Oh, what fun it is to be “above-average.” And not as in an above-average employee or student (although I like to think I have been both).
No, I mean above-average as in height, weight and shoe size.
At 5-foot-7, I have been taller than my mother since high school. And thanks to my dad, I haven’t been able to wear her shoe size since junior high (I inherited my dad’s big feet and wear size 10 shoes).
Put me in a good pair of high heels (of which I have many), and I tower over my 5-foot-6 boyfriend.
Swing dancing is often painful for me, as my dance partners don’t seem to realize that I’m at least a few inches taller than their previous partners (hello, can they not see my head?).
It was through dancing that I first learned I was tall. As my dad and brother are both taller than me, I had always figured I was average.
So, what is average?
More Top Picks Gozney Roccbox
The average American woman is 5-foot-5 (or 5-foot-3 or 5-foot-4, depending on whom you ask). The average American male is 5-foot-9, give or take a few inches.
Average shoe size? In the 1980s, it was 8 to 8.5 for women, according to an article on Slate.com. I had a hard time finding an answer to this question (about as hard a time as I used to have finding shoes for my feet!).
The average weight for a woman, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2002 was 164.3 pounds. For men, it was 191 pounds.
Finally, an article I found on NBC10.com (the Web site for the NBC station in the Philadelphia area) said the average dress size for a woman is 14 (woohoo! below average there).
I’m having fun now. Let’s see what other averages I can find.
Most common eye color: I had a hard time finding the answer to this question. It’s a popular question, but surprisingly, I couldn’t find the answers online. A MySpace.com blogger claims it’s brown.
Most common hair color: I didn’t find this one at all. But all my research on the Internet did find that among the drow (your guess is as good as mine as to what a drow is), white is the most common hair color, according to dwarvenforge.com. Gullible.info says the most common hair color worldwide is black. But can you trust a Web site named “Gullible”?
How time is spent: According to the American Time Use Survey conducted in 2003, people ages 15 and older spent 8.6 hours sleeping, 5.1 hours on leisure and sports activities, 3.7 hours working and 1.8 hours on “household activities.” The remaining 4.8 hours were spent on miscellaneous activities, such as eating, shopping and going to school. All this was mentioned on the Web site About.com.
That article went on to say that Americans spent about half their leisure time watching TV.
The 2004 time use study, incidentally, saw little change in those numbers.
Ouch. So I’m getting less sleep than the study’s average, spending less time on leisure activities, working more and doing next to no household chores.
Incidentally, the study said that employed people, on the days they worked, put in an average of 7.6 hours. If I work more than that, am I above or below average?