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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
I have not been short for most of my life. By the time I had exited elementary school, I was already well on my way to my full adult height, and I believe I had crested the six foot mark at that point. (1.82m, for people who use sensible metric systems instead of stange imperial ones.) As my mother would joke, it was a yearly question of whether we would make it to summer break before I outgrew my uniform clothes for that year. (I did not outgrow them, as best as I can remember, but there is also always a thriving exchange of uniform clothing for Catholic schooling, so if there had been a swap, I wouldn't have noticed.) I am most certainly not a member of the average height club for the country, although I am a member of the average height club for people of my body type in my family group. And my youngest sibling is taller than I am. (I'm a lttle over 1.9m, my sibling is just over 2m.) So there's plenty of my life where I find myself wishing for some additional length in many things. As I've gotten older, of course, and continued on a US diet, along with not getting quite as much exercise as I was during my university days, (marching band will definitely give you plenty of options for vigorous activity) I've also gotten rounder. (My ex routinely mentioned that I needed to be less skinny than I was, and so she might have gone in to try for some of that.)
What that means, functionally, is that for most of the things that I use to clothe myself, I have jumped into the "Big and Tall" sections for some time now. It used to be that I was having a devil of a time finding things that were tall without being big, but as I've settled into my middle age, it's a little less of an issue to find something that is both wide and long enough for me, as the "Big and Tall" part assumes both, rather than one or the other. Since the length is both in torso and in legs, getting things that fit has often been a "worst of both worlds" situation, with shirts needing the "Tall" designation on them to avoid showing where a lower back tattoo would be placed, and pants needing to go for some ways to get to my ankles, comparatively speaking. And socks and shoes, oh, goodness, most shoe places carry up to a US Men's 13 as the top end of their regular offerings, with the occasional US Men's 14 available, but for the most part, I've had to hope that when a manufacturer says what their size is, they're looser and bigger than it, rather than smaller and tighter. Big feet, big shoes. Long shirts, long pants. It was only this year that I was given the magic keyword "King Size" to describe socks that were designed to fit my feet and bigger feet than mine, so I finally don't have to deal with boring socks that aren't actually big enough for my feet, but instead can have fun patterns and designs and a comfortable fit. I've done a little bit better for having shirts and pants that are comfortable and fit, but a lot of the "Big and Tall" fashion tends toward either solid colors, floral print patterns, or geometrics. Since I like floral print patterns, this is not as much of a disadvantage to me as it could be to others, but I'm also very picky about what floral print patterns I want to put on my body, and in what colors. Same with other kinds of patterns or colors. I like jewel tones, but other people in my life with an eye for color compatibility have pointed out that I do quite well in pink and in lighter shades of various colors as well. (The current crop of people claiming to be expert on masculinity would say that pink is a girl's color, when only as recently as the Roman Empire was pink considered masculine, a lighter shade of the red of blood and war. Blue was the feminine color, especially in light blues.)
Being Big and Tall, however, comes with some other problems. Many times, those problems manifest themselves when you bonk your head on something that was meant for someone who is of a more average height. Or when the local grocery score is stringing decorations for a promotion or a season across the top of their lane lines and those promotional materials will strike you squarely in the forehead if you don't duck underneath them. Also, I will admit that being asked to help a stranger because of being a long being has, in fact, happened to me several times throughout my life. There is always gratitude at the end, though, and so, much like the other long being, I have accepted my role in society for these purposes.
