I have always had a weird fascination with the size of human heads. This is likely due to the fact that my mother told me often when I was a child that I have an overly large head. Thus began my weird fascination with head size.
I have a very high forehead - a fact that was pointed out to me numerous times when I was a kid. I got this from my grandmother Cordelia, who I was named for. Having this huge forehead was not fun for me at school, because kids sometimes called me baldy and laughed derisively at my huge forehead and weird hairline. I remember feeling very sorry for Frankenstein.
Needless to say, I rarely wear hats. When I do, I feel like a parade float.
During my 20's and 30's when I was looking for someone to marry and father my children I immediately rejected men with large heads. For instance I would never have married Vincent D'Onofrio.
Although he's a terrific actor and not too bad looking, I pictured our enormous children and how agonizing it would be to give birth to them. [I also rejected men with large behinds, as mine is overly large - think of the agony of giving birth to a big-headed large-assed baby! Aaaargh! There wouldn't be enough drugs and I would never have had more than one child...]
Below, me and my cousin Tono. I am 5'4 and he is 6'1 and look how enormous my head looks compared to his! He was lucky in the gene pool. He also got Cordelia's forehead but it doesn't look weird on him.
I got the bad end of both the maternal and paternal gene pools. My great-grandfather Christopher Columbus Phillips had a large head.
Apparently, I am not the only one who notices weirdly-sized heads.
One of my favorite movies is Kate and Leopold, even though I really don't like Meg Ryan's character in it. I just noticed this morning when I was flipping channels and I watched it for a moment that Meg's head is bigger than Hugh's head.
Most people wouldn't notice or wouldn't care. I have always thought Hugh was/is attractive but that tiny head of his is odd. I noticed when I Googled their names together I got a lot of photos of them where it appears that a clever artist has made their heads look more the same size, in shots from the movie:
Very clever, how the artist has her leaning back and him not. Also, notice how his hand is much bigger.
Remarks about heads can be not just weird, but cruel.
I remember when I was a kid one of my neighbors telling me she would never tell her daughter she was pretty because then "she'd get a big head." Obviously having a "big head" is a very bad thing.. Years later Mom and I discussed the stupidity of that. First, the girl WAS quite pretty. Second, she didn't have any self-confidence. She wound up marrying a man who was somewhat ugly and I thought wow, how sad, if she had just realized her attractiveness she would've set her sights on someone far more attractive. Then again, I think she is still married to the ugly guy, and maybe since she's the same age as me they look more alike in the attractiveness department. Men often look better with age; not so for [most] women..
Did you know there is actually a band called Big Head Todd and the Monsters? Interesting that Todd's band is "the monsters" - it implies big-headed people are monsters, to my way of thinking.
Then there's the fact that on a ship the bathroom is known as "the head."
The word "head" is not always something negative. The head of a company is an important person, for instance. It's also sometimes used as a verb - "Joe, I want you to head up the Parade Committee" for instance. Or it can simply be a direction - "Let's head over to the coffee shop."
If you have a normal-sized head, be thankful, although her big old noggin apparently hasn't hurt Meg Ryan's career...
