The Devil's Playthings

Playing solitaire on the computer isn't a hobby. According to my mother, maintaining this blog is not a hobby either. Her point was that this is somewhat of a required exercise, and I tend to it as if it were a chore. Not that it isn't completely satisfying: seeing my words come alive on Al Gore's Internet each day. But this is no hobby. It is, to use the parlance of elementary school, a "must-do."
What then would my "may-do's" be? I used to put together plastic model kits, but even in my youth I had a compulsion to finish them. Sometimes the pieces broke or I painted the wrong side first. Too much glue or not enough. My work suffered by comparison to the other kids on the street who were painting the lenses on the binoculars of Afrika Korps commanders that were one seventy-second scale. That kind of detail was wasted on someone like me. The idea of spending more than a few minutes with a piece of plastic no bigger than my thumb was incomprehensible. It still is.
That's the trouble with me and the hobby thing. Just about the time that I catch myself collecting or connecting with any object for more than a few minutes at a time I start to question myself and my priorities. Consequently a lot of my energy gets used on home repair and upkeep. It has that "useful" feeling to it, though I still find myself racing to the finish. I'm not one to take a break and sit on the steps, admiring my handiwork. Gardening is the same challenge. If there's something that needs to come out, I don't spend a lot of time negotiating. If it's going in the ground, I dig a hole and get it planted. My wife is a "process" kind of person, and when the two of us get on opposite ends of a project, the strain can be almost unbearable. I'm big into that whole completion thing.
Golf has too much equipment, and there's too much fog here next to the bay for stargazing. I bike to work, so it doesn't feel much like fun to me, and the only thing I want to respond to a remote control is my TV. And by now you've probably come to the same conclusion that I have, which is that the hobby for which I seem most suited is complaining about not having one. Maybe not very fun, but ultimately very satisfying.