How I became a fat midget overnight

“Enter your weight,” asks the bike in the gym. I dial the numbers and press enter. “You are underweight and can’t exercise,” says the bike, and turns off.

For a second I’m so happy. I have never had that kind of problem with my weight before, that I weigh too little. How nice! Maybe it is true that people here in America are all so fat, and that compared to them, I’m extremely thin.

Then reality bites. It is my second day in America, and I’m not that good with measurements. I realize that I had dialed my weight in kilograms, not in pounds as I should have. The bike doesn’t understand kilos, of course. It also doesn’t understand that I’m a Finnish alien in Texas.

It takes me awhile to calculate how much my weight is in pounds. When I finally get the number, I ride the bike more intensely than ever. I weigh so much that it is beyond my comprehension. There are three numbers in my weight! That really sucks.

And what’s even worse, is that this is not the end of the story. There is also something wrong with my height, too. I have shrunk! My height used to be three numbers, now it’s only one and something a little more. I feel like a midget. A fat midget.

Before I moved to Texas, I hardly ever thought about weight and measuring systems. I had traveled mostly in Europe where the people use the same standards as in Finland. But when I came to Texas, the whole world seemed to be dislocated.

Learning new measurements has been much more difficult than I would have ever thought. I have been in Texas for four months and I’m still confused many times every day. If the weather forecast promises 67 degrees for the next day, is it warm or cool? If there is an exit from the highway in one mile, how soon is it going to be in front of me? If a salmon filet costs five dollars for a pound, how much is it in kilos and in euros?

One of the most difficult things involving measurements is cooking. In my first week in Texas, I invited guests and tried to make baked potatoes. I wrapped the potatoes in foil and put them in the oven at 200 degrees (Celsius, in my mind). When my guests arrived two hours later, well, the potatoes were a little warm, but definitely not ready to eat. I should have put them in at 400 degrees, in Fahrenheit!

I don’t even try to bake anything, because I have no clue about the oz’s and tbsp.’s, whatever they are. But one thing I have learned —
how much is in a yard.

For some reason, I had a belief that a yard is half of a meter. I wanted to make a tablecloth for the living room table and figured that two meters of fabric would do. So I bought four yards of the fabric. I have to admit that it looked like there was quite a lot of fabric when I looked at it in the store but, hey, I’m not that good with measures.

So I bought it all and came home. My husband (who is so good with numbers that I call him a human calculator) laughed in tears and told me that there were four meters of fabric.

Well, who cares. Now I can sew some curtains, too.

— Heli Nummila is a Finnish native who studied at North Lake this semester. She is returning to her country after the Christmas holidays