This Creature is Lore

I am taken with a sort of semi-manic fatigue lately. The barrage of activities, classes, committees, and gatherings into which I’ve jumped the past couple years--esp. the past six months--might not daunt your average overachiever much, but I’m a lifelong underachiever recently converted. I’m starting to suspect my low energy level can’t handle this indefinitely, and/or that I’ve still not established sustainable methods of time management. The upside is that I barely have time to dwell on anxiety, my confidence has increased exponentially, and I perceive myself as an active and contributing member of my community rather than an unworthy alien. Yet more and more, I get some sense I’ll always be alien in some way, not a bad way per se, but not always in an easy way.

( Rambling about writing that I’ve been meaning to post for the better part of a week. )

Why do I get the feeling my winter break is going to consist of a lot of writing, and a lot of reading metric verse aloud in my lair?

And now, astonishingly, to diverge from my Tolkien fixation. People like LeGuin (and Tolkien) are the ones that make sci-fi and fantasy my favorite genres, despite the proliferation of crap that mars their reputations. They create feasible worlds one might actually want to visit or inhabit. For a while, I've felt the need to make a case in writing for my immediate relocation to Gethen, the wintry planet of LeGuin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness. For consideration:

- Gethenians are androgynous except during their kemmer (basically, they are in heat once a month). They can turn either male or female in kemmer and have no choice in the matter. Thus all people are usually divested or any dichotomous concept of "male" and "female," and when they do experience these polarities, they are no more likely to experience the one than the other. As a woman who usually hates the way people treat me based upon my status as a smallish, generally "attractive" woman, I've often wished I looked like a scary old man so that people would take me seriously as a leader, philosopher, speaker, and intellectual. This is probably my sociopsychological pendulum overcompensating. I don't know that I'd really be a man if given the opportunity. But, I think the whole gender thing is bullocks and I would like to be rid of it. It's caused so many problems for humankind, my own personal foibles aside.

- Gethenian religion is fascinating. The main religions are the Handdara and the Yomeshta. Though the two oppose each other at first glance, I think they are along the same vein in their own way. Both focus on time and perceptions and experiences thereof, which I can dig way more than dogmatic conceptions of patriarchal deities. One of the creation myths told in the book is also compelling, dark and paradoxical. I think I could get behind religion on this planet.

- Gethenians have this nifty concept called 'shifgrethor,' which the Terran narrator never quite grasps the full nuances of, but which seems to be an elaborate code of honor. There is also some prestige thing involved, which some might call petty, but it seems to accord with my view of the world. I have a very defined notion of honorable behavior, take pains to treat people in a way that does not cause them to lose face, am prone to defending the honor of even people I dislike and more so people I admire, and hold an eternal grudge if I find that an individual has impugned upon what I see as my honor. In other words, most people would probably think I take the whole damn thing too seriously. I don't believe they'd think so on Gethen.

When can I leave?