo. I have to say, I’m disappointed in it because it does not flick open easily. Maybe it’s because of the cold and it’ll be better once it warms up, but I would not count on it.

In addition, it does not close without a hitch, either. So my shitty seven dollar cheapo fan is actually better for the Fan Form than my more expensive metal one. I guess it makes sense given the intricacy of the fan, but I can’t help being a bit disappointed.

I have to pace myself. I was practicing the Swimming Dragon Form (Bagua), and I reached a point where I totally forgot what was next. I had been doing the first few movements on the left side, and I think that was messing with my brain. I watched my teacher doing the form, and it came back to me. Plus, I had to adjust a few movements, too.

I also tried using two fans to do the Double Saber form. That was interesting, but it did not work that well. The vibes were off, and I didn’t gel with the feel of it. It was fun to do, though.


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Even more about gender and martial arts

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I’m still on that gender/martial arts tip. And on that mental health tip. Here is my post from yesterday about how I am smarter than most therapists. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. No, smarts aren’t everything, but they are something. And for me, I cannot respect someone I can manipulate. One of the best things about my last therapist was that she would call me out on my shit. She was a psychologist, which I vibe much better with than the social worker mindset.

Here’s my issue with finding a therapist. I need someone who understands being a person of East Asian descent living in Midwest America. Then, toss in grief and family dysfunction, and we are narrowing the field rapidly. If I dare say queer, well, we might as well shut this shit down now. I know that I can’t have everything I want in a therapist, but it’s really hard to pare it down to the essentials.

I am a firm believer in therapy. I think it can be so helpful, and I got a lot from my last thearpist. But I had to go through half-a-dozen mediocre therapists before that. They ranged from bad to blah. One was really bad, but it wasn’t completely her fault. Another was nice, but inept. Another I can’t remember at all. My last therapist was the best, but she had her blind spots as well. She was focused on mother issues, which meant at times she was  biased for mothers in a way that was not helpful to me.

But the one thing I appreciated the most about her was the she called me on my shit. As I said, I had the tendency to talk circles around my therapists, but she would not let me do that. She would listen to me talk for several minutes. Then, she would cut me of and say something pithy. Early in our relationship, after one of my long ramblings, she said, “Minna, thinking is what got you into your troubles; it’s not going to get you out of it.” I protested, but she was right. Or rather, she was not wrong. I had the tendency to talk myself in circles without actually getting anywhere. I could get deep in the weeds without even touching on the actual isue. Much like my writing, come to think of it.

My point is, while I believe in therapy, I have a hard time doing it myself. The last time I tried, I looked at a popular website that is pushed by content creators. I was horrified by how it was run, though, and when I did more research into it, I realized that it was not good. Not just for potential clients, but also for the therapists who were working for it.


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More about gender, martial arts, and life in general

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My brother stopped by today to drop off my Premium Elite 2 Xbox Controller or whatever it’s called. I’m being flippant, but it’s by far the best controller I’ve ever had. I was wavering because it’s not cheap, but Ian swayed me because he has it and loves it. Once I got my hands on it, I realized that it was truly several cuts above the rest. Now that I have it back, I’m so happy. I tried it out, and it just felt so right in my hands. My one gripe is the reason my brother had it for a month–the left bumper stopped working all the time. It worked maybe a third of the time, which was even more infuriating than if it didn’t happen at all.

I looked it up, and it was a known problem for this expensive controller. Apparently, they cheaped out on the bumper buttons, which means that people have issues with them. This is, frankly, unacceptable for the amount of money we’re paying for them. Well, I say it’s unacceptable, but clearly it’s not. Would I buy it again? Sadly, yes. Because it’s just that much better than any other controller (expect for that one issue). I will say that it’s somewhat on me because I’ve dropped it several times. Still. I’ve dropped all my controllers several times, and this is the first time I’ve broken a bumper.

The other thing my brother wanted to do was to natter on about his newest obsession–espresso-making. He was not a drinker of coffee for all of his life. Then, his GF inherited an espresso machine, and now my brother is hooked. True to his nature, he bought an expensive machine and an app that monitors it from his phone. Plus other accessories that added up to a prettty penny.

I joked that of course he went hard on it once he got interested because that was how he do. I was also laughing beacuse that’s how I do as well. For me, it’s the weapons. I am so obsessed by them. Right now, I am learning the Cane Form with my saber after watching my teacher’s teacher do it. I have learned three of the four rows, and as I’ve said before, doing the Cane Form with the saber made both forms really click for me.

Here’s yesterday’s post about gender, martial arts, and more.

Listening to my teacher’s teacher talk about the cane and the saber made something go off in my brain. Before, I was struggling with both. Not the forms per se, but with how I felt about them. This is where the arts part comes in for me. The weapons need precision, yes, and it’s definitely martial, but the arts part is all about the feel for me. I’ve talked about how I relate to each weapon–and about how I’m vibing with them.

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Health, gender, and kung-fu fighting

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I have still more to say about gender and martial arts. That should not surprise anyone because once I get stuck on something, I go on and on and on about it. Yesterday, I talked about gender and what I think of it (not much). I’m so tired of talking about it, but it’s a big deal right now given the state of my country at the moment.

