The art of bathreading can change your life (it changed mine!)
Note: this entry has moved.
Bathreading: act of reading in the bathroom.
Bathreader: a person who enjoys bathreading.
Avid bathreader:
kzu!
Bathreading is an activity I owe much of what I am today. But to understand
it, a little history (and auto-biography) is required.
I'm the second of five children, which in other times here in Argentina, wasn't
so unusual, specially if you lived in a small town more than a couple hundred
KMs from Buenos Aires (you know, there was no cable TV...). We're "grouped" in
two series: 3 sons first (about 2 years between each), and 2 more about 8
years later. Now, the really interesting bit, and the one that brought me to
bathreading, is that I'm the only male (and enough to handle 4 womens at least,
I could add...).
Now, everyone that has a sister (imagine 4!) knows that they are noisy when they join their friends. And that happens much more frequently than for guys (at least that was my case... although I may be a boring guy after all, and that could be the reason... time for therapy I guess). When there's so many people around the house (and it's quite a big one), it's increasingly difficult to find a quiet place to read. My father gave me an incredible example of how to deal with this, and something I'll be grateful for my whole life: he just went to the bathroom with the newspaper, and nobody would bother him for hours (well, that may be too much... let's say some minutes).
So I learned from this experience, and begun to adopt it. Fortunately, we have 3 bathrooms there, so there wasn't much contention. Although the women would always complain. Bathreading proved to have many benefits:
- Nobody asks you whether you're busy (to ask you to do something else, for example)
- Nobody asks you what you're doing (interesting if you're an adolescent and like to read "sensitive" magazines)
- Nobody will open the door and interrupt you (obliquely related to the previous one)
- You can focus completely on what you read (there's nothing interesing in that environment so you can't be easily distracted)
- You can't get asleep (unless you want to break your head with the washbowl). This is a clear advantage over reading in bed.
- By focusing on reading, you're distracting yourself from the main purpose that originally got you to the bathroom, which is now transformed in a purely automatic and reflex activity (WAY easier in my experience).
- You always finish reading what you started: as there's nothing else you can do but finish reading while you're at the bathroom, even the most seeminly uninsteresting and irrelevant articles will get your attention and be read completely.
One main problem with bathreading, is that it becomes such an addictive habit, that you can no longer go to the bathroom without something to read. This can be a real problem if you're at some else's house, for example. I remember reading medicine "manuals", lists of toothpaste benefits and chemical composition and others.
Over the years, I realized that I read much more than most of my friends. I also realized that most of the more interesting reading (even after adolescence) happens through bathreading, because you are more leaned towards disposing that time to experimental or recreational materials (your subconscious will never -even after the years- recognize the time you spent in the bathroom as time that could have been used in something more "productive").
Finally, a good printer was always a required accessory for any decent bathreader. I guess it's time for me to buy an iPAQ... The ideal environment for an avid bathreader could be something like the following:
but with bookshelves... The product page even says "get inspired" on the left... bathreading is the future.