#rambling...

just throwing it out in a post that i miss y'all. i miss ffiv and the little nook we have here for that fanbase and i wish life would slow down just a little so that i could envelop myself in that game and its community again... it's so fun and so rewarding. i apologize for my absence as of late, but know i'm alive at the very least and do intend to come back... sometime. when i can.

I've been thinking of aapi heritage month and ppl posting culture stuff... it feels kind of disingenuous for me because the culture I grew up with and the culture I want to, um, post about and represent are so different. Well... I know there's danger in clinging to past forms of culture and searching for that legitimacy, but I also want to find a sort of Hui and Manchu culture that feels authentic, to understand it even if it's as a sort of outsider. The parts of my life (naval gazing now) that were influenced by it are impossible to unthread from the general Chinese Canadian experience, maybe it's 50% general Chinese Canadian, 40% Hui and 10% Manchu (mainly through racialization), but I feel such a distance from Chineseness. Perhaps it's spitefully so due to conflicts with those spaces. It's all in my head, but what is nationality (ethnic) but a mindset? My families are actually Very Hui and Very Manchu, but being raised in Canada ironically immersed me more in Han Chinese culture: surrounded by Han Chinese Canadians instead of a growing up in a closed Muslim village or Manchu autonomous region. I'm sure my life is better this way but somehow.... I'm a little sad.