Manipulation of small objects is very much harder when you have large hands, and so many of the fiber arts are less accessible to me, because the needles and the fibers themselves are pretty small and it takes practice, patience, and tools I don't have to succeed at those things. (I could probably do just fine with fiber arts if I had the right tools to work with and a certain amount of ability to not stab myself with needles.) As are certain fiddly bits of constructing with plastic bricks, or trying to gently bend things and not break them, or trying to put tiny screws into tight places because the assumption seems to have been that you would have small hands as well as small tools to fit everything into the space. (The robot vacuum of Theseus manages to defy this problem, as much of its screws and fastenings are not crammed into awkward, difficult spaces. This is why it is the robot vacuum of Theseus.) My cell phones have to be bigger screens to fit my hands and allow me to manipulate them well, but the increased size sometimes tries to be incompatible with the amount of pocket space that I have to carry them. I prefer cargo pants, not simply for aesthetic purposes and their general likelihood to fit both my length and my width, but because the additional pocket spaces mean that I can more fairly and effectively distribute pocket goods without overcrowding or losing any such objects because of their jumbling around or being pushed out.
And speaking of cell phones, touch screen interfaces are not particularly nice to me when they want me to make complex manipulations on a phone-sized screen. Or they make me hold them awkwardly while I'm trying to keep all the necessary information visible on the screen. Or, and this happens an awful lot, they interpret my up-and-down scrolling gesture as a side-to-side dismissal swipe, so I've used a lot of undo functions on my programs because they can't seem to figure out my gestures compared to someone else's. This is on top of the difficulties with using swiping keyboards, the ones I like the best, because sometimes the keyboard believes that a gesture that started well away from a particular letter or, usually, backspace, actually originated at the spot several seconds into the gesture. That is much harder to undo. I still prefer swiping keyboards to touch-tapping keyboards, though, because I have to have even greater precision with the touch-tappers to avoid typographical errors or complete nonsense words being entered.
There are some professional hazards of being Big and Tall as well. First and foremost that shelving, and just about everything else, designed for smalls is not very conducive to those who are tall. Most grownups sympathize with this, and I have found that I can mitigate at least some of this through sitting, kneeling, or otherwise not being on my feet when I have to handle working with those stacks, the chairs, and the rest. Getting down to the level of a small is a good professional situation, and I hope that I will continue to have the ability of body to keep getting down to those levels as I age.
The second of my potential issues in being a Big and a Tall is that when I take an interest in a tiny one, it often seems like it's a frightening experience. Even if these are little ones who have been in my story time, or who I have met and said hello to in other contexts, there's something about having a tall grownup take an interest in you that sends a lot of these little ones scurrying for the security of hiding behind their grown-up's legs. It's happened to me enough times, in enough different contexts, that I have to assume that it is, in fact, me that is the issue. Especially when it happens on the same day as the story time, not more than an hour or two after the end of the story time. A lot of children suddenly get shy around me when I turn my attention to them, even in the story time. I don't know what's happening in their brains as this goes on, but it feels like there's some sort of thing for them that goes "Oop. A grownup is looking at me, therefore there has to be something wrong, or something else is going to follow on from this." Even though, most of the time, if I'm looking at them, it's because I want to know what they're playing with, or to practice sharing, or any of those things that are developmentally appropriate for a child of that age. It's amusing to me, honestly, that this kind of thing happens, because the grownups know that I'm not a threat, I know that I'm not a threat, but there is a small child reacting to me, entirely appropriately, like I am a threat, or at least, that the situation itself is potentially strange or threatening, and the child is looking for cues and comfort from their grownup about how to proceed with in this new situation. (If I didn't have some of the child development education and continuing education that we take to try and understand kids better and make our programming better, I might be worried that there was some inner fault of mine that has to be smoothed out. Or worse, I'd be worried that someone with managerial authority over me would take it as a sign that I have some fault and am not actually fit to be a children's librarian.
For all of the jokes about the weather and the complete exclusion from the Average Height Club, I still like being tall, and I've come to accept that I'll have some big to me as well. So long as there aren't too many people trying to cut short their own existences by telling me that I have to go back to the skinny person that I was twenty years ago, I think I can manage to make it work. And it's a community that I think a fair number of people are part of.
