E=mc2, or m= F/a

So mass is a function of speed. Apparently, if you slow pure energy down enough, say radiation from outer space,  it’ll congeal into tiny little particles of iron. Likewise, if in theory you accelerate anything quickly enough, say, for instance, me, it should dissolve into a massless blast of pure energy.

    The main problem with this neat little equation, of course, is that some of us are simply not built for speed. Large, craggy creatures of habit and substance, we are constantly buzzed by the quick. Junior, for one, cannot sit still. He can, and will, consume half his weight in pizza, bothered because he has to slow down at the table to do so, and keeps getting told to stop kicking the empty chair or to stop standing up when he’s supposed to be eating. 

“Slow down,” I tell him.

“I’m built for speed,” he says, quoting Lightning McQueen. My chair creaks under my weight as I nudge over to let him breeze by.

On fate

(Belated. October 10.) Today is my birthday, and no one called. Granted, I am traveling, but one would have thought with these newfangled cell phones and all. . . Maybe my wish to become less weighty, bordering on the invisible, is working in realms unexpected. Take for instance the bike versus car accident I had earlier this week. I was racing home on the bike, along a wide-ish boulevard in a working class section of town. A beat up station wagon was ahead of me, and started to slow down. I started to slow down. Then, the car put on its right turn signal almost at the same time as it turned into the parking lot. I slammed on the brakes, fishtailed, and landed on the pavement, sort of thumping into the car’s side. Old lady got out. I lost it. Never rudely- I used no curse words, and adressed the ancienne as “ma’am”. Instantly, the neighbors came out of the woodwork, accusing me. Bizarre, full of bad karma, bordering on lynch mob. I didn’t like how I started to behave. I limped off and made it home barely in time for the babysitter to get to her class. I know I’m not much to look at in Spandex, but this was uncalled for. 

     Bad karma seems to be in the air: my weight seems to be in inverse proportion to the stock market, if not in degree, at least in direction. Market went way down, I went up slightly. It had the greatest single point gain in history, I retreated. Portentous times, these. Think I could save the world from the next Great Depression by going on a hunger strike?

On Effort

Tomorrow I weigh in. So I decided on a sort of mini-marathon. I dusted off the old road bike for the first time in two years (in California, fifty pounds ago, I used to be a semi-serious biker: my regular route was a 12 mile circuit with a 2,000 ft vertical. 40 miles of rolling hills was a cinch). 

I biked 5 miles, came home, thumbed through most of the collected journalism of a 19th century Mexican poet, and swam 20 laps. Exhausting.