Dog Beers & Vanity Sizing

“It takes a very long time to become young.”
Pablo Picasso

A friend recently shared a meme that read: “In dog beers I’ve only had one” which made me laugh and then gave me pause.

I’m not very good at math but isn’t one human year about 7 dog years?

In other words, one dog year is 1/7th of a human year and one dog beer is like 1/7th of a beer. So the meme is basically saying they’ve had 1/7th of a beer. Of course the intention is probably to suggest excessive drinking; but somehow the joke ends up being funny anyway.

Which got me wondering: why did we even create dog years? Presumably so that we could equate a dog’s life span to our own. You can just look at a handy chart and you can see that your 3-year-old dog is about 28. I mean not really though. Your 3-year-old dog likely doesn’t have very much in common with a 28-year-old human at all.

But it does give you a rough reference for when your dog might die. So when you refer to your dog in dog years what you’re really saying is: I estimate my dog will die in approximately 10 years. Other than that it’s fairly meaningless.

Anyway, this whole tradition of creating arbitrary scales of measurement is a funny one. Take for instance shoe sizing. It occurred to me recently that my size 7 foot isn’t actually 7 inches at all.

A quick review of a sizing chart confirmed that my size 7 foot is actually 9¼ inches. My husband’s size 11 foot on the other hand is actually 10¹⁵⁄₁₆ inches.

What you may have noticed is that my 9¼ inch foot is made to sound smaller by calling it a size 7 whereas my husbands 10¹⁵⁄₁₆  inch foot is made to sound slightly bigger by calling it a size 11; it seems shoes come with a historical form of vanity sizing.

The weirdest part of all of this is that straight up inches (and fractions thereof) would work perfectly well to describe everyone’s shoe size. There’s no need for vanity conversions. But apparently we women want to be forever smaller and younger.

All of which got me thinking: if I do indeed want to appear youthful I might consider referring to myself in some version of dog years. But not dog years obviously; as dogs are a relatively short-lived animal, which would make me several hundred dog years old.

No, I need a long-lived creature like the elegant Geoduck (pronounced “gooey-duck”). Geoducks have been known to live up to 168 years, making me at 38 human years a mere 23 Geoduck years old (100 divided by 168 x 38 = 23).

Better yet, I might try a Red sea urchin, who have been known to live up to 200 years; making me a mere 19 Red sea urchin years old. But maybe that’s a bit excessive.

Yes, I think I’ll stick with Geoduck. I am 23 Geoduck years old, if anyone asks and I’ve had 14 dog beers; which sounds worse than it is.