Figuring myself out

"Sorry I misspent so much of your time. Now I'm trying to put your riddle to a rhyme."

Let me tell you a story. For about a year and a half of my college career, I was a terrible student. I dozed through class, hardly studied at all, and did all my homework at the last minute. A brush with some really bad grades provided the wakeup call I needed and I kicked some ass during the rest of my time there, but that’s not the story I’m telling today. During those first years, I lived on the same floor in the same dorm, with a crowd of characters ranging from the nerdy to the obnoxious to the awesome, up to and including my wife. Although that’s also the fodder for lots of interesting tales, it’s again not the story I want to tell.

The story I do want to tell begins with me, during those lazy years, lounging around in the parlor of the dorm until the wee hours of the morning. This was nothing unusual; at this time of my life, it was in fact my usual routine. But as I was lying on a couch chatting, a friend of mine had to leave to go study, commenting on the way out “Greg, you need a hobby.” It was intended as a joke, to point out that there were obviously other things (like schoolwork) that I should be doing with my time, but for some reason it really stuck with me.

More recently, after I graduated college and transitioned over to a “9-to-5” life, I began to think about this a little bit more. I didn’t have homework anymore, and there weren’t intramural sports or club meetings filling my time in the evenings. Add in Stacia discovering knitting and deciding to pursue an online Master’s degree, and I was going to be stuck either watching TV all the time, or actually finding a hobby. I’d never had a hobby before, so I was going to have to think pretty hard to find one, but I was determined.

In the beginning I had no idea what I was looking for, so I tried almost anything. I began to build a model kit I’d had since I was a kid, but it just got boring and tedious. I thought about learning to draw, but never had enough desire to pick up a pencil and work at it. I tried writing fiction, but never really could get going with a great story idea. I went running a few times, but, let’s be honest, running sucks (I had been on the track team in high school, but I didn’t even like it then, always finding excuses to miss practice). And one time, I even let Stacia try to teach me to crochet.

After all these failed attempts, I was a little disheartened. So one evening Stacia and I spent our usual workday wind-down cooking dinner together, and I was griping about not having a hobby. She then pointed out what should have been obvious all along. “Well, you like this, don’t you?” I thought about it a little, and realized that, actually I really kind of loved our cooking adventures. Oftentimes it was my favorite part of the day, and while a large part of that was just us spending time together, the cooking itself was something I really enjoyed.

Quickly I was able to come up with all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t work as a hobby. “It doesn’t leave me anything to do after dinner.” “I don’t have any training and I’m not very good.” But after thinking about it some more, those excuses started to sound lame even to me. After dinner was over I could always work on meal planning, look up recipes and learn about nutritional aspects or new techniques. Stacia was entirely self-taught with her knitting, so I could learn on my own too. If I wasn’t very good to begin with, the best way to improve would surely be to practice.

And on top of all that, I found myself becoming excited about the whole idea. Which, when you think about it, should have been the key all along. Stacia knits not because she actively sought out a pastime, but because she tried it and had a blast. Who cares what I call it; if I really love cooking, that should be how I spend my spare time. So now it is. It’s an ongoing process, one that I’ll probably talk about on here more than you’d care for, but why not? After all, cooking is my favorite hobby.