Every February, I write a "Sin of the Month" column that is shorter than usual. I figure, February is the shortest month of the year and everyone hates it, so letÕs just get things over with as quickly as possible. IÕve always thought that one of FebruaryÕs good qualitiesÑwell, its only good qualityÑwas its shortness, and IÕve thought of shortness as a good thing in general.

But apparently, not everyone feels that way, as I discovered recently as I drove up the New Jersey Turnpike while listening to a public radio interview with a woman who has apparently written a memoir about being short. It seems that short people are the recipients of extremely unfair treatment in our society, and that this woman, who was, I think, just under five feet tall, was once passed around a bar like a tray of hors dÕoeuvres.

I had never thought about it before, but this womanÕs angst about shortness caused me to feel great empathy for the plight of all people of diminutive stature, and I vowed to read her memoir, Short Rage, a vow I was destined to break, since by the time I reached Exit 13, I had forgotten all about her and her plight.

But while briefly pondering the issue of shortness, I suddenly realized that I, too, have been the victim of discrimination, ridicule, and other forms of harassment, but not because of shortnessÑbecause of longness.

I refer, specifically, to the sizeÑor, if you prefer, the durationÑof my nose. You may not be able to tell from my photograph (from which, by the way, the bags under my eyes have been digitally removed), but I am the owner of a nose of considerable amplitude. In becoming privy to the rage of the vertically challenged, I realized that I have a number of grievances myself.

My nose began, as all noses do, as a body part of reasonable size. During my childhood years, it could perhaps have been described as fairly prominent, but not freakishly large. However, when I was around ten, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, "WhatÕs that?" And then, "Uh-oh."

Sure enough, as my adolescent years began, my nose continued to increase in length. Viewed frontally, it was not all that obvious to me, but one day when I was thirteen, using a collection of mirrors, I managed to get a good look at my profile. There, to my horror, I discovered that an enormous pointed object protruded from the familiar curve of my cheekbones.

Like many girls in early adolescence, I had an addiction to Seventeen magazine, which I later blamed for a variety of ills, and as I perused the pictures of models, I had imagined that I could perhaps look like them one day, if I immediately desisted from the intake of all nutrients. But after my tragic Nose Sighting, I realized that I would never be one of those cute, bob-nosed girls in the Ladybug blouses, Villager skirts, and Bass Weejun loafers with pennies in them. It was suddenly clear to me that for the rest of my life, I would be merely a nasal appendageÑattached to a person, perhaps, but primarily, in the eyes of the world, a NOSE, with respect to which, shortness would have been a virtue indeed.

As adolescence wore on, as you may surmise, my nose did not shrink. At around that time, a girl at my high school had plastic surgery, which at that time was relatively uncommon; afterwards, her face displayed a little piggish snout with two dots for nostrils where an aquiline thing of beauty had been. I found this so appalling that I was therefore never the slightest bit tempted to have a nose job myself, though it has occurred to me that if I had had one, I would not have had to suffer from a lifetime of nasal discrimination.

Soon after that, I made the unfortunate mistake of taking my entire face with me to college in southern California, where a nose of any size is not allowed to enter the state. Because of this rule, or perhaps because of the plethora of cosmetic surgeons in the Los Angeles area, no one there had ever seen a real nose except on one person: Barbra Streisand. I canÕt tell you the number of people who came up to me and said, "You know, you look a lot likeÑ." "Thanks," I would say, grinding my teeth. The fact isÑconsult my photograph if you donÕt believe meÑI donÕt resemble Barbra Streisand in the slightest, but she was the only woman in California with her original nose, and therefore the only frame of reference anyone had. My evidence for this is that I was once at my best friendÕs little sisterÕs bat mitzvah in Bel Air when a woman known only as Cousin Arlene came up to me, grabbed my face with both hands, stared into my eyes, and said in a voice suffused with hilarity, "You have BubblesÕ old nose!"

Perhaps the worst side-effect of being nasally over-endowed was that I did not like to date anyone with a nose smaller than mine, a policy that reduced the available pool of partners considerably and was clearly not the best available criterion for romance. When I look back on all my old boyfriends, I see that every single one of them had a nasal complaint of some kind which probably caused me to overlook some of their other qualities.

In college, a guy I dated for whom the word "cad" was probably invented once pulled out a tape measure and proceeded to check to see if my nose was bigger than his. As I recall, his nose was larger by a thirteenth of an inch, though I think he immediately lied about it, and that probably caused me to overlook his caddishness, at least temporarily. My ex-husband had a nose that was not only large but broken, and again, this probably led me to ignore many of his more obvious deficienciesÑthough it was clever of me to realize, if only subliminally, that a broken nose would not be genetically duplicated, and luckily, my kids have very nice noses.

On the other hand, sometimes nose size is probably as good a reason to fall in love with someone as anything else. I would not say that I was attracted to my present husband for this reason, but itÕs true that his nose is rather substantial; on our first date, he says, he remembers wondering if we would be able to kiss. It turned out that we could, and the rest, as they say, is nosetory.

I could regale you with more of my nasal trials and tribulations, but I am saving them for a memoir in which I detail my nasal oppression; I plan to call it Nose Rage. Meanwhile, I think IÕve proved my point: that shortness is not a sin at all but often a thing devoutly to be desired.