It’s great being tall
I’m rather tall. 195 cm or 6 feet 5. It’s really great and I’ll tell you why.
- Since being tall pretty much implies having large feet, finding shoes is like looking for the holy grail. My toe nails know the front side of my boots all too well (it’s a bloody affair). I finally stood up for my right to have a comfortable skiboot with the result that I haven’t skied for a couple of years now.
- If I’d like to find some pants, long sleeved shirt or sweater I usually end up looking like I belong to some right-wing white-supremacy conservative group. All the groovy stores’ size large is for looking baggy not for being actually tall. Anyways, forget hitting on that funky girl tonight.
- When I’m in a social gathering it’s often hard to understand what people are saying because they project their sound from upto a foot lower and usually downwards, rarely upwards.
- It’s really not that much colder up here, I can assure you.
- In any social setting, it’s hard not to notice everybody that’s there. You can’t escape scanning the surroundings. So just when you thought you were thoroughly obsessed with some girl you discover another who from afar looks even better than the one you’re with. Bugger.
- Getting in and out of the average sedan car is like an exercise in yoga. Driving in such a car is a compromise of either a headache (because my head wants to punch through the ceiling) or tendonitis in my legs since they have to be maintained in a stressful position. In any passenger seat my legs protrude either in someone else’s back or side. I’d best fold them up and shove ‘em under my seat.
- When I’m dancing with the average girl, her breasts are comfortably rubbing against my belly instead of my chest. It’s just so exciting. And oh yeah, since my elbows are at the height of her forehead, it just takes the slightest lack of precision and I’ll whack her right in her face. Obviously I don’t even want to talk about all the feet of neighbouring dancers that I’ve stepped on.
- If I’d be so crazy to kiss this girl, we’d both be complaining the next day about our stiff necks. I guess I won’t get into further details about physical intimacy in this case and its anatomical idiosyncracies.
- Most girls of average height and who have common sense make jokes about getting involved with me since they’d rather not feel so short all the time. The ones that remain are usually really short and need a rather tall guy to compensate for their inferiority complex.
- Since all tall women are models, and since all tall men like me are spoiled rotten having been hunted down by short women, there’s no way that I would know how to approach them since they’re surrounded by professional womanizers. Either that or tall women are just as happy to be tall as me … hence they stay safely at home.
- In a show where there’s no tribune, and only the frontline can actually see the performers, everyone thinks that I can see it anyway and demand to stand in front of me so I end up seeing a glimpse of the show from the back of the venue.
- After age 16, I decided to have a cast-iron helmet built into my head to prevent further brain-damage from inconsiderately low placed beams, awnings, signs and what have you. Average impact ratio: 1-2 times a day.
- Certain countries are just off-limits, since it feels like being Gulliver. Example: Japan. Most of the time I needed the entire table for myself in order to get rid of my legs underneath it. Cars and trains required me to permanently bend over. I guess the Japanese are serious about making sure foreigners adapt to their bowing habit.
- Being tall my hands are also big. The mice I use for the computers I work with almost give me RSI since I can never relaxedly rest my hand on the mouse (my finger tips would be tapping into thin air).
- If I’d like to play the race-car game in the arcade I might as well use my hands to control the pedals. That is, if I succeed getting into the drivers seat at all.
- When I enter a place, there’s always someone who wants to know how tall I am, and thinks that it’s so funny that s/he is so much shorter. If only they’d know that I’ve been going through that joke since I was about 14. It’s wearing a little thin. Same holds for how funny it is that I’ve got such big feet - like I wouldn’t need waterskis and such. Man, I’m really laughing and laughing.
- Like full-breasted women, I’m represented by my chest, since that’s the first place people look at when they look at me. And that’s after they’ve realized they’re not looking at some wall that came outta nowhere.
- In the plane it always seems that some kid got the front row seat with all the extra legroom. Taking a leak I always need to aim with deadly precision since the toilet is tucked far away in the side of the plane with the ceiling progressively lowered so that standing upright is impossible. I generally make do by bending my knees and angling my head. The whole thing becomes another yoga exercise.
- Going out secretly with a lover without your girlfriend finding out is impossible. At best, everyone that is remotely connected with your girlfriend will know with whom you were there, possibly without you realizing since they could easily hide. At worst the girlfriend is there and there’s no way I’d see her before she’d see me.
- Since I’m always looking down, people easily mistake it for acting like I feel superior.
- Some women think that a tall guy like me would easily defend them in physical threatening situations, so they’d actually get into sort of provoking such situations because they feel so safe - or maybe to show off they’re so well protected. Just too bad I’ve got no clue how to do a fist fight and things like that.
- Once I was in a bus in Santiago, Chile. I couldn’t stand upright in the bus because the ceiling was at about 5 ft 10. The two front row seats were free and could just barely accomodate me with my legs pushed accross the two seats. Just after I managed to squeeze into these seats and when the bus corridor had filled up jam-packed, an old lady entered the bus and demanded I surrender one of the seats. At the end of the ride I needed help from three men to untangle me from the corner I had managed to get myself into. I took me another hour to regain normal walking procedure.
So, it’s really great to be tall. But in fact I didn’t give you the best reason: Everybody thinks it’s great being tall.