Rhyme and Meter

For the past two weeks, I've been mulling over ideas for my final project for non-fiction literary narrative, a twenty-five to thirty-page piece on anything, so long as it's good non-fiction. Tonight, I presented my idea: a profile on the kilogram. It's ideas like the kilogram, which is such a big part of our lives (often bigger than we'd like by just a few) that makes me shake my head at science and say, "Did you just do that? That's amazing." Of course, when I tell science kids this idea, that I'm writing a piece on the only remaining standard of measurement that's defined by a material object and not some funky relationships and numbers, the reaction is always a nonchalant, "Ok." They're not surprised that the kilogram is a little cylinder sitting under glass lids in an institutional in France, they already know that. To watch the reaction of the humanities majors, however, is quite another story. "There's a what? For reals? What does it look like?" "The very idea that something could be measured..." "I wonder what this system says about the psyche of the French." Ah. Just another day in my liberal arts bubble.