Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Silly hobbies
When I was a kid we used to have these sort of friendship books. A person who owned the book would ask their friends to fill in their names and some details, such as favourite foods or music and such. One of the things to fill in was usually hobbies. I would often write down things like reading, writing, drawing. I never felt quite right about it though. Reading, writing and drawing didn't feel as hobbies, but the usual living person stuff like eating or taking a shower.
Hobbies are something I've never been really good with. You know, taking part of hobby related lessons and exercising or keeping up with knitting. I get done with things so easily. Short attention span. Or that thing about too much thinking. Even reading, writing and drawing I kind of randomly. I do take photos, but that's pretty irregular too.
Googling the meaning of hobby defines it as "an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure". It's that regularity which I think I'm not good with. Or maybe I'm wrong.
This whole thought about hobbies came to me when I recently got myself into something you might find funny. See I have this hobby. I mess around in the virtual world Second Life. I won't call it playing, because that might mislead you thinking it's a game. Nevertheless the new thing is that I bought a couple of breedable cats in SL (yes, you read right) and decided to play the game of creating kittens with them. The kitty cats take some time to get there, thus I don't yet have any newborn kitties to show off. At first I was laughing at the idea of my new little hobby. So silly! It's not obviously as serious as honing art skills, playing games, dancing ballet, watching movies, writing contemporary poetry, listening classical music, collecting stamps. Hey, wait a minute!
This is the point where I realised a hobby doesn't have to be too serious and that most hobbies are kind of silly when you look at them from a distance. I also came to think I have other hobbies. Some of them may be so natural to me I don't see them as hobbies. Some may seem silly compared to something oh so important. But a hobby is something you do for pleasure.
When it comes to pleasure it's really useless to point fingers. Unless the pleasure is taken from hurting yourself or especially others. Well okay. Some like pain. And now I got distracted from the original point of this post.
My hobby isn't the most regular one. If I'd play guitar everyone I know would understand it's a hobby. Some of them would think it's a hobby that makes me somehow more respectable. I would be honing really awesome skills. But no. I just toy around with some strange stuff.
By the way this whole code breeding stuff reminded me of the biology lessons in middle schools. Figuring out how the genes of bunnies or fruit flies are passed on and what happens when different genes are mixed with other genes. I really liked that. If I would want to find some use in this whole virtual cat breeding thing I could tell it's a practice of genetics. What am I explaining here? A hobby doesn't have to be all about usefulness. It can be fun too.
Do you have hobbies you have trouble of explaining to your friends or family? Or maybe hobbies you have thought yourself to be silly? Do tell in the comments section!
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