I have been voting for thirty years. I have voted Democratic almost every time*. I have not been happy about it most of the time because it’s just the least worst of two evils. The only times I’ve felt joyful about voting was for Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Take from that what you will. I dutifully voted for whoever had the D by his (and yes, it was overwhelmingly male which says a lot about the Democratic Party, but taht is not what this post is about) name, but I never felt good about it. Or rather, rarely.

I know that I don’t belong to this time or place, but I also don’t think I would have fit in any time or place. And I don’t know how much fight I have in me to try to change the world for the better. I realize that I’m slipping back to where I used to be, more and more each day.

I know it’s because of inertia and because we tend to go back to homeostasis. In other words, we don’t move in a positive direction without being deliberate about it. Some people like my brother do it almost effortlessly. I envy that about him, by the way. If he thinks something sounds fun, he just does it.

When he was here a few days ago, he was telling me about his adventures in Taiwan and Thailand with his GF. Each day, they had a plan, but then they changed it on a whim if something else looked better. I remembered that from when we went to Taiwan together, and it was a nightmare for me.

I digress.

I tend to stick to my routines, and they work until they don’t. One big example is my sleep. I have always had shitty sleep, starting from when I was a kid. When I was six or seven, my mother would put me to bed at seven or eight, and I would put a t-shirt in the crack under the door so I could read until midnight. I have always liked the night better than the day.

When I went to college, I could not go to bed until 3:30 a.m, even though I had a class that was a quarter to eight in the morning. I would get up at 7:30 a.m. and race to class. I was so sleep-deprived that I could not find my portable alarm clock one morning. I looked for it for five minutes, and it was nowhere to be found.


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More about health and identity

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I am musing more about health, gender, and how I wish the world would be. Here is my post from yesterday in which I wrote about why I opted out of the ‘woman’ label–reluctantly and with some regret. As I said, in my previous post, I have no problems with the label itself or being called a woman in an ideal world.

Alas, we do not live in an ideal world, especially not now. And I am not a material girl living in a material world.

I want to be totally honest this post. I do not understand gender and why people are so wedded to it. This is not me saying I don’t believe that most people are very wedded to their gender–I know they are. I am just not one of those people. I wish we could just not talk about it, but I realize that this is not realistic.

In this society (and maybe others, but I cannot speak to that), we place so much emphasis on gender. It’s baked into so many things that even the mildest push back is considered radical, disruptive, and threatening.

Seriously. I cannot say how shocked I was at the pushback I’ve gotten from supposedly feminist women for…not wearing a bra. For quietly deciding not to have children. For stating the fact that calling someone by the wrong gendered ttitle is misgendering. For simply saying I’m agender. All of these in a very bland way because I know better than to be at all positive about it. Or for saying I don’t use pronouns.

I’m constantly reminded that me quietly living my life is a big shock to some people.

I mentioned this is an earlier post (I think), but I need to repeat it. Last year, I had to renew my license. When I went to the DMV to do so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had nonbinary as a choice. They didn’t have it when I nenewed (online) four years prior (early pandemic), so I was not expecting it.

And  I didn’t choose it. Why? One, I don’t consider myself nonbinary. As I’ve said many times–if I was thirty years younger, that’s probably what I would call myself. Not because I vibe with it, but because it’s the least-worst of the options. Much like I chose bisexual, reluctantly, because there’s just no better label. Well, bi.

The biggest reason I did not choose nonbinary, though, was because I looked at the political climate around me. I knew the possibility of a repeat of the orange menace, and I knew that no matter what, the Republicans were going to make hate of queer/genderqueer people a major point of their platform. So, I swallowed hard and went back in the closet. I shut the door behind me, and sighed in sadness.


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Health in relation to identity

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Here’s the thing I learned from my debacle about not wanting/not having children. And this took me a decade into my thirties at least to fully suss out. I had no idea why women would be angry at me for not wanting children and being vocal about it. It’s beacuse they had bought into the societal message that they were supposed to have children and they could not tolerate anybody who indicated the lie in that statement. Because if they did,, then they would have to examine the choices they had made in their life. And they did not want to do that. Oh, they did not want to do that.

I must stress as I always do that I did not crow about it or say that anyone who wanted/had children were stupid/ignorant/out-of-pocket or anything like that. I never brought it up because I didn’t think about it except when people asked me about it. I used to explain it like this. I would never bring up not not having a dog because it was not a part of my life. Same with kids. I would never bring them up because I didn’t have them, didn’t want them, and did not have them as a part of my life.

Anyway. I was not ashamed of not having kids nor for not wanting them. I did not apologize or act as if it was a failing on my part. Because it wasn’t. That was my first step to distancing myself from being a woman, though I did not yet know it. If I was going to get so much shit from not doing my womanly duty (including from my mother, oh so much so), then I did not want to be a woman.

