I am short. I am not vertically-challenged, otherly-heighted or differently-tall. I am short. Short short short-itty short. If you call me "teensy," "weensy," "itsy" and/or "bitsy," I will hurt you in ways that won’t even manifest until you’ve had several years of expensive therapy.

            (Okay, I kind of like "wee." Wee! Hee! It sounds Scottish, and I have much love for the Scots and their whiskey and their kilts and their castles and their heroin and their Mel Gibson movies.)

            Just for clarification, I am not a midget. Number One Daughter almost was; a growth spurt that brought her up to 4'10 1/2" cruelly crushed that dream for her. (The cutoff is 4'10", apparently.) (Who, it occurs to me to ask, makes these rules, the International Society Of Midgets, Dwarves and Elves?) (I hope I don't need to explain to you that yes, indeed, elves exist.) (If they didn't, who do you think would make Keebler cookies? Q.E.D. And also? Duh.)  Sadly, I'm not a dwarf or an elf either. (I could totally rock the elf thing, 'cause of how I'd be stylin' in a pointy green elf hat.) I'm just short. 5'3", to be exact. I am roughly the size of a large raccoon, though I am not rabid, and I wish that everyone I’ve bitten in the past year would just shut the fuck up about that. Fucking crybabies.

            (Speaking of midgets, apparently a group called the Little People of America objects to the term, despite their group having been founded as Midgets of America; I understand that the preferable term is "dwarf." Huh. The guys at our weekly dwarf-toss must be told of this immediately. They’re very PC. And can hurl a dwarf like 20 feet.) (Apparently LPA also objects to dwarf-tossing. Fuck. Now what am I supposed to do on Thursdays until Grey’s Anatomy starts again?)

            It should come as no surprise to you that there are advantages and disadvantages to being short, and as even less of a surprise that it’s mostly disadvantages. I have more stools in my house than the CDC during a salmonella outbreak. When I was a kid, bigger kids enjoyed kicking my ass, because they could (and also, I might have been a little bit of a wiseass, possibly); indeed, kicking my ass was one of the activities recommended by the Greater Miami Tourist Board for bigger kids when visiting the Miami area. (One applauds the logic of that very human urge to beat the crap out of smaller humans, as it makes the kind of sense that human actions very rarely do. One applauds this logic, that is, unless of course it is one's own personal only ass getting kicked.) Dating taller women can be problematic--not on my side, as I've dated women much taller than myself (I believe 5'10" was the tallest), and am pretty used to my own shortness, but for them the idea of reversing the standard man-tall, woman-short concept is new and daunting and  often just does not fly. The idea that a man should be taller than the woman he's with is deeply ingrained, perhaps not just in our culture but in the human psyche. (Which is why I went to live with the Pygmies for a year. Man, I made out like a bandit.) (And Pygmy chicks? Are hawt.)

            I know: boo fucking hoo. Got a job? Got a house? Then get in line for sympathy. The line starts behind the 40 million people who are out of work. Hey, I’m not saying it’s a tragedy or that I think about being short 24/7/366 (it’s always a leap year in my calendar), or even that it’s been a driving force in my life. It definitely doesn’t suck more than cancer or lupus--in the great scale of things, it’s more like eczema. Kind of annoying, and a little itchy, but there are lots of people worse off than me. And the itchy thing doesn’t come from being short; I think I need a new fabric softener.

            Being short is a little like being a member of a minority--not an oppressed minority, like African-Americans or gays, but an inconvenienced minority, like... Yeah, right; I don't believe I'm inclined to open that particular can of worms at this time. (Do worms really come in a can? Do canned worms taste different from fresh?) You don't have that much of a problem getting into good schools, you don't have that much of a problem getting good jobs (although there is a fair amount of statistical evidence that preference for top jobs does go to taller people) (well, and also whiter and straighter[-acting] and more-male people), but, you know, you do have to belly up to the taller urinals on tippy-toes, getting off a bus is often an Indiana-Jones-esque adventure, ordering a drink in a crowded bar is a bitch and you spend a lot of your time staring at women's breasts, which are frequently at eye-level. (Hey, I said there were advantages.) It's not horrible; it's just irritating. And given the almost-50 years I've lived, I've gotten pretty used to it.

