Shit Listed

I really hate coffee, as anyone who has known me for even a little while can tell you. It’s usually bitter and contains too much caffeine for my comfort; it also is linked to making people shorter. I have a big thing with height and the coffee thing has only aggravated my attention to it. It’s actually really hard to judge height when you’re the one who is shorter. You tend to keep looking up but you can’t quite tell how much taller people are. You just know they are taller by more or less than the last person. When you’re taller than the second person, you notice their shortness immediately. In fact, they’ll probably end up looking smaller to you than they really are. Standing next to tall people always makes me uncomfortable because of this whole comparison people do. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are taller than me, if just by a little. I compromise with my Napoleon Complex. Is that such a crime? It’s entirely justified!

Tall people aren’t really on my shit list, though. Only if they keep calling attention to me being a relative munchkin :/

freshman year (”Please don’t drop the tiramisu on me”) Note that the shirt does not say “Bitch.” It says “Busch Gardens.” People always seem to misread that…

This is also the look I give cocky tall people, complete with tilted head and furrowed brow.

I’m not even sure how my shit list evolved, but there wasn’t one before high school. Even during high school I was basically oblivious to the social machine. Now that I’m in college, I’m more aware, but I can’t say I fully understand all this social group interaction crap. I didn’t have an emotional memory at all as a kid. I remember not understanding when kids at school said something mean. Probably because I was just learning English at the time! I never really reacted, even internally, to things kids would say. Maybe that’s good; at some point, every kid is made fun of in the playground, classroom, park, etc. But yeah, I only realized what they meant years afterwards, when I’d randomly remember something from forever ago. Kids can be cruel but not eloquently so, until they reach and age with double digits.

There was this one kid in third grade who told me that I always looked sad because the corners of my lips were always turned down. He pulled down the corners of his lips to demonstrate because I was giving him this blank look like I couldn’t hear him. I felt like laughing because his face looked stupid but my face wasn’t responding. Maybe it was my child brain’s way of thinking, “WTF?” But that is right. The corners of my mouth are turned down slightly! I never noticed that before. Now when I catch it in the mirror I can’t stop from smiling a little because it is odd.

I think the problem was that I never smiled in photos before college.

It still takes a lot to get on my shit list. Not even if you put a (unused) condom on my door knob like someone did on my floor freshman year. I turned it to get out of the suite and this sticky ooze is all over my hand. Sticky ooze??? I didn’t even know what it was; the plastic was stretched to the limit over the metal. Hopkins has a habit of keeping all its dorm floors amply supplied in a huge envelope on the main bulletin board. They usually come in different colours and flavours but so far I’ve seen a packet of “special” ones every now and again. I am betting it was clean. I am praying it was clean. But to this day, I really don’t know.

The most embarrassing moment so far with condoms involves the first day of move-in, freshman year. I am forever collecting and using alcohol wipes to clean stuff. My dad wanted to help me so he saw a bunch of alcohol wipes just sitting in a bowl on a table in the lounge area. He took a bunch of them and came to my suite door and puts them in my hand telling me, “Here, you’ll need these.” At the same time, a guy in the adjacent suite opens his door to watch my dad giving me all these individual packages of colourful squares. What my dad didn’t know is that those packets weren’t alcohol wipes, but condoms. I could not even look at the kid standing in the other doorway. It got really silent in the hallway for a second before I told my dad that those are not alcohol wipes.

They might both be square but please read the label.

Embarrassing me doesn’t necessarily get you on my shit list. You have to be downright evil like coffee. Give me a high and reliably bring me even lower; then we’ll talk.

~ by paperdreamer on June 9, 2008.