The bra thing is the same. Here’s my post from yesterday. Most women/AFAB people do not like wearing bras. Many wear them simply because they’re supposed to.. It’s a societal expectation, and when some people opt out, it triggers the crabs in a bucket mentality/martyr complex in others. “If I have to suffer, so do you!” It’s a terrible way to live life, but many people have that mentality.

So these oh-so-feminist and progressive women could not explain why they were so upset that some women and AFAB people did not want to wear bras. But even more so, they were upset that we weren’t apologetic about it. There were a half-dozen other women/AFAB people who unabashedly declared they would never wear a bra again without a hint of apologia in their statements.

And some women got so mad. SO MAD. Like, you would have thought we came and took their bras so they couldn’t wear them, mad. Just for saying we preferred not to wear bras or wouldn’t wear them.


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More on health in general, and in specific

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I’m talking about health. Let’s talk morea bout it. In yesterday’s post, I talked at length about eating disorders–namely, my disordered thinking. I don’t know how to go about being healthy in a healthy way. Well, that’s not exactly true. Taiji and bagua are healthy for me, and when I do them, they short-circuit that part of my brain that is constantly telling me that I have to do better and juust be better.

I don’t know how to get out of that mindset, quite frankly. Any time I try to be sensibel abouut my diet, I go off the rails in one way or another. I need to find a thearpist, but it’s so daunting. Not just because it’s hard to find a therapist in general, but because what I’m looking for seems to be the unicorn of therapists.

I took the questionnaire on Better Help, and by the time I put in everything  I was looking for, they told me they had no match. That’s not surprising, but it was depressing. Here’s what I was looking for. Someone East Asian and queer. Someone who was comfortable with gender issuues, trauma, and grief. Oh, and family dysfunction.  And was in Minnesota (or aware of the Minnesota ethos). There was nobody.

Of course, this was just one (lshady, I later confirmed) website, so that means nothing. I went to the Psychology Today website and had a hard time finding anyone who fit my criteria, either. I had to toss out two or three of these criteria, which didn’t feel good. I decided I really wanted someone who was East Asian, non-male, and skilled in Minnesotan mentality, family dysfunction, and grief. Oh, and a psychologist. That last one was a killer.

I really don’t think that’s too much to ask for, but it’s like looking for a needle in the haystack. I gave up in discouragement, especially given how the election went and what is going on now in this country.

I need to get back to it, though. I can tell that my depression is deepening and my anxiety is getting worst. There is a hopelessness in my soul that is not going away. It’s sad because when I died (twice), I got a renewed lease on life–and then frittered it away. Now, I’m back to where I was before my medical crisis. Well, not quite as bad, but I’m fighting the same fight. It’s not surprising because I am the same person in general, but I wish I could have held ontto that better me for a longer time.

Back to health.

Eating is my bugaboo for several reasons. I don’t know if I will ever come to grips with it. I want to be at ease with eating, but I teeter from binging to starving. I can barely taste food as I eat it, and I don’t know when I’m hungry unless I haven’t eaten for, say, ten hours. I fucked up the mechanism that is supposed to tell me when I’m hungry while dealing with my two eating disorder eras, and I have never fixed it since.

In my sixth decade on this earth, I would like to finally be free of the disordered thinking that has plagued me since I was seven. It’s gotten better over the years, bit by agonizing bit, but it’s still not where I would like it to be.


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Let’s talk about health, bay-bee

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I’m going to talk more about taking care of myself. Here is the post from yesterday in which I explained why I did not care for the Instapot. I think one of the things that I have accepted about myself is that I am not going to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to feeding myself; I just am not. I am not going to cook more than pasta and premade sauce or rice and steamed veggies with rotisserie chicken from Cubs.

I wish I could find joy in cooking; I really do. It seems like something that would be great to get into, and you have a delicious result at the end. The problem is that–well, there are more than one issue with cooking for me.

One. I have so many food restrictions, and while substitutions are better now than they have ever been, it can be hard to find them in my local Cubs. And they’re more expensive than the regular items. I used to buy Lactaid cottage cheese, but for some reason, it’s not made any longer. I can’t find it at Cubs or online. I looked up recipes for something similar and easy to make. I tried it (out of tofu), and it was horrid. It did not taste like cottage cheese at all.

I knew better. Fake food items rarely taste like the real thing. They are better these days than thirty years ago, but you have to keep in mind that they are not the real thing. In other words, you have to try to appreciate them for what they are. There are some that are delicious in and of themselves, and there are some that are really close to what the original tastes like.

The one exception is cheese. Daiya is the closest I’ve found to the real thing, but I still wouldn’t eat it on its own. It has to be on something and melted. It has the right consistency and that boingy spring that cheese has when melted. Eat it on its own and cold, though? Hell, no.

I’m really grooving on the doing the Cane Form with the saber. It’s amazing how much it’s changed my feelings about both the cane and the saber. Before this, I would have put them both at the bottom of my weapons. Now, I have to say I love practicing with them. Would I put them at the top of my faves list? I wouldn’t go that far, but I have a new appreciation for them. I’m including the video of my teacher’s teacher doing it below. Yes, again, because it’s that amazing.


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