Complex Complex

I seem to be developing a complex; and it's a complex one... a complex complex, if you like.

You see, I'm about six feet tall, about four inches shorter than 'Bad Bad' Leory Brown, about four inches taller than Noel Gallagher. I say 'about' because these things are never exact: I've never met Noel (and I doubt the NME had his height recorded by a medical nurse or anything), and Leroy Brown is just a fictional character in a Jim Croce song; and furthermore, the only reason old Jim got away with rhyming 'four' with 'sir' in the first place was because of his ubercool Philly accent. Anyway, it's this aforementioned inexactness that is the root of my complex complex.

I'm about six feet; about five feet eleven and three quarters; about six feet half an inch; about six feet and a quarter inch. Why am I giving you this in Imperial units? I presume it's because we tend to think of human physical measurement in terms of feet and inches, as opposed to centimeters. Why? Fuck knows. Maybe it's because we like our labels, or rather, we're conditioned to feel that we need them. Maybe it's just that we haven't made the effort to go properly metric yet - how slow are we... it's been thirty-odd years. Maybe it's just a function of my complex complex, my need to pin my height down.

I was ok for years. Really. For years I'd thought I was five foot eleven and three-quarters. So, I wasn't six foot tall, I didn't fit into this modern day aesthetic stereotype and I really never gave it a second thought. Then I had a medical. The nurse told me the news: I was six foot, dead-on. This got me in a bit of a state. I didn't feel six foot. I felt five eleven and three-quarters, a quarter of an inch short of this cultural grouping. Now I'd have to contend with being in this club I'd never even applied to for membership, and worse still: Nobody else is six foot tall! Six two, six four, six seven etc etc. Nobody is six feet tall! . It's a complex complex, one of the main symptoms being an unyielding compulsion to measure myself (my height, that is: I ain't getting all existential here....though I do feel myself descending into bad metaphor the more I get into this). Some days, I'm back at five eleven and three-quarters. I don't know how this works. Mostly I just skim around the six mark, sometimes slightly under, sometimes slightly over. My condition is so ridiculous that, in a truly Patric Batemenesque reflection of my complex complex, I even have a trainee /shoe height adjustment thing worked out:

Converse: 6"
Jack Purcell: 6' 1/2"
Onitsuka Tigers: 6'1/4"
Clarks: 6' 1/2"
Nike: 6' 3/4"

That nurse has totally fucked with my identity, maaan, I only wish she'd left me in my ignorance. I mean, she wasn't to know that such a trivial piece of information would send me totally fucking fruitloop, I know, but still, in this one way, it has. I don't feel part of the six foot gang. What I feel like, is the really uncool person who's turned up at the party, and everybody's looking to each other and going "who is this twat, and who invited him?". Kind of the way bands like Keane, Maroon 5, Razorlight and Stereophonics must feel all the time.

So now, for the first time in my life, I feel self conscious about my height - despite being (about) six feet tall. It's a very complex complex.