Recently, I’ve been thinking about the personalities that people project through their blogs, about how, when meeting bloggers in real life, I invariably either think “this person is exactly like their website,” or “this person isn’t anything like their website,” though rarely anything in between. And, in the case of that second group, those bloggers whose real and digital selves diverge, I wonder how intentional that difference is. Are they recreating online who they secretly wish they could be in real life? Or are they simply unaware that their web-message and their in-flesh medium somehow don’t line up?

In my own case, I’m fairly sure the real me and the digital me are, for better or for worse, rather similar. By and large, I suspect any readers meeting me in real life for the first time are likely to leave the encounter thinking, ‘yep, that’s pretty much what I expected.’ The only exception, however, might be the same lament often whispered behind the backs of famed actors seen for the first time in person: “he seems much shorter in real life.”

Which is to say, at 5’6″, I’m certainly not tall. For years, in fact, I’ve joked that I should change this site’s tagline to: “the dangerous result of a serious Napoleon Complex run for decades unchecked.” But, in truth, I don’t think of height as a big issue, nor have I for most of my life.

Certainly, through most of elementary school, I didn’t give it too much thought; though small, I was still extremely fast, and therefore an asset on dodgeball and kickball teams, as well as uncatchable enough to survive even the roughest games of ‘kill the pill’ – the consummate test of schoolyard masculinity. It wasn’t until I hit middle school, as the girls began to sprout up faster than us guys, that I even began to notice my own small size. Even then, I quickly discovered upsides – at middle school dances, for example, I was invariably boob-level on the taller girls I asked to slow dance. (“Put on End of the Road again! Put on End of the Road again!)

By high school, as we guys caught back up, however, I started worrying – in typical insecure ninth grader style – that girls might not be interested in me because of my height. So, in a solution that, in retrospect, was both extremely inane and admirably ballsy, I set about trying to prove otherwise to myself by hooking up with the tallest girls that I could. I don’t mean to sound as though I was obsessed with the idea – most of the girls I dated in high school were of average height – but, given the chance, I’d try and steal kisses from any cute, tall, lanky girl I could find.

As a result, after my Freshman year of college, I ended up making out with a UCLA volleyball player at a barbecue on a beach in Half Moon Bay. She was 6’2″. I declared victory, gave up on the tall girl search, and went back to not thinking much about height – mine or that of the girls I was interested in.

Though, to be fair, if someone were to call Everything I Do (I Do It For You) up on a bar jukebox, I’m not sure I could resist reverting, full circle, to my middle school self breast-level eyeline self, searching out the tallest girl in the bar, and asking her to dance. Old habits die hard.