A Fat Person on the Couch Theory

I spent an hour going thru other blogs and was horrified to see so many, so much religious babble, so many people writing about what they did and where they are on vacation and how old the baby is now. It is shattering to peer in to so many heads. My own blog here is daunting... surely it will never be read, only by me as I write it. And yet the desire to post my every little electromagnetic connection going on in my head is overwhelming... So to begin with, I must bark at Walter Isaacson for his occasional snooty description of Albert. I have read biographies before, and they are often superior sounding in the same way... Is it because the biographer is upended by the genius he is blogging or because of something else? "The proud little patent office man wrote to the eminent professor..." says Isaacson (and I paraphrase but that was the gist of it). In the book, Albert has just published his paper on the theory of relativity and Isaacson has just called him "Bitter" in so many words..."bitterly disappointed that no one paid any attention" says Isaacson repeating what Maja Einstein reportedly said of her brother... I mean talk about third hand information! Ok, so Einstein is bitter and then when Planck writes to him he is the "proud little man from the patent office". If that is not insulting I don't know what is. It is one thing to describe the anti semitism that crept in to the picture... I am using a lot of dots here, in my vague unsure way of showing my ambivalence about being critical toward Mr Isaacson. Its just that often the language sounds squashing. Proud Patent office man. Sort of diminishes Albert and his paper. Well anyway, this is the way biographers write. They DO diminish, in order for the reader not to be swallowed up perhaps. Maybe if they did not diminish their subject, the reader would feel small and insignificant reading about such flawless greatness. Perhaps the psychology of it is to show their baser human aspects, in order to make them palpable. Einstein, who discovered the make up of the universe, was a proud and bitter man who worked as a lowly patent office fellow. Nobody special...in fact, lots of people helped him and his wife might even have done the math for the theory. So don't feel bad, he was a conglomerate.
I am rambling. Not a good thing to do on a blog, what with all those millions of other blogs out there to compete with. After all, I have my audience to think of. My audience consists of me. I am the only one signed up for my blog. But it is not about OTHERS, it is about UNDERSTANDING. And last night I sort of understood the E equals M C squared thingy. I have never understood what it meant, and thanks to Walter Isaacson, I actually think I get it now. It used to be L equals V squared, which meant light is the same as velocity squared. Now admittedly, I still have trouble with the squared part, but I think it means times a lot. So energy in light is equal to mass speed times a ka-gillion. The bigger the mass, the bigger the energy contained. So I figure a fat person sitting on a couch is a ball of energy unreleased. This makes dieting and exercise much more understandable. If this is ever read, I suppose they will be shaking their heads in wonder at my simpleton-ness. Wow, that such ignorance is possible, they might say. But I think I do get it. I think I do.
It is the train that still stumps me. I was sitting in the Bronx yesterday on Broadway, outside a little tavern on a bench, when the subway went by above ground. I watched the train roar past, I considered myself at rest there on the little bench, and I pondered the theory. Who was moving, me or it? And I have to say no matter how I blurred my eyes, IT was moving and I was not. But on the train, a man looking out at me saw me disappear in the distance. I got up and shouldered my bag and my bag of groceries, and began the long trudge back to my apartment, humming a little tune about energy and velocity and feeling the very mass of me plodding along, expending. Was I walking toward my apartment or was my apartment coming to me? Again, I felt a certainty that it was I who was putting out the energy to reach the apartment and not the other way around.