This post is mainly for men, although girls could also take note and point their SO towards this page if he’s getting out of the bathroom red-faced and bleeding from a thousand small cuts. Trust me, I speak from experience.

You see, I’ve been on a quest for razor systems that don’t suck since my late teens, and it wasn’t easy. I have sensitive skin and tough stubbles, which pretty much guaranteed razor burn every bloody time. I’ve been through the whole Gillette range - and some Wilkinson on the side. I’ve tried electric, but to my horror I discovered that it only replaces razor burn with dried-out skin patches, that look (and feel) even more horrid.

Until a friend of mine recommended an old-fashion safety razor. He had sort of the same problems, and he swears by it, so I said I’ll give it a try. Turns out it’s not only the razor; it’s the whole shaving process. I was doing it VERY wrong.

After two years of great shaving, here’s what I learned so far:

• Moisture is really important. Always shave after a shower - barring that, get and use a hot towel to soften the stubbles. This is the most important step to a pain-free shave; I can’t stress this enough. If there’s no hot towel available and you don’t have time for a shower (!), splash your face for at least one minute with hot water - as hot as you can stand.

• The shaving cream or soap or whatever you’re going to use should be on the oily side, so that the razor slides on the skin. Slide. Not scrape. A shaving brush helps, but it’s not necessary for every products. There are some lather-free creams out there which are better applied by hand.

• The shaving itself. Regardless of the razor you use, you should always shave in the direction that your hair grows (with the grain, as it’s called). Don’t shave against the grain, even if you think the result is not smooth enough. That’s going to lead to ingrown hairs, which are a major pain. Shave in small increments and rinse your razor often. Don’t forget that it’s trimming, not scrapping: don’t push the razor against your face. It’s better to trim incrementally (say, 4-5 times on the same spot) than to scrape it all in one go. By the way, if you have a safety razor, you should NEVER EVER scrape; you’ll end up looking like you got shaved by Freddy Krueger.

• IMPORTANT: use sharp blades. No kidding. On a safety razor, a blade should be used for only two shaves, three tops. Fortunately they’re quite cheap, compared to the modern contraptions. A sharp blade slides; a dull blade pulls the skin and gives cuts and burns.

• Putting on some manly aftershave lotion is important. What is even more important is putting on some rather less manly moisturising face cream afterwards. Or go for a alcohol-free aftershave balm.

• Oh, and one more thing. Whenever you have the chance - like weekends in the woods, or fantasy conventions or whatever - give your face a rest. One or two days without shaving every now and then is good for the skin.

And that’s about it. I shave mainly with a safety razor nowadays - it’s something of a guilty pleasure for me, and I understand if people don’t want to invest the time in learning how to use one. It’s well worth it, in my opinion, but your mileage may vary.

I also own a Gillette Fusion (the one with the battery in the handle), which I use as travel razor, or if I’m really in a hurry. I find that microvibrations in the razor blade are the most important invention in the field of shaving in the last 30 years. If you don’t want a safety razor, this is in my opinion the way to go.

If you’re fortunate enough to have one of those old-fashioned barber shops in the neighbourhood, do yourself a favour and get a shave there. You’ll experience first-hand what I’ve told you above, and then you can make up your own mind about shaving techniques. And if you have problems like razor burn and ingrown hairs, you can ask the barber for advice; he’s a professional after all.

Contrary to what Marvel or DC might want you to think, there is no such thing as superpowers. A statement which, if you’re not under 12 or have a double-digit IQ, won’t strike you as odd, or even the least bit surprising. Indeed, if evolution taught us anything, it’s that natural occurring superpowers are nigh-impossible. James Randi made it his life work to prove that mystical superpowers are by and large a hoax. And while technology-based superpowers (the other kind) may occur, the large-scale adoption of said technology will soon throw it back into the realm of the mundane.

In a way though we all have superpowers. We project our voices around the globe! We can read and write across vast distances! We can travel faster than a speeding bullet!¹ And yes, we can even fly.

But that’s not what a superhero makes. As Stan Lee probably guessed decades ago, what we like the most about superheroes is that they are unique - in their respective universes, of course. They have something to set them aside from regular humans. The power to fly without using an airplane. Or a hot air balloon. Or a lawn chair. The power to read minds. The power to wear underwear over pants without anyone laughing out loud. The power to shuffle the cards with the aces on top. It’s something they excel at, something nobody else has, something that makes their life choices easy.

