Shortcomings

I made a new friend today. He's a dwarf named Peter. I shit you not, I met a dwarf.

I was sitting there on the patio at Chipotle when out struts this two foot-four little man, and he looks up at me and smiles. I smile back and say, "hey," which I sometimes do and sometimes do not do, and he responded similarly, adding only, "Mind if I sit here?" At this point, as you are no doubt aware -- any of you who know me at all outside of this forum -- I'm freaking out. Somehow, though, probably because it's a fucking beatiful day and I'm all full of brotherly love and fanfare for the common man, I say "sure." So he sits down -- if you can call it sitting down, really it's more like climbing up -- into his chair. He has a beer and a burrito and I immediately wonder 1) is he really going to eat an entire Chipotle burrito and 2) how drunk is he going to get off this one beer.

At this point I'd go into the particulars of the conversation, except I don't want to bore you with all that. Instead I'll skip to the point where my questions are answered: 1) no and 2) very. So my new intoxicated dwarf friend Peter says to me, "What would you call me?" and I say, "What do you mean?" laughing, of course, to cover my confusion. "I mean, what am I?" he says, looking at me in a way only a drunken dwarf can. "A midget, I guess?" and then Peter rolls his eyes and puts his face in his hand. "Fucking people." "What!" I say, "I dunno, what was I supposed to say?!" "Dwarf!" he says. "People like me are called dwarves." He tells me that "dwarf" is the scientific term for a person with the condition of "dwarfism" and that "midget" is actually something viewed by the dwarf comunity as a very derogatory term. I look at him oddly and question him, saying how I think of "midget" as a much less derogatory term than "dwarf" which to me implies that he's a character in some nerdy RPG game or sci-fi fantasy novel. He says flat out that I'm wrong, and as a result of this and our now very chummy repartee, I call him a "level-seven" dwarf -- much to his groaning, of course. We left on good terms, agreeing to keep in Christmas card contact at the very least, though I plan on calling him for the next gathering at the apartment, which is looking to be either the Super Bowl, V-day, or the 3rd Annual Oscar Party.

Anyway, it was pretty much the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me. He's a real trip, that level-seven dwarf friend of mine.