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shaving in the tub
Thursday, January 7 2010
The brownhouse is where I do most of my reading of non-electronically-generated words. Some days ago I started reading a book Gretchen got me for Christmas entitled E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. I started reading it somewhere in the middle, as I often do with non-fiction books. It's surprisingly well-written for a book covering a scientific topic (though it's more of a history than anything else). There is one annoying thing about the book, though, and it's the constant use of formulations such as "E=mc2 was only just," "this cause E=mc2 to," or "this would lead E=mc2 to," or "millions of examples of E=mc2 were." Okay, I get it, your book is about E=mc2. But it's awkward as a character, and it's even more awkward for the many web writers who don't know about the <sup> tag.
At around 5:00pm I took the book downstairs and read it while taking my weekly bath. At some point I began to shave. When I start shaving, it's as if in answer to the question, "If were to drop dead right now, what part of my face would I most want to be clean shaven?" Usually the early shaving is somewhat painful, because my razor is a many-months-old Gillette Fusion, a sort of miniature Venetian blind one rubs across one's face. But then as the bristles of my face are whacked off, they present less friction and I can proceed more quickly and painlessly. At a certain point my shaving turns into a manifestation of a random walk process (similar to how a Roomba vacuums a floor) because I do not use any sort of visual aids. When I feel I'm done, I run my hands over my face feeling for rough patches and dispatch any I discover.
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