height and a black belt

two posts in a day, this is bad.

just been meaning to write this down: saturday afternoon I leave the apt to go to tkd, walking down the sidewalk, take off my glasses to blow off some dust, then go to put them back on, and they snap in half. so my glasses broke.

i go to tkd, not wearing glasses, and not really able to precisely recognize faces beyond a couple of meters. in the distance i see a woman practicing something, a black belt, with mid-length black hair pulled back in a ponytail. at first i think, that's j*, just i guess because her style and general characteristics seemed right. but then i thought, no, that's not her, she's too small. i got a little closer, and yes, this woman was too small to be j* - a couple of inches shorter than me. a little closer and, then, yes - it was indeed j*.

i felt certain that j* was taller than me - if you had asked me before how tall i thought j* was, i would have guessed, oh, maybe 6' or so, she's a real amazon. apparently she's closer to 5'8". taller than the average woman, and still an amazon, okay, but not what i thought. in my mind, i guess, her high status (at tkd) had me convinced that she was actually larger than in reality. i've noticed this effect before (it's been studied for a long time, and probably known forever), but never in a context like this: certain that a person had a relatively unusual trait (woman taller than me), and then unable to recognize her because i don't see the trait, when it was never there in the first place.

"she's actual size, but she seems much bigger to me"