And you thought metric was hard

January 9th, 2005 · 10 Comments

The neighbor’s tabby got into the house today. He’s always hanging out on our stoop, staring and pawing at Trixie through the glass, and today he slipped inside. I had to pick him up to get him out and, man, cats weigh nothing. It was the first time I had picked up a cat in several years and I remembered them weighing a lot more.

It was like getting one of those frosty mugs they sometimes have at the cheap pizza places. You know the ones. They look like they’re made of heavy glass, but they’re actually super-lightweight plastic? And when you pick up your drink the first time you practically throw it in the air because it doesn’t weigh anything close to what you expected?

Picking up that cat today was the equivalent of spilling my drink all over the place. We’re both lucky he didnt hit the ceiling.

I am so used to picking up Trixie all the time, that by default, and stupidly, I expect most things I encounter to weigh about as much as she does. She not only dominates our household, our health, and our life, she’s moved on to fundamental units that govern my ability to communicate with the rest of the world. In short, Trixie has become my new unit of measurement. She’s remapped my sense of scale and weight. Cats used to be heavy. Now they are about as light as a pair of socks.

And it’s really not a great system. It creates all sorts of conversion problems. I mean, I can tell someone that a cat weighs .326 trixies (t), but they aren’t going to know what the hell I’m talking about. It’s also not a stable standard. Trixie’s getting bigger on a daily basis. This makes a trixie more akin to a fluctuating exchange rate than the precisely defined (and currently more popular) kilogram and pound. Jenn used to weigh about 17.1 t and now she only weighs 4.7 t. Did she lose weight? Did Trixie grow a lot? With this system, who the hell knows?

Still, most of these problems can be overcome by means of wheel chart. Something along the lines of the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer, only more complicated. I know its not going to be an easy sell. The trixie will have to compete against the madison (m), the olivia (o), the aiden (a) and more. We face a coming crisis of standards that will make us long for the old English/Metric disagreements. Im afraid well become paralyzed as hannah (h) to jacob (j) to bailey (b) conversions grind our national infrastructure to a standstill. Well eventually be forced to fall back on long forgotten units of measure. What a cute little baby, well say. “One stone, and 40 pennyweights??” “Holy crap! I hope you got an epidural!”

Tags: Behavior

10 responses so far ↓

1 Rae // Jan 9, 2005 at 10:08 pm

Ben: You are hysterical! I definitely enjoy the way your brain works. What happens when you have a newborn and a 14 month old like I did? Which scale do you choose? Maybe you just add the 2 kids weights and create the “2 kid” weight wheel.

Just keep on thinking, Ben, it’s what you’re good at.
2 Maddie's Mom // Jan 9, 2005 at 11:50 pm

How do you manage to put into words what the rest of us parents of 17 month olds are thinking? And so much better, too!

Of course, I wasn’t really thinking about it as in depth as you were…I was just thinking something along the lines of, “Wow…didn’t Kramer (the cat) used to be heavier?”
3 Heather // Jan 10, 2005 at 8:42 am

Remember that not all cats are light. I had a cat (Graceland) who weighed 25 pounds. And that was after she’d been on a diet for 3 years. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found her dead in my bathroom last March from a heart attack.
4 KED // Jan 10, 2005 at 10:08 am

I, too, have a “little unit of measure” at my house: a rather large 14 month old. Think how I feel when I pick up my 9 month old, significantly smaller, twin nieces. You think you have a problem when you toss a neighbor’s cat in the air, yeesh. Plus, you can innocently mention that two of my nieces equaled one of my son at a certain point in time and really get in trouble. I was, obviously, merely speaking in terms of weight not importance or societal value. Sisters can be so touchy!

The whole discussion reminds me of the measure of currency my college dormitory used at its governing council meetings. All purchases were translated into the equivalent of kegs of beer. Not just kegs, either. There were varying denominations: kegs of Shiner (a local beer that was still very cheap back then), Miller Lite, and then various more expensive imports.

It all just goes to show that you use whatever gold standard represents your most precious “commodity.” Not a surprise that your world revolves around Trixie “units”.

Great essay!

KED
5 Rachel // Jan 10, 2005 at 1:18 pm

I’m reminded of this Fuzzy Memory by Jack Handey:

‘Grandpa used to describe the size of everything in terms of a calf. For instance, if he was describing a large dog, he would say it was “about as big as a calf.” Or about a car, he would say it “could seat four calves comfortably.” (Oh, that was another thing: how many calves could ride in something.)
One time he was talking about a calf he had, and I asked him how big it was. He said it was “about three-quarters as big as a calf.”
Sometimes Grandpa would tell time by calves. If you asked him how long something would take, he’d say, “About as long as it takes a calf to drive over here.”‘
6 hannah // Jan 10, 2005 at 2:32 pm

my jobs involves converting a lot of measurments from in/ft to cm/m which i thought was hard… but thinking about trixies makes my head hurt.

btw, i do the plastic mug thing all the time!! why is that??? i must never pay attention to anything.
7 Adrienne // Jan 10, 2005 at 5:42 pm

The unit of measure for money at our house is gallons of milk. When someone says they spent $40 on a pair of shoes, my mind flips that to mean 16 gallons of milk!
8 benmac // Jan 10, 2005 at 9:31 pm

Rae: Sometimes you just have to pick your favorite child, and use that scale. But I would probably pick the newborn to avoid accidents (see KED.)

Maddie’s Mom: I’m not convinced that cats didn’t used to be heavier (see Heather.)

Heather: We’ll always remember the younger, thinner Graceland. Like the Post Office did.

KED: Love everything you wrote.

Rachel: Thanks for the fuzzy memory!

hannah: Everyone, we have a new hannah who’s been posting lot’s of funny stuff lately. I just wanted to point out that she’s not the same as our beloved ‘old school’ hannah who’s also awesomely funny. You can tell them apart because the new hannah has a website, huffmania.

Adrienne: Ok, that’s pretty strange. Because I thought most new shoes cost at least 24 gallons of milk.
9 hannah // Jan 11, 2005 at 9:36 am

hi everyone, i am new to blogging, and in love with trixie! but dont tell my daughter, she might get jealous! at some point i hope to get some pictures up of my kids on my site, but they will pale in comparison to the tpods. thanks ben for the inroduction, i hope one day to have comments on my own site like a real blog.
10 hannah // Jan 11, 2005 at 9:38 am

oh and how cool is it that there is another hannah? i thought we were a dying breed, all though i have heard rumours of a well-spring of two and three year old hannahs, watch out world, we are making a comeback!

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