Friday, October 09, 2009

He Would Throw Stuff

Today I started reading what is quickly amounting to a fascinating book!
I cannot put it down.
Einsten: His Life and Universe.
By Walter Isaacson.
I'm only at page 32 of a possible.... 551.
But I already can tell, this thing is going to be good!

[By the way, according to Einstein, if I quit blogging right now and commenced reading at just slightly faster than the speed of light, I would actually finish this book before I even started it!]
One thing that is really amazing to me is [don't laugh] umm...... how much I myself am like Einstein.
I mean, personality wise.
He was a loner, like me.
Every day, for him, was a bad hair day! Just like me!
By the way, it is completely NOT true that he flunked math in school.

But [seriously now] I am finding that there are so many areas in which I am LIKE Einstein.
The guy was a bit of a nutbar.
As early on as page 12, I was totally identifying with him. Because [when I was a youngster...] I also liked to throw things at my younger sister when I was angry.
Albert Einstein threw stuff.

He was also, at least as a young child, prone to temper tantrums. "At such moments his face would turn completely yellow, [I can relate]... the tip of his nose snow-white, and he was no longer in control of himself," Maja [his younger sister] remembers. Once, at age 5, he grabbed a chair and threw it at a tutor, who fled and never returned. Maja's head became the target of various hard objects. "It takes a sound skull," she later joked, "to be the sister of an intellectual." Unlike his persistence and tenacity, he eventually outgrew his temper.

As did I.

A few years ago I wrote a small biography about my own father, after he passed away.
In it, there is an excerpt about my own childhood personality which can effectively illustrate and verify that I am indeed, in at least this one way, quite Einsteinian.
So, having said all of the above, if you are perhaps so bored out of your own skull that you are ready to jump off a roof -- you are welcome to read of my anger-induced lapse of better judgment
--> HERE.
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2 comments:

Beth said...

Comparing yourself to Einstein? Hmm...
Actually, I noted the similarities when we met. ;)
(Although I didn’t catch a glimpse of the temper...)

Your sister survived your shared childhood and still loves you?

Alyce said...

I loved this book. (Although I have to admit that I didn't read it all. It was due back at the library and I never got around to finishing it. It wasn't because I didn't like it though, I just moved on to other books. Maybe someday.)