Quant, Part 2

A podcast that I listened to
while road tripping across Iceland
with my beloved
has stuck with me ever since:

centuries ago, across the Atlantic
a man took a tool
originally used to measure
orbits of planets
   (the average) 
and applied it to humans 

He began with a dataset of
soldiers’ chest measurements
adding them all together and dividing by the number of samples,
calculating the “true” size of a soldier’s chest

When the U.S. Air Force took
a similar approach to designing airplanes,
creating a cockpit for pilots’ “true” size
People died
because the seat fit no one.

On ten measures of physical dimensions
not a single pilot was “average.”
Not a single one fit the rigid mold.

Then why do I feel the weight to conform
to some intangible and impossible norm?
When did forcing myself
to mold into an aggregate of the populace

when did “best practices”
become more desirable
than my own best?
than my own practices?