@mitu derp, dunno how i missed it.. what's strange is that is the default settings after installing the drivers. The 90 will put it in a landscape view, so I guess this screen is portrait out of the box (before the installation of the driver).. anyway, if I remove the rotate, the screen won't work (white screen), and so at the moment I have it set to 270 so that way it's back to landscape with the pi power plug at the top.. I tried accessing terminal with it upside down (rotate=90) and it was still happening...
I think at this point I'll just hook it up to a monitor, get all the pi settings I want, and then just avoid needing to go to terminal when on the mini screen.. thanks for your help with this