Feeling broken

Dreams (the night-time variety) .. one can leave you feeling relaxed and happy, the next can turn around and leave you shattered and broken. If they'd happened in the other order I'd feel better.

It is probably the after effects of a week of widely fluctuating emotions in response to a series of events - from nigh exhilarating highs to gutting comedowns. Also a week where I pushed myself somewhat at work and while I am happy with the time spent and with the quality of my code I still did not complete the results I was aiming for, at the cost of tiring myself out.

So today I feel broken and hurt and alone, and have a bad case of the "don't wanna's" which means I only* managed to drag myself out of bed because I have commitments to meet this afternoon - this will get done as will probably some other things which sort of /need/ doing but the things I had planned to do today are probably dead in the water.

* Also because lying in bed moping wasn't going to increase the chances of someone turning up on my doorstep to "distract and comfort"** me - but then neither is dumping and angsting in my journal.

** totally a euphemism

Non-binary-sex gender equivalents in fantasy gaming

Stupid humans, always judging first if you can give birth and not how hard you can swing an axe. Easy to fool.
- Orc warrior

It is a strangeness of humans that so many of their cultures define and even segregate persons first by whether they possess the physical attributes to bear child and only then how skilled they are at their craft, often assigning primacy to one or the other sex.
- Dwarven sage

Pity the short-lived races trapped in expressing only one portion of themselves based on accident of birth, without the time to master the bodys secrets and wholly fulfil all the self.
- Elven shaper

In the real world gender is very much a cultural construct, in western society currently very tightly tied to the popular sexual binary. I've a vague theory that this is both a luxury and a (hopefully) temporary curse of having time to think about such things and no ability to change them.

I'm aware that non "western" societies have different sets of gender constructs and admit to not knowing much about those, so I'm going to look at a few hypothetical fantasy races, still assuming a sexual binary*, to see where similar conflicts of identity might arise. In all of these it can be assumed that some concept of male/female exists but is generally of as much significance as hair or eye colour is to us.

* for non-binary ideas see my Alternate Reproductions series.

Disclaimer: my understanding of gender issues is flimsy at best so I apologise in advance for any terrible faux-pas / offence made in this writing in regards to real-world issues.

( snip )