Oh boy. You’re in high school, your conscious mind barely awoken, and you hear this one word over and over again. Potential. You have it, or you don’t. Or you have more than one. You could be a doctor. Or a programmer. Or a lawnmower man. Or you could be so damn good at flipping burgers, you’d go and open your own franchise. Everybody’s talking about what you could or couldn’t do. And the hard part, the real bitch is this: you need to choose. And keep on choosing, until one of those potentials is realised, and the others are so many steps in the sand.

That’s when you start seeing the lucky ones. The guys and gals who know already what they want to be when they grow up. They decided, they have certainties, and they move ahead. And your mind reels with the possibility: what if you could get something like that too? What if you would know what you’re good at, and pursue it, and become the greatest anyone had ever known - in that field. In that job. In that way of life.

Which is where superheroes come in. Talk about easy choices. Along comes the first girl (or boy) and then you dream up she’s kidnapped by the worst villain you can possibly imagine, and then you fight him, and you win. You prove your courage, and then you act upon it and you ask her out. She accepts gratefully. And so it goes.

There’s nothing wrong in wanting to be good - to do good deeds, to save the planet, to get the girl, that sort of thing. That’s a goal that you can relate to - at least in your tender years. And that explain the success of all those comics-based movies, brought on the silver screen by the power of CGI and the Hollywood top brass’ quest for a guaranteed profit. It reminds us of adolescence, when things were clear-cut and life was simple. We could see the line between good and bad. And we were always on the side of good.

But as time rolled on and life got harder, the lack of that one unique feature became the focus of our blame. If only I could fly. If only I could teleport. If only… my life would be different. It’s orders of magnitude harder to be a superhero with no superpowers. When there’s no easy path cut out in front of you, and the choices you have are gray at best. And you have to choose the best of all possible options, day in and day out.

That is, if you don’t want to wake up one day, look in the mirror and see him. The villain you were fighting all along.

1. Provided that it’s a subsonic bullet, or you’re flying military jets for a living. [↩]

Books are my constant companions pretty much since forever. I started reading when I was about 6 years old, and until now I’ve probably chewed out a few cubic meters of the stuff. I am, without a shadow of a doubt, a book addict. BRA¹, here I come.

Like any child of that age, I was really into adventures. It started with fairy tales - folk legends, the Greek mythology (the children’s edition, I’ve got to the heavy stuff quite a few years later), 1001 Arabian Nights, novelised history… Then I ran into Jules Verne, Karl May and Alexandre Dumas (all of them translated in my native Romanian, of course) and that sealed the deal. I was hooked.

As years went by, I kept on going through miles and miles of fine typography. “Shogun“, James Clavell’s masterpiece that dragged me kicking and screaming into adolescence. Frank Herbert’s “Dune”, with its unparalleled world and insightful characters. Tolkien. Asimov. Clarke. Orson Scott Card. Then Dostoievski, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Hugo and Sartre. Mircea Eliade and Eugen Ionescu. I was moving up in the world. Thomas Mann. Herman Hesse. John Fowles. Heavy, heavy books that I was struggling to understand, complex characters and motivations, refining years and years of the author’s experience and shaped by mature thoughts and desires. Like many before me, I’ve moved then to the arid world of philosophy. Plato. Descartes. Hegel. Kant.

And then there was Nietzsche. And then I stopped.

There’s no describing the sensation after finishing “Thus spoke Zarathustra“. It was as if a perfect mirror was suddenly and without warning placed before me. There I was, trying to find truth among the ink-stained souls of long-gone trees. While I was reading, the world was floating by.

Thus passed the longest two months of my life. No books were open during that period, except for the manuals needed for school. Time was gained, and invested in introspection and long walks. Battles were lost. Battles were won. The world kept on spinning, indifferent to my book-free existence. Indeed, friends, adolescence is truly the Age of the Extreme.

At the end of those months, however, I came to a conclusion. Books were no longer to be read as guiding lights, shining a path towards one should be striving. Instead, they were to be companions, friends to which one would turn for comfort. They were objects of art, not worship, and needed to be treated as such. The truth, if any, was hiding elsewhere - but that, friends, is a different story, for another sleepless night.

In the years that passed since I’ve found many more great writers, storytellers, bards and poets. I couldn’t remember them all if I tried, so I won’t even try. What I belatedly came to realize was that my insight of those many years ago, hard-earned as it seemed, was also wrong. Books did left their mark on me, through the choices they made me imagine, the points of view they showed, the many sorts and flavours of human emotions and social interactions. Books taught me politics and honour and why cats always land upright. They made me laugh. They made me bleed. They made me who I am.

You are what you read.

1. Book Readers Anonymous - and if it doesn’t exist, it really should [↩]