they're supposed to be half your face

One of Maria's favourite adverts is from Christmas 2006. It was a Jack in the Box commercial hat was featuring their "give-aways", snowmen that you put on your car aerial. These snowmen were partying hard, hard enough that one of them announced: "My nose is a carrot!" This line cracks Maria up to this day. I know that, even as she reads this, she will be chucking away to herself, remembering*. The reason this advert has such a resonance with her is because, as she tells it, at some moment a stoned friend spent most of the evening looking at his hand, declaring: "Woah, my hand! It's so big! My hands are huuuuuuge!"

The night before last we were round at a friend's house, it was his birthday. At about 10pm, four other people crashed the party - but they brought their own alcohol, so it was cool. One of these people decided to get her freak on and chugged her way through several glasses of wine in record time. She then grabbed the bowl of sausages and proceeded to devour the whole thing in record time. Now I realise that, being a polite person (who sits on desks), I should have turned away and not watched her, as the toothpick went down, speared another sausage, raised it to her mouth, and then speared down, but I was hypnotised. It wasn't the metronomic way of eating, it was the size of her hands. Normally your hands are supposed to be half the size of your face - try it, put your hands up to your face, see (or feel) how they cover your whole face? That's the way it supposed to be, your hands are big enough to protect your face. But this woman had tiny hands, really tiny. I had been drinking for three hours and I suddenly got freaked out, seriously freaked out. There was this woman, eating for Mexico, with tiny hands. I really wanted to point this fact out to Maria. We can be bastards that way. We love people watching, listening to people's conversations, making up stories about people we see. Knowing her love of the-big-hands story, I had to point out the tiny hands. I knew that, in the car, on the way home, we could talk about this woman getting stoned, looking at her hands and going: "Woah, my hand! It's so small! My hands are tiiiiiiiiiny!" But there was no possible way of mentioning it to Maria without the woman over-hearing it.

As the night progressed no opportunity arose to mention the "tiny hands phenomenon". I drank more, everyone drank more (except for Maria because she was driving).At one point in the evening I stepped out for a cigarette. As I looked in the window I saw the most surreal sight. Tiny handed woman was holding her arm at full stretch with her tiny hand at the end of it. Then, just to fuck with my head, Maria leaned over, extended her arm, and pressed her hand against tiny handed woman's hand.

Had I said something out loud? Had my staring been noticed? What was going on?

It appears that, as conversations go, somehow Maria and tiny handed woman had actually got into a conversation about the fact she had tiny hands! I felt embarrassed, I felt ashamed, I felt totally weirded out. What had caused this conversation? Had I, inadvertently, in a drunken state caused some offence?

Well no, I hadn't. It appears that the woman was actually denigrating her husband. This man had casually remarked about the fact that Maria and I had kissed several times during the evening (as we are wont to do). He announced that his wife hadn't kissed him in six months. Her retaliation to this comment was to point out her tiny hands. Everyone got to see how small her hands were.They were tiny, tiny, tiny. Yep, everyone agreed that she had tiny hands - probably the tiniest hands in the world.

"Which is the only reason your cock looks big in them."

Ah, good times.

*Oddly (or not particularly oddly) I never ask Maria to read my posts before I publish them, except, in this case, I did. I was a bit worried that posting about someone's tiny hands shouldn't really be the done thing. However, forget the main content of this post because Maria never got round to reading it. She was laughing so hard, reminiscing about the Jack in the Box advert. Told you it would make her laugh.