Why I Might be a Bad Person - 1

Have you seen the Burger King commercials with the father and son who are cursed with tiny hands? Well, if you haven't seen it, the whole shtick is that this guy is explaining to his son that he has miniature hands and is sorry to have passed this unfortunate trait on to his offspring. And while life will be a struggle in many ways with this defect, there is some redemption thanks to Burger King's Junior Whopper, which fits perfectly into their hands made entirely of pinky-fingers. They can order the baby version of the fast-food sandwich and tell everyone its the grown-up version because it looks like the big-boy burger, relatively speaking, when they wrap their tiny digits around it.

I could have saved Burger King's advertising department a shoot-load of money. Instead of hiring some Russian computer science major to digitally shrink the actors' hands, they could have used this guy I know who actually has hands that small. He would have done it for cheap, too, because I am fairly certain that no one will hire this guy to do anything else since he has frighteningly tiny appendages.

I have so many hang-ups but usually I'm able to overlook even the most egregious of physical issues including halitosis, webbed toes and even a laser-eye (and I know it's "lazy eye" and there's probably even a less-offensive name for it but a good friend of mine once coined it a "laser eye" because she said it was as if the thing was shooting a jerky blue light beam in different directions, making the imaginary zeeeeeeeee! zeeeeeeeee! zeeeeeeeeee! noise as it threatened to sever everyone's heads). However, I can't stand to be anywhere near this person and his toddler hands.

I don't think I can do them any justice by describing them in words. So, if you could get your digital camera and take a photo of your own hand and then zoom out as far as possible. Or, even better, upload the photo onto your computer and open it in Photoshop - I know Photoshop is hard to use but I think there is a tool that is represented by a minus (-) sign - just click the minus sign until the computer sends you some kind of error message. Now, print out the image on a piece of paper and take it to Kinko's (which I think now is actually just FedEx) and put it on the Xerox machine and shrink the shrunken Photoshop version down as far as it will allow. No, wait, actually, if you could ask someone in a blue apron for some assistance because I think they keep the machine you need behind the counter. Oh, wait a second. Scrap all that. You know when you're browsing the web and the mouse cursor turns into that little hand when you go to click on a link....that's it! Those are his hands.

But his hands aren't a cute little cartoon version of a Mickey Mouse glove. They're real human hands and they're not cute. And boy oh boy I cannot stand to look at them, let alone be touched by them. One evening we saw this fellow out at a bar and he came over to say hello. Now, whenever I see him, I take comfort in reminding myself not to look at them and this usually works but on this night it didn't help a lick.

He'd clearly been drinking all day because he had no concept of the imaginary bubble we're all supposed to respect when speaking to one another. He was very close to me and speaking some nonsense that I can't report on because I was too busy telling myself not to look at his hands. I'm not sure what I said to prompt him to do what he did next but I get a lump in my throat just thinking about it. Let's just say I said something like.

"Ha ha, you're pretty drunk, huh?

And then, the unspeakable happened....Ok...here goes... He "shushed" me. But instead of shushing me by placing his finger up to his own mouth, he put his finger on MY mouth!

Asa knows how I feel about this guy's baby hands. He knows how I feel not just because he's heard me talking about it before but although he'll never admit it, he hates those baby hands as much as I do. He's just a better person than I am, that closet baby-hand hater! Anyway, he looked at me and had this astonished expression on his face. It was as if he was waiting for me to react as though I'd walked through a spider web. And while I felt like I'd walked through one inside my heart, I remained comp0sed, laughed it off and took a big swig of my wine.

Eventually the guy moved on to gross someone else out and I haven't seen him since but I think about that night all of the time. I mean, what's wrong with me? Huh? The guys hands aren't bloody or pus-y (pussy?sp?) or even a little sweaty and I can't let it go.

This is why I might be a bad person, reason #1.