A House Divided
Things get heated
My wife and I are in a multi-cultural marriage. By that I mean that I stubbornly use the metric system and she, Americanly, uses the Imperial system. It doesn’t really matter too much because measuring tapes come in both centimeters and inches, I have memorized my height in feet, and only one of us is a baker in our home (whatever my wife chooses to do with her bakes is between her and her quarter teaspoons.) But there is one part of day-to-day life in which this divide surfaces: temperature. My wife uses Fahrenheit because she is American, and I use Celsius because I am sane.
I’m joking, of course. I use Celsius because I was not born in the United States. That is it. That is the only reason why I use the Celsius scale. The thing is that as seasons change, people online feel the urge to talk about these units again and again, and to litigate which system is better than the other. This usually gets boiled down (hehe) to the conclusion that Celsius is better for temperature and Fahrenheit is better for weather. That is wrong because it is dumb and doesn’t mean anything. Any scale is good for temperature or weather if it’s the one you are used to using! Americans like to get very dramatic when they see a reading in Celsius and say things like “It’s so weird! What does 32 even mean?” It means it will be pretty hot (about 90 degrees). It’s a random number, but people understand it. It is exactly as arbitrary “tomorrow is going to be in the 70s." When I was in grad school and heard that the first time, I genuinely thought we were having a 70s-themed day.
When my wife and I talk about weather, we just offer both numbers! It’s so easy and we kinda learn the other system. She tells me it’s 68 and then I ask her what that means in “real numbers.” AS. A. BIT. Because both systems are just random numbers. In the end, I think these numbers just represent two visions of the world. One is the clean, metric-like, idealized precision of Celsius, or the chaos that is Fahrenheit. I don’t know how else to say it, but to me Celsius is Catholic: idealized, structured, and mostly concerned with things larger than humans (i.e. when water freezes and when it boils.) Fahrenheit, is Protestant: it’s concerned about our actions right now, in the moment, in this world, and it is vaguely aware that at some point water will freeze or boil.
Anyway, fighting about these idiotic numbers invented by a Swede and a German hundreds of years ago, is very silly. And maybe we can all agree on one thing: at least we don’t use Kelvin.
I’m Doing a Show This Wednesday
Yeah, what the headline says! I’m doing a show at Caveat in New York City and if you come, I think you will laugh.