            (As an aside, I’m always amused by people who think it’s a killer insult to point out that I’m short or think remarks about my being navel-height are devastating--I’m not talking about friendly banter, but people actually trying to get under my skin. Really, halfwit? I’m short? Dear god, I never noticed before! AAAAHHHH! I must run home and hide myself from view! I’m…hideous! And, by the way, given a choice between being short and, say,  being sufficiently fucktarded to support Sarah Palin, I’m going to want to stay in my very own size-7 shoes.) (They’re Ecco hiking boots, and very comfortable.)

            But, all that almost-50 years worth of adaptation aside, you do despair of this shit after a while and from time to time. You do wish you were, perhaps, a few inches taller. (If you are me, and if as I suspect this piece gets like 30 reads, for all practical purposes you are.) You get tired of the stools (the ones you stand on, not the…right, you got that, just making sure), having to watch out for people's elbows on a crowded El, endlessly having to announce one's height before meeting a blind date (when dating, as I am not any more). ("I am the size of a rodent of unusual size. I can fit on your keyring. If you have a large appetite and are a cannibal, you could eat me in one, or maybe two or three, sittings.") But hell, there's nothing you can do about it, except possibly have one of those horrendous leg-breaking operations where they insert metal rods into the broken bones and oh, did I mention how much I'm never doing that? Because of how fucking incredibly much I'm never doing that. Just…no. I would like to come out here as being very much against pain on a personal basis. I cannot speak for others on this matter; go for it if you are so inclined, to each his/her own, but definitely none for me, thank you, I’m not hungry, someone else can have all my agony.

            If, though, suddenly by magic I could be average height, 5'9" or 5'10" or so, would I? Now, the psychobabble-ishly correct answer would be, "Hell, no! I love myself just the way I am," and while I agree with the whole "You must love yourself" concept (hey, my porn bill is so high because of how very much I love myself--well, actually, I guess it's because of how very often I love myself), the real answer is, "Fuck yeah," I would. Or I would until I spent two minutes thinking about how in fairy tales when you get wishes granted it generally does not turn out well. Wish for your drowned son back, and a shambling thing drags itself up the porch to your door, and you have to use your last wish to make it go away. Wish for the power to make gold, and you starve in the midst of golden food. (Why didn’t Midas just hire a guy to feed him? I always thought that was kind of a plot hole.) Wish for a gigantic penis and…er, wait, that’s not a fairy tale; that’s porn; sorry. The point being: there’s always a cost to magic.

            So if I were suddenly of average height? What if the cost of that were my sense of humor--tall people seem remarkably humorless, especially when I play little jokes on them like whacking their knees with a ball-peen hammer (hey, it makes me laugh)--or my ever-so-slightly-skewed view of life, which I rather enjoy, because of how much it saves me on drugs? What if those things come from the same place that the blues comes from: pain? (In the case of Young Floyd getting his ass kicked, not so much emotional or existential as punching-related.) Even without the leg-breaking and steel-rod inserting agony, that doesn’t seem to me that awesome a trade, especially since damn few people are attempting to kick my ass anymore. (Well, the tall people I hit in the knee with a ball-peen hammer, but they can’t catch me, because, and I feel it incumbent on me to reiterate this, I hit them in the knee with a ball-peen hammer.)  So, should some good fairy (or elf) show up and offer me the deal, I suppose I’d have to turn it, regretfully, down. Seriously, this whole having-learned-a-few-things-from-life-and-shit sucks. Even hypothetically.

I would totally take some Keebler Vanilla Wafers from that fairy or elf, though. They’re the snack of choice on dwarf-tossing night.