I have not been short for most of my life. By the time I had exited elementary school, I was already well on my way to my full adult height, and I believe I had crested the six foot mark at that point. (1.82m, for people who use sensible metric systems instead of stange imperial ones.) As my mother would joke, it was a yearly question of whether we would make it to summer break before I outgrew my uniform clothes for that year. (I did not outgrow them, as best as I can remember, but there is also always a thriving exchange of uniform clothing for Catholic schooling, so if there had been a swap, I wouldn't have noticed.) I am most certainly not a member of the average height club for the country, although I am a member of the average height club for people of my body type in my family group. And my youngest sibling is taller than I am. (I'm a lttle over 1.9m, my sibling is just over 2m.) So there's plenty of my life where I find myself wishing for some additional length in many things. As I've gotten older, of course, and continued on a US diet, along with not getting quite as much exercise as I was during my university days, (marching band will definitely give you plenty of options for vigorous activity) I've also gotten rounder. (My ex routinely mentioned that I needed to be less skinny than I was, and so she might have gone in to try for some of that.)
What that means, functionally, is that for most of the things that I use to clothe myself, I have jumped into the "Big and Tall" sections for some time now. It used to be that I was having a devil of a time finding things that were tall without being big, but as I've settled into my middle age, it's a little less of an issue to find something that is both wide and long enough for me, as the "Big and Tall" part assumes both, rather than one or the other. Since the length is both in torso and in legs, getting things that fit has often been a "worst of both worlds" situation, with shirts needing the "Tall" designation on them to avoid showing where a lower back tattoo would be placed, and pants needing to go for some ways to get to my ankles, comparatively speaking. And socks and shoes, oh, goodness, most shoe places carry up to a US Men's 13 as the top end of their regular offerings, with the occasional US Men's 14 available, but for the most part, I've had to hope that when a manufacturer says what their size is, they're looser and bigger than it, rather than smaller and tighter. Big feet, big shoes. Long shirts, long pants. It was only this year that I was given the magic keyword "King Size" to describe socks that were designed to fit my feet and bigger feet than mine, so I finally don't have to deal with boring socks that aren't actually big enough for my feet, but instead can have fun patterns and designs and a comfortable fit. I've done a little bit better for having shirts and pants that are comfortable and fit, but a lot of the "Big and Tall" fashion tends toward either solid colors, floral print patterns, or geometrics. Since I like floral print patterns, this is not as much of a disadvantage to me as it could be to others, but I'm also very picky about what floral print patterns I want to put on my body, and in what colors. Same with other kinds of patterns or colors. I like jewel tones, but other people in my life with an eye for color compatibility have pointed out that I do quite well in pink and in lighter shades of various colors as well. (The current crop of people claiming to be expert on masculinity would say that pink is a girl's color, when only as recently as the Roman Empire was pink considered masculine, a lighter shade of the red of blood and war. Blue was the feminine color, especially in light blues.)
Being Big and Tall, however, comes with some other problems. Many times, those problems manifest themselves when you bonk your head on something that was meant for someone who is of a more average height. Or when the local grocery score is stringing decorations for a promotion or a season across the top of their lane lines and those promotional materials will strike you squarely in the forehead if you don't duck underneath them. Also, I will admit that being asked to help a stranger because of being a long being has, in fact, happened to me several times throughout my life. There is always gratitude at the end, though, and so, much like the other long being, I have accepted my role in society for these purposes.
Manipulation of small objects is very much harder when you have large hands, and so many of the fiber arts are less accessible to me, because the needles and the fibers themselves are pretty small and it takes practice, patience, and tools I don't have to succeed at those things. (I could probably do just fine with fiber arts if I had the right tools to work with and a certain amount of ability to not stab myself with needles.) As are certain fiddly bits of constructing with plastic bricks, or trying to gently bend things and not break them, or trying to put tiny screws into tight places because the assumption seems to have been that you would have small hands as well as small tools to fit everything into the space. (The robot vacuum of Theseus manages to defy this problem, as much of its screws and fastenings are not crammed into awkward, difficult spaces. This is why it is the robot vacuum of Theseus.) My cell phones have to be bigger screens to fit my hands and allow me to manipulate them well, but the increased size sometimes tries to be incompatible with the amount of pocket space that I have to carry them. I prefer cargo pants, not simply for aesthetic purposes and their general likelihood to fit both my length and my width, but because the additional pocket spaces mean that I can more fairly and effectively distribute pocket goods without overcrowding or losing any such objects because of their jumbling around or being pushed out.
