Tonsor Retonsus

tonsorial \tahn'sohr-ee-uhl\ adjective
1: of or relating to a barber or his work

I had a haircut a few days ago, and I went from being very shaggy to very short, so now my head feels about 2 lbs. lighter. I also can't headbang quite as well. The haircutter based this haircut on a picture of George Clooney and assured me that women would be falling into my lap. We'll see how that prediction turns out.

Yesterday I went skiing for the first time in a long time, grandly girded with new (to me) equipment. I hung out on the bunny-hill runs for a while, then stupidly decided to take on all my favorite blue- and black- (i.e. medium and difficult) level runs. One or two turned out to be a little steeper than I had anticipated, and I found myself digging in to the side of the mountain with my skis to keep from tumbling off. Attempting to move forward in this position requires the exertion of one's leg muscles, and mine were somewhat withered from disuse, the upshot of which is that my thighs and especially my calves felt like they had been injected with gasoline and set alight. But I valiantly stuck it out until the end, went home, and was more or less unable to walk or even remain standing for more than a few seconds. They're better today, as in "I can walk," ("Mein Führer, I can walk!") but now my arms hurt. Oh well, no pain, no gain. And it was a hell of a lot of fun.

In cultural news, I just finished reading The Book of Sand, a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I've also read his The Aleph and Other Stories, and his Labyrinths is in the stack. He's a wonderful writer, cosmopolitan and literate but distinctly South American, phantasmagorical yet punishingly real. He deals often with religion, philosophy, and infinity (which reminds me of an interesting but long essay on time my dad sent me recently), and often uses vividly pictorial metaphors: circles and spheres, cubes, mazes, darkness (Borges was blind), sand. His stories are horrific (There Are More Things, which was dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft), A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, The Sect of the Thirty), fantastical (The Aleph, The Book of Sand, The Other), figurative (The Circular Ruins (which was the subject of The Borges Project, a fascinating multinational theatre project covered in American Theatre), The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths, The Mirror and the Mask), and realistic (The Bribe, The Night of the Gifts, Ulrike). He's one of the few South American writers whose oeuvre I am more or less familiar with, the others I can think of being Gabriel García Marquez and Isabel Allende. I read the first few stories in The Book of Sand several months ago and never got around to finishing them, but while browsing in the library the other day I found it again and decided to finish it. My personal favorites from the collection are the fairy-tale-like "The Mirror and the Mask" and the straightforwardly dreamlike "The Other," though Borges states in the introduction that he believes two different stories in the collection, "The Book of Sand" and "The Congress", to be some of his "greatest works in short fiction." He also mentions in "The Bribe" what he calls something like "the peculiar determined predilection of Americans to be even-minded." That was a bit surprising to me, as I've always tried to be exceptionally even-minded and noticed the predilection of many of my acquaintances, whether I agree with their opinions or not, to tend to regard people who disagree with them as utter fools. (Notice that I attempt to show my own even-mindedness by adding the cautionary "whether I agree with their opinions or not." Heheh.)

I am ashamed to say that much of the preceding was referenced from Wikipedia, which as everyone knows is a highly suspicious website and probably not the best place to get your information from, since any Joe Schmo can upload any crap he likes and people will assume it as fact until it gets taken down. Consider the case of John Seigenthaler Sr. as evidence of Wikipedia's spuriosness.

While poking around in the dictionary for a good word to use in place of the cumbersome "spuriousness," which sounds akin to words like "spokesperson" in construction, I found an amazing array of similar-sounding words meaning "doubtful," that is, not "worthy of being doubted" (which is what I was looking for with "spuriousness") but "in a state of doubt": dubitancy, dubiety, dubiosity, dubiousness, or doubtfulness. Amazing concoction, the English language.