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Matthew Liu

Mr. German

Creative Non-fiction

09 January 2013

Short Is Bad

Too often have I heard, “Oh, I wish I was taller” or “I would be so much better at football

if I were six foot four.” I cannot argue for why being tall is good as I am not tall myself, but I

can argue for why being short is bad. Most people would prefer being tall to being short and I

can safely say I am one of those people. I have discovered there are actually many disadvantages

to being short from a high school perspective.

Not being able to reach my ceiling even when standing on a chair or stool is one major

problem of being short. In my case, this means getting distracted by the spider on the ceiling

right above my head that I cannot reach. One night as I am innocently doing my homework, a

spider’s presence rudely assaults its way into my personal space, my dorm room. As one of

many victims of ADHD, I am constantly looking around my room and once I notice a spider on

my ceiling, I cannot take my focus away from it. I can no longer concentrate on studying or

doing homework, looking up every three seconds to make sure the spider is still there. The

obvious solution would be to kill the spider humanely with a quick thrust of the palm of my hand

but unfortunately, I cannot reach the spider even when I am standing on a chair. If I tried to kill

the spider and the tissue I used came up empty handed, I would be paranoid beyond words as to

the whereabouts of the spider. I ended up eyeing the spider as a tiger would eye its prey,

studying the spider’s every movement. However, a spider is rather lazy but if it did move, I

needed to know so I ended up not doing anything for a good hour. My height prevents me from

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finishing my homework quickly and efficiently which is disadvantageous as I lose precious

hours of sleep as a result of being unable to eliminate a distraction.

Larger taller people also have a tendency to show off their strength and “large-ness” on

shorter lighter people. In other words, I get hoisted on people’s shoulders and picked up more

than I would like. As I am walking down the brown carpeted hallway of Page to get to the buses,

I usually encounter a rowdy energetic Ted Coy. He crouches down into what he calls a “football

tackling position” and drives his shoulder into my stomach and lifts me up. Usually, I am

perched up there for a few minutes as I am carried down the way I just came, causing me to miss

the good bus drivers and forcing me to get on the molasses-like bus of Wayne. This relatively

frequent occurrence has forced me to take an outside route to the buses as a precaution. I can

personally relate to this need to pick up smaller people as I always try to pick up the tiny

freshman; perhaps it is the need to compensate for my height and make myself feel better. There

is a moment of exhilaration knowing that I can pick up a human being with one arm without

exerting myself too much. In this case, being short hinders my ability to be punctual because of

larger people’s tendencies to pick me up.

Finally, shorter people always have to sit in the front row for team pictures. Whenever I

am taking team pictures, the photographer never fails to say the dreaded line “Line up from

shortest to tallest.” I always seem to find myself near the shorter end, despite my efforts to make

myself seem taller and weasel my way up the line. However, most people do not want to be in

the front row so my efforts are usually in vain and I end up sitting in the front row anyways. As

a veteran in the front row, several aspects of the picture process bother me. The position I have

to sit in causes my ankles and legs to scream in pain as my body weight presses them down

against the bumpy cement tiles. I have to wait for all the other rows in the picture to get

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organized and whenever I try to relieve myself from the uncomfortable position, the

photographer never fails to call me out. For some reason, whenever I move or twitch, it messes

up the photographer’s ability to take a picture worthy of being hung up in the hallway. Jealousy

overcomes me as I glance behind me and see the last row grinning at me and standing up

comfortably. When people look at our final pictures, the front row is the first thing they see and

since all of us in the front row have an “I hate pictures and do not want to be here right now”

look; we are usually the butt of the jokes about the swim team. For example, several “Haha,

look at his face” captioned pictures never fail to go up on Facebook for everyone to see, which

further increases our embarrassment. My height forces me to always be in the front row for

pictures which causes me to have a bad picture and everyone laughs at me afterwards.

There are many disadvantages to being short. Not being able to reach my ceiling even

with the assistance of a chair is a serious problem. If there were a distraction on the ceiling, I

would not be able to safely remove it and it would continue to bother me for a considerable

amount of time. My height also causes me to be late for classes as I am picked up against my

will. Finally, I am always in the front row because of my height which causes people to laugh at

me. Overall being short has many disadvantages and these three reasons can be applied to any

relatively short high school student.