And speaking of cell phones, touch screen interfaces are not particularly nice to me when they want me to make complex manipulations on a phone-sized screen. Or they make me hold them awkwardly while I'm trying to keep all the necessary information visible on the screen. Or, and this happens an awful lot, they interpret my up-and-down scrolling gesture as a side-to-side dismissal swipe, so I've used a lot of undo functions on my programs because they can't seem to figure out my gestures compared to someone else's. This is on top of the difficulties with using swiping keyboards, the ones I like the best, because sometimes the keyboard believes that a gesture that started well away from a particular letter or, usually, backspace, actually originated at the spot several seconds into the gesture. That is much harder to undo. I still prefer swiping keyboards to touch-tapping keyboards, though, because I have to have even greater precision with the touch-tappers to avoid typographical errors or complete nonsense words being entered.
There are some professional hazards of being Big and Tall as well. First and foremost that shelving, and just about everything else, designed for smalls is not very conducive to those who are tall. Most grownups sympathize with this, and I have found that I can mitigate at least some of this through sitting, kneeling, or otherwise not being on my feet when I have to handle working with those stacks, the chairs, and the rest. Getting down to the level of a small is a good professional situation, and I hope that I will continue to have the ability of body to keep getting down to those levels as I age.
The second of my potential issues in being a Big and a Tall is that when I take an interest in a tiny one, it often seems like it's a frightening experience. Even if these are little ones who have been in my story time, or who I have met and said hello to in other contexts, there's something about having a tall grownup take an interest in you that sends a lot of these little ones scurrying for the security of hiding behind their grown-up's legs. It's happened to me enough times, in enough different contexts, that I have to assume that it is, in fact, me that is the issue. Especially when it happens on the same day as the story time, not more than an hour or two after the end of the story time. A lot of children suddenly get shy around me when I turn my attention to them, even in the story time. I don't know what's happening in their brains as this goes on, but it feels like there's some sort of thing for them that goes "Oop. A grownup is looking at me, therefore there has to be something wrong, or something else is going to follow on from this." Even though, most of the time, if I'm looking at them, it's because I want to know what they're playing with, or to practice sharing, or any of those things that are developmentally appropriate for a child of that age. It's amusing to me, honestly, that this kind of thing happens, because the grownups know that I'm not a threat, I know that I'm not a threat, but there is a small child reacting to me, entirely appropriately, like I am a threat, or at least, that the situation itself is potentially strange or threatening, and the child is looking for cues and comfort from their grownup about how to proceed with in this new situation. (If I didn't have some of the child development education and continuing education that we take to try and understand kids better and make our programming better, I might be worried that there was some inner fault of mine that has to be smoothed out. Or worse, I'd be worried that someone with managerial authority over me would take it as a sign that I have some fault and am not actually fit to be a children's librarian.
For all of the jokes about the weather and the complete exclusion from the Average Height Club, I still like being tall, and I've come to accept that I'll have some big to me as well. So long as there aren't too many people trying to cut short their own existences by telling me that I have to go back to the skinny person that I was twenty years ago, I think I can manage to make it work. And it's a community that I think a fair number of people are part of.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-29 09:46 am (UTC)I'm aware how many very tall women there are out there these days.
Other half is 6' so I have to stretch to reach sometimes! :o)
no subject
Date: 2024-12-29 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-29 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-29 05:56 pm (UTC)