This paragraph struck me close to home when I read it this morning:

In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a dwarf. Tolkien’s Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he has surrounded by squabbling Hobbits had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years.

- Cryptonomicon (1999) by Neal Stephenson

I’m feeling a little like a dwarf these days. If that makes no sense to you, then the multiple layers of metaphor at play here are beyond a blog post. In an accidental effort to deal with this bit of psychological transferance, when my copy of Dragon Age: Origins arrived from Amazon this afternoon, I, of course, opted to play as a dwarf.

Maybe that will help. Or make things worse. I haven’t decided yet.