The Perks of Having the I-Read-a-Book Mien.

6:03 a.m.
Sick.
Just took a shower.
Sick again.
Read some Emily Brontë.
Opened Safari.
No latte today.

---

I have that face when I shave.

The one that convinces strangers I've either read Proust or know how to fix a fountain pen. Put on Hala's glasses and the illusion becomes peer-reviewed.

My roommate suffers from the same condition. Barring a few unmistakable quirks, he could get away with almost anything in class. People trusted him instinctively. Meanwhile, he'd quietly orchestrate harmless little conspiracies, frame his classmates with astonishing elegance, and somehow leave the room looking like the only morally upright witness. Conan would have admired the craftsmanship.

I envy that.

Or perhaps I merely studied it long enough to imitate it.

I've become reasonably competent at getting away with mischief myself, though my education consisted mostly of patient observation, social blunders, and tiny shards of accumulated cunning.

People prefer me with a beard.

I don't.

Without it, my face feels oddly aerodynamic. I look less like a philosophy lecturer and more like someone who accidentally wandered into one.

Yes, I've been told it slightly disappoints the female gaze. Whether that's true or simply a comforting myth I tell myself in the mirror remains inconclusive. Still, I've always found the psychology of attraction more entertaining than attraction itself. My friends routinely dismiss my little theories, only to return months later with suspiciously similar conclusions.

I never mention this.

Professional courtesy.

My life resembles a Hegelian dialectic.

There is me with a beard.

Me without a beard.

The synthesis, naturally, is a beard too indecisive to commit either way.

That is my golden mean.

Enough beard to look trustworthy.

Not enough beard to look as though I own three podcasts.

Appearance fascinates me because most people mistake it for personality. I operate under what sociologists would call Facework Theory. Everyone is performing; some of us simply rehearse more than others.

But appearances occasionally tell the truth.

I really do read.

When I'm healthy, I read with the enthusiasm of a medieval monk convinced the library might burn tomorrow. Brick-sized novels. Multi-volume histories. Books that double as improvised dumbbells.

When anxiety arrives, however, I can stare at the same paragraph for twenty minutes and retain nothing except the page number.

Last summer I read more than fifty books.

Looking back, I suspect I wasn't reading so much as emigrating.

Fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, nineteenth-century adventures... I accepted citizenship wherever fiction was issuing passports. I wandered through Kafka's bureaucratic labyrinth only to hitch a ride with the Three Musketeers shortly afterwards. Escapism is unfairly criticised. Sometimes reality deserves to be ghosted.

One of my favourite rituals, strangely enough, is opening second-hand books and discovering library stamps from institutions that no longer exist, or margin notes left by complete strangers. Nothing makes me happier than reading an argument in the margins between two people who never met. Somewhere in 1987, someone underlined a sentence in pencil, another reader disagreed in blue ink fifteen years later, and now I arrive decades afterward as an entirely unnecessary referee. Books, I've realised, are occasionally just very slow group chats.

That, incidentally, is why I refuse to dog-ear pages. It feels like folding the ears of a golden retriever.

Looking like someone who reads is pleasant.

Actually reading is considerably better.

Reading alone, though, accomplishes very little. The dangerous readers are not those who finish books but those who argue with them. The moment every page becomes scripture instead of conversation, you've mistaken literacy for thought.

Read not because you fear being outsmarted by some inquisitive Sherlock, but because the world is embarrassingly larger than your own certainties. Read until your opinions become drafts rather than monuments.

Or, as Virginia Woolf might gently remind us, read until you've built a room of your own.

You'd be surprised how many people decorate their minds before they've laid the foundations.

Guess that's enough for one sick morning.

Babbay.