Same size as your local transvestite...

Today was a wed-ding (pronounced wed - *DING*, as in ding-a-ling) extravaganza. Most of it was terribly boring (did you know that Target is the only place in town that sells tissue paper in attractive colors? neither did I). That is the unfortunate thing about planning a wedding--it makes you incredibly boring.

Kind of like graduate school, really.

So let's talk shoes, instead. I love shoes. This may surprise some of you, since I have only 6-8 pairs that I wear regularly--hardly a shoe lover's collection. Unfortunately, although I would love to give them my money, the shoe industry is apparently uninterested. As I previously mentioned, I am freakishly tall, so it is unsurprising that I have feet to match--a pair of size 11 beauties. Although my shoe size is not particularly out of proportion, given my height (my grandmother, on the other hand, was 5 feet tall with a size 9 shoe--talk about stable!), it does put me squarely outside of the mainstream of women's shoes. How far outside? Well, I was getting pretty tired of my wed-ding extravaganza, and so I happened into a DSW shoe--not because I needed anything, but because I couldn't stand to go to one more store looking for tissue paper. I realized that only the clearance rack was arranged by size, so I went back there to take a look. But then I remembered why I usually don't go into these stores. While there were 2-3 racks of the sizes up to 9, and 1 rack of size 10, the rack called "size 10 and up" contained...come on...take a guess.

Four pairs of size 11 shoes.
Four. Pairs.
All, by the look of them, designed for transvestites.

I should have known--why else would you have a rack of size 10 and a rack of size "10 and up," unless you wanted to hide the fact that you don't actually carry the "and up" part of the equation? Can you tell that this gets a wee bit frustrating at times? Where are the cute green satin heels in my size? The tweed pumps? The fushia ballet flats? The sassy red maryjanes? Nowhere...and so I'm stuck with a selection of orthopedic beige pumps and nurse's flats, looking longingly over at the size 8 rack.

So when you see me wearing the same old, tired pair of shoes, think of them as a trophy--a hard-won pair of (formerly) attractive shoes that I can't bear to part with because, frankly, I would have nothing to wear on my feet.

If Science says it, then it must be so...

I often say that I am freakishly tall. And I am...here's the proof:



This is a chart showing the average height of white, American women by age. The red lines indicate different percentiles. So if you're height/age point is between the line marked 75 and the line marked 90, then you are taller than 75-90% of the white women in the US.

I am 5'11" tall (71 inches), which puts me significantly above the top red line for all age groups (I'm in my late 20s). Now, obviously, since the distribution of height is bell-shaped, the percentile lines would stretch out considerably near the top, but there is a case to be made that I'm in the top few percent of white American women, height-wise.

But Ross is also tall. In fact, while most people don't think of me as tall (until they realize that I am taller than all of the women in the room), everybody thinks of Ross as tall. Which raises the question: Who is the bigger freak, height-wise? I think that this chart answers that question definitively:



At 6'5" (77 inches) tall, Ross is even further above the 90% line than I am. By my incredibly scientific measurement, Ross is 3 black lines above the red line, whereas I am only 2-1/2 above it. So science says that Ross is a bigger freak. And if science says it, who am I to say differently?

******

If you're interested, I got these charts from this site The data is admittedly a little old (it is based off of the NHANES, which was collected between 1988 and 1994) but it gives you an idea.