I'm in the process of learning a new language. and it's not italian. it's a language i've come to despise, not because it's bad, but because I'm utterly lost with how to speak or understand it, and frustrated beyound belief. i cant do anything without my 'dictionary,' and even though i know translations, its still not clicking. i wasn't expecting it to be this hard.

what new language could i possibly be studying, or why would i be studying ANOTHER when i'm still in the process of learning italian? well. it's not actually a language. but it feels that way. it's the metric system.

for most 'expats' i doubt its as big of a deal. look up a conversion now and again. not a daily part of your life. for me though, i'm forced to work with it constantly. every time i need to design something (which i spent about 75% of my waking hours doing) i have to do it in mm and cm. but someone tells me a square is 165mm by 74mm.... okay, 16.5cm by 7.4cm, but how the hell big is that? I cant picture it! my fellow americans can understand this frustration, and lack of visualization. for the non americans, try this: try to picture a shape that is 17inches by 11in.... can you? can you visualize how big that is without having to convert it all to cm? and when you do convert it, it's an odd number: 43.18cm by 27.94 cm. now try visualizing that. annoying with those decimals and odd numbers in there, isn't it? now imagine you have to spend hours doing this. and you have to waste so much time doing calculations just so you can visualize the size of something. its frustrating as hell.

i've gone from being able to visulize what i want, and put it on the computer in a matter of seconds, to having to spend 5 min to figure out how many mm wide i want my text box to be!