Loving the Mic is my Hobby
Michael over at Deux souffle-durs has written a lovely and epic musing on the nature of hobbies. As I read it this morning in my pyjamas, it implored me to contemplate whether my haphazard doings could be called hobbies. Is blogging a hobby? I’ll tell you what: at times, this feels like work to me, and I’m far from prolific. Any professional writer will tell you that writing is a tough job, tantamount to hours per day of heavy lifting. No matter your degree of talent, tenacity, and love of the craft, you don’t simply sit in your leather office chair with a cognac at your elbow and tap a vein every evening. You slog and puzzle and pace the room until your sorry ass can cobble some dilapidated piece of crap together that holds its shape well enough for you to rewrite it. Hardly the same as whiling away a hazy Sunday gently paddling a canoe around a nearby lake.
The poignant bit:
In my own life, alas, I’ve been confused about these distinctions. I wonder if this is because I was pushed into a high-powered, upper-middle-class world where people pursued careers. Where’s room for a hobby — in the sense that I understand the word, anyway — in a life devoted to careerizing? Some of the upper-middle and upper-class people I’m now among pursue activities that look like hobbies: sports, travel, oddball skills, etc. Yet something often seems amiss to me. The activities seem less loved than achieved, less a function of easygoing pleasure than necessary steps in an ongoing crusade. Where does the careerizing person’s vocation end and where does his/her avocation begin?
As one of these very Kids Today trying to find the energy for extracurriculars in a hyper-careerized world, this question hammers me over the head every morning when I wake up and at night when I amble off to bed. And even though I consider every second away from the office as sacrosanct, I would be a stinking liar were I to act like I used these seconds wisely.
Many weekend hours go unaccounted once Sloth sinks its hooks in. Before you know it, Sunday evening has rolled around and you’re scrambing to finish your chores and maybe read a chapter of that book before bedtime, and oh hell I’ll just take care of it tomorrow. The weekend cannot help but sit in the gloomy umbra of the oncoming work week, robbing it of meaningful consequence. Depressing, because we work hard for our weekends only to go and waste them, or so it seems. Weekends feel more like recharging sessions for the upcoming week, the chaos of which tends to sap us dry. Fitting a productive hobby into the gaps between is a daunting task indeed.
Then again, Sloth is universal—it exists at the workplace, too. Even the sternest and most devout labourer feels on a cellular level the urge to punch out early for a beer every now and again. And anyway, what’s with the urge to treat one’s weekend like it’s a regular workday, measuring productivity on some unholy Gannt chart? Leisure is supposed to be, well, leisurely, isn’t it? Projects go half done (or until we tire of them, whichever comes first), letters stay unopened, and the bed only gets made if we’re expecting someone else to join us in it. We drink juice from a plastic Hulk Hogan tumbler and leaf through magazines on the couch while listening to the Mountain Goats.
Well, I do.
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Hi Nick, thanks for leaving me a comment – I’m happy to find your blog too and will add it to my Montreal list!