The Ant and the Half-Ass Hopper

There’s an old story about The Ant & The Grasshopper, but this is not like that at all.

At all.

It’s totally different.

There are no similarities, other than the name sounds a little similar.

And there’s an Ant in both of the stories.

Anyway, once there was this industrious ant. Personally, I don’t know why ants are always so industrious. Did you know that the lifespan of an average ant is 45 to 60 days? If I were an ant, I’d work for a few weeks, but then I’d want some time off to start enjoying myself a little, cuz y’know… life is short.

Anyway, this nameless Ant (another interesting ant fact: most ants don’t have names) did a workout every day. He would lift 60 milligrams, which equals out to… lemme see… 0.00212 ounces. Well, that’s not very impressive, is it? I could lift that with one hand. The pink barbells at the gym weigh 2 and a half pounds, and sometimes I use one in each hand. That’s lame, Ant!

What? How much does the Ant weigh? Well, it’s hard to get a good Ant weigh-in because some scales won’t even register a number when an ant steps on it. Google it? Google doesn’t know everything, you know!

Okay, it looks like (according to... um... an internet resource) that an ant weighs 3 milligrams, so yes, the Ant is lifting… um… 20 times his weight. Hmmmmm, 20 times my weight would be…uh… 4,222 pounds. Well, I’ll try it, but I’m gonna need somebody to spot me.

But what about the Half-Ass Hopper? When does he come into this story? Well, right about now, as it turns out. The Half-Ass Hopper hopped around all through the week, doing half-ass workouts that looked like real workouts and actually caused him to break a little bit of a sweat, but didn’t really get much accomplished when you really got down to it.

The Ant worked hard and prospered; the Half-Ass Hopper just flitted around the gym and didn’t really see any meaningful achievements. When Winter arrived, the Ant had stored a lot of food, and the Half-Ass Hopper had just squandered a lot of time.

See? That wasn’t anything like that other story…

“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”
–Henry David Thoreau