broken-nosed gods

Something I noticed today: recently, reading about young men laughing and talking and making plans makes me feel kind of nostalgic and sad, but reading about young women (or young women and young men) doing the same thing makes me feel confidant and cheerful.

This may be an aftereffect from re-reading Timely Errors,wherein a bunch of nice young men play cards and joke around, one of whom will grow up to torture another into insanity; that scene hits me super-hard in ways it didn't before, because now I connect card games to my cousins and close friends in some deep-down way that I didn't when I read that fic the first time. Though why that should carry over only to young men hanging out together and not any of the other things it might, I don't know.

What strange things brains are.