It’s a funny thing that so much of our time is spent asking and being asked inane questions. Maybe this is especially the case in Medicine, where you can genuinely spend a day taking histories and asking patients questions like “Oh really? That must have been stressful for you, but what brought you to hospital this time? Not last year, last week.” But it’s definitely also a thing when you get asked to describe yourself for things, especially online things, like profiles for Facebook, or even the website of “biosketches” for people in our course. I’d imagine things like dating websites and stuff would be infinitely worse, but fortunately my experience in that field is limited at best.
All these “tell us about yourself!!1!one!” things seem to have in common the direst question of all: “Do you have any hobbies?”. Tell me, Cherished Reader, do you, in fact, have any hobbies? Really? Any that you would ever actually call “hobbies” unprovoked? I mean, sure, you might say; “I really enjoy photography/music/watching TV/reading discursive blog posts/sewing foolish gifts/swimming in the wintry sea/whatever.” Or you might say; “I spend a lot of time listening to music/making short films about Iceland/doing the crossword/cycling/baking elaborately shaped cakes/talking about people behind their backs/writing soulful songs on my guitar/something.” But are these really hobbies? I bet they aren’t. Hobbies are things like model train landscaping, or stamp-collecting (sorry, “philately”), or maybe whittling or something. They’re not something real people really do.
What does one even do when it comes to stamp collecting? I know that you can get, like, starter packs from the Post Office, but quite frankly it seems like cheating, as well as being unspeakably dull and a strangely unsatisfying and inauspicious way to start. Also, nowadays people can make custom stamps with their kids on them for Christmas or anything, and quite frankly that sucks any conceivable joy out of it for me. Back when there was the Penny Black and maybe 14 other kinds of stamp anywhere in the world, collecting the whole set was achievable, now not so much. Plus, Australian stamps seem like they’re mostly all the same, just a collection of thousands upon thousands of copies of those same 4 wildflower pictures. I mean, maybe if you inherited an old collection o something, that’d be cool, but I still wouldn’t know what to do with it, except sell it to someone who would.
Mainly I don’t think anyone under the age of maybe 60 would describe the things they enjoy doing as “hobbies” because it trivialises those activities. It makes it sound like it’s either an unimportant fad or an unhealthy obsession. Also, dividing things you do into “work” and “hobbies” makes it seem like everything you do has to be one of the two. So the quite-fun-really chores like buying the groceries or doing that thing where you clean your entire house in a day and get all satisfied stop being things you can just enjoy and start being either “hobbies” (which is tragic) or “chores” (which everyone knows are un-fun). Essentially what I’m saying here is that dividing your life up like this cannot possibly be anything but pathological.
Also, what kind of hobbies could possibly meaningfully define us? “Listening to music” isn’t a hobby unless you sit there, alone, for hours and hours, doing nothing but listen, and even then, quite frankly, it’s more of a “thing to do” or a “cry for help”. Otherwise, you just like music. You know, just like everyone else except the tone deaf and the terminally be-migraned. If your hobby was “vivisecting serial killers” or “collecting spleens” or “tearing apart people who ask me inane questions with my bare hands or vicious rhetoric” (or even “alluding absentmindedly to quotes from bad movies no-one else ever saw”) then yes, people might want to be warned in advance, so that they could run away or make documentaries about you, as their own hobbies/inclinations directed. But really, when can this sort of thing ever help?
There are some hobbies which sort of categorise you, so, say, “cross stitch” makes you either a little old lady or one of those hip modern chicks who’re part of that new wave of craft, and who go to ‘crafternoons’, but so what? How does that enrich anyone’s understanding of you? Unless you’re really defined by your knitting or whatever, it hardly seems likely to be relevant to anything much, and if you are that defined by it, chances are it’ll be pretty obvious. The fact that you’d be knitting while you were asked these stupid questions’d be a hint, to start with.
This impatience of mine is probably linked to all those years I spent being a directionless Arts-studying vocational no-hoper. People would always (fairly rudely, when you think about it) ask “But what are you going to do with your life? For a real job, I mean?” and when I said “Oh, I don’t know, something?” you’d be amazed how helpful they would be. “Well, what do you like doing?” they would say in that sincere voice which plans to help you sort out your life. It was only with really saintly self-control that I used to resist getting fairly seriously ironic at this point, because “listening to music and hangin’ out and also being really well-paid” is not a job description. I always, always wanted to say “Gosh! What an interesting and insightful question! I never thought to think about what I like doing. I guess I do really enjoy working with pipes, and unblocking toilets and driving my own ute. Maybe… maybe, do you think that possibly I should become a plumber?! Thank you! Oh my God, you’ve changed my life with your incisive and insightful thoughts!”
Tchah. No-one “likes doing” these things in advance. You learn the parts of your career and get to like them. Sure, everyone likes shopping and having fun and hanging out and chocolate or whatever, but there are very few jobs where people will pay you to do things you like, and even then, people judge those jobs. Most folks enjoy dancing and making new friends and having sex, but no-one seems to translate that into wanting to be a stripper or a prostitute. Really, it seems almost perverse, when you think about it.
I realise that these people were only trying to help and being nice. I know that they had only my best interests at heart, but really. There’s something so very paternalistic about that sort of thing (the “what do you like doing” thing, not the “wanting to be a call-girl when you grow up”{which now I think about it, some people must do, even just as a matter of sheer statistical inevitability, holy crap!} thing) that I makes it very hard to accept in the spirit in which it was offered.
Anyway, that’s enough of this from me for the meanwhile, I’m sure you have some minatures you have to get back to painting or something: reading these very very long blog posts can’t be all you do with your time. Don’t you have a hobby or something?
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