I Need a Hobby
Within certain parameters...
I know, your reaction on reading that title is “My dude, you have 9,000 followers on ex-Twitter and you’re writing a blog. You’ve got hobbies, you need a life.” But bear with me…
It’s absolutely true that in addition to having a day job and a family, I do some hobby-ish things. Some of them don’t even involve computers— I bike when the weather and my neck problems permit, I go hiking and take pictures with my DSLR (see the above photo of a blue jay from a couple of weekends ago), I enjoy cooking.
I’ve been realizing lately, though, that almost everything I do is essentially solitary. I go into work and spend most of my time (aside from a few hours a week actively teaching) siting in an office by myself, mostly manipulating various documents. My kids are teenagers now (The Pip as of 4:35 this morning), so when I get home they either have schoolwork or just aren’t interested in talking to old people. And Kate has a ton of work that she does in the evenings, which leaves me sort of silently farting around on the computer, by myself. On the weekends I can get out and do stuff just for me, but they’re generally things I do by myself.
This is all generally okay— one of the things I really like about my job is that it’s very independent, and doesn’t force me to negotiate with other people to be able to do what I like. Even as a department chair, the amount of externally dictated administrative bullshit isn’t all that bad, so if I want to spend a couple hours noodling around writing marginally competent Mathematica code to look at some silly side issue I ran across, I can do that. It’s great. Mostly.
But over the last several months, I’ve started to realize that there’s an element of isolation to a lot of this that’s really bad for me. This is exacerbated by my odd schedule— I’m up early, and usually in the office by 7:30 am, and leave campus around 3 so I can be available for kid-chauffeur duty if needed. A large fraction of the campus population doesn’t even show up until 10 or 11, so the window in which there’s even the possibility of socializing is pretty narrow. My hours of peak availability are also a lousy fit for social media— the peak hours when I have the time and energy to interact with ex-Twitter are all earlier than most Americans are online.
I very definitely feel this lack of interaction with other people, and the thin contacts of social media aren’t a real substitute. I find myself feeling mildly pissed off all the time, not for any objectively valid reason, but because I have a lot of pent-up social energy that doesn’t have a good outlet— I’m either by myself, or with people who have perfectly good reasons to not want to talk to me.
This was slightly alleviated in late summer by The Pip’s travel baseball schedule— a couple of nights a week, I could take him to practice and chat with the other parents. That’s actually one of the things that led me to the realization that my bad mood was mostly a lack-of-socialization problem— I was a lot less pissed off on baseball days. Of course, now that it gets dark at 5pm, there isn’t any more baseball practice, so I’m back to feeling this really acutely.
Thus, “I need a hobby.” Specifically, I need something to do that gets me out of the house and around other people on a more regular basis. Preferably not people I already work with, and preferably not something involving politics in a major way (in either the partisan or organizational senses— I get plenty of both of those…).
I just don’t really know what that could possibly be. I was thinking about this while walking the dog, and one of the first things that came to mind as a thing I like doing with others was basketball— maybe I could find an evening game or league somewhere, and play more. The problem is, I’m a 53-year-old man— playing hoops for an hour or so 2-3 days a week at lunchtime leaves me hobbling around the house. I’m not sure I could significantly increase my hoops activity at this stage of my life.
Some lower-impact sport might be a reasonable option, but we’re past golf season and I’m not good at bowling or darts. Also, I’m looking to acquire a social outlet, not a drinking problem. (Honestly, a lot of what I’m after could be addressed by just becoming a regular at a local bar, but I’ve worked really hard over the last several years to get my weight down, and don’t want to throw that away by becoming Norm Peterson…)
In a different era or social context I’d be a part of a church, or join some fraternal organization— Rotary, Lions, whatever— but those both have the drawback of involving a lot of organizational politics. Likewise getting more involved with the kids’ school through the PTO or booster club or whatever— there’s a lot of “Well, we could do that, but Kathy is in charge of this committee and she doesn’t get along with Bill who runs this other thing, so…” and I’m all stocked up on that sort of drama.
The lowest-effort option is probably just to start attending more events on campus; that is, after all, one of the nominal perks of being faculty. Really, it’s a “go back to…” because I used to do this a lot more— before I got tenure, my chair once conveyed an unofficial message from a Dean that I needed to “be less visible,” because people might think I wasn’t spending enough time on my research. (I replied “I mean, I can stop showing up at things, but if I do I’m just going to watch more tv…” He agreed that it was stupid, but he had been told to pass it along.) (I didn’t like that Dean, and wasn’t sad when she moved on…) I stopped when the kids got old enough to object to being dragged along, but now that they’re mature enough to not be a huge imposition on Kate, I could resume going solo.
That’s not super helpful in the very short term, though, because we’re in the last week of the Fall term, and thus about to enter a several-week hiatus in which there are essentially no campus events at all (a handful of home sporting events in November/December, and that’s it)… And it will run into some problems with my schedule— many campus events happen at times when I’m starting to think about going to bed— but I don’t think that’s insurmountable.
Anyway, I’m throwing this out into the aether mostly because just typing this out is mildly therapeutic. And there’s always an outside chance that somebody reading this will have a brilliant suggestion of something I can do to help maintain my sanity until baseball season starts up again.
So, yeah, that’s Today in My Mental State. If for some reason you like this, here’s a button:
And if you have suggestions, the comments will be open:
When I was a postdoc I used to make a point of attending a bunch of other department’s colloquium. I called it my TV time. Watching the talks and then socializing a bit with the ones that had tea before or after was great. Boy did the synthetic biologist give the most impenetrable talks. FWIW f that dean, more campus events sounds awesome to me.
I was going to suggest tabletop rpgs. Regular meetings with the same folks is a good way to make friends.