I should get a hobby, or eight

I talk about a few of my silly little hobbies, past and present, and ponder whether writing is one

I think to myself—as I hear yet again the clop-clop-clop of a literal carriage riding past my crumbling Victorian house in rural New York, as I sweat and wonder what further level of discomfort it will take for me to drop a few hundred on a window AC unit, as I sit alone trying not to think about the fact that many of my friends are currently gathering in magical Tennessee greenery for a bacchanalian yearly writer’s conference that I am not attending—that this will be my year of hobbies. I’ve already started a new hobby, actually, and it’s been one of the only reasons I have to leave my house. It’s also one of the only things tethering me to regular human contact.

During my first year of grad school, I decided to really put the A in MFA and took a beginner oil painting class. I had painted with oil many years prior in my high school art class and remembered the strong, pleasant smell of the paint, and how satisfying it was to mix together unlikely colors to create a more perfect shade of something. This oil painting class at V*ndy was comprised of mostly unaffiliated Nashvillians (I remember thinking, maybe I’ll make new friends! and proceeded to put zero effort into the task and predictably emerged with not a single new friend). It was comforting to spend three hours a week in the subterranean art studio on campus with its ugly fluorescent lighting, mixing colors and dirtying my fingernails. I liked the scent of canned paint—like linseed oil—and that slick, sensual feeling of spreading paint onto canvas with brush. That wet smear. Paving over the canvas’s rough texture with a thin layer of paint still transparent, then waiting for it to dry, then layering more paint. It’s liberating, I learned, to take up a new hobby as an adult and to be bad at it. To struggle. To learn something new. To mess around with no agenda of greatness. So different from what I was doing in school, which was serious, disciplined, striving. In school, I wanted to be good and smart and successful. In oil painting class, I just wanted to have a good time.

In my last year of grad school, I decided to return to that basement art studio, this time to learn how to throw on a potter’s wheel. I remembered working with clay from my high school art class too: that big old slab, and how it felt to cleave through the mass with a wire. Wetting the clay, molding it, letting it sink into the lines of my palms. As soon as I turned on the potter’s wheel and heard that thrumming sound, I knew that I’d like working with a wheel. And I liked it very much, despite all my pots collapsing into twisted, tortured whorls. I liked the thud of slapping clay onto the wheel, the feeling of bearing down and building up. It was so exciting how, with these two fingers, I could draw the wall of clay higher, higher, higher — until the inevitable Icarus moment of collapse. I liked getting my hands wet and dirty, liked looking in the mirror after class and seeing that my face mask, ears, and neck were all clay-spattered. I liked failing, because it meant that I could have another go and try again. (Thank you to my friends who accepted my twisted ugly pots as gifts this past year; your enthusiasm over receiving one of my failures was endearing and appreciated.)

And now, what is my new hobby, you may ask? Well, in an unlikely plot twist, and though it is somewhat out of character, I have taken up boxing. This development occurred because I realized I really should check my new email account, the one associated with the university that now employs me, and while combing through action items involving insurance and onboarding, I saw an email announcing free boxing classes for staff and faculty. It was one of my first days here in Hamilton, when a wave of extreme loneliness was just one thought away at all times. I signed up. I showed up. I nearly fainted. I kept going back. And then I got a little better.

As a regular human being alive in this day and age, I certainly have some aggression, sadness, frustration, and the like to channel into physical movement, and boxing has been helpful for this. My boxing coach is a short, stocky man with quick fists and an intense gaze. He often calls me “girl” as in, “Great work today, girl,” which I find fun. No one calls me girl anymore. My boxing coach and I spar —is that the right verb? spar? who knows, not me—as he shouts numbers which correspond to various punches. For example, he may yell, “one one two one,” and the odd numbers correspond to punches involving my left first, and the even ones my right. I like these commands. I take to them quite quickly once my brain has a second to think through which number is for an upper cut on which side, which for a jab, which for a hook. I enjoy punching the mitted palms of my boxing coach’s hands. I like the way he, after I complete a series, trots and paces, like a caged big cat, encouraging me to do the same. “Always keep your fists up,” he says, and I try. “Don’t cross your legs,” he says, and I try. I feel very powerful and feral with my fists up. I like to focus on pivoting hard, drawing power from my legs into my arms, which are not accustomed to so much movement and effort. My arms usually have it good. Now they’re sore. It’s like boxing is unlocking some weird human instinct I might have deep down to fight, to defend myself. This is not an instinct I activate often. When I shadowbox, I keep my hands up by my face; I look into the mirror, make eye contact with myself, and punch.

I even enjoy what my boxing coach calls “calisthenics,” which is one of those words I have heard and know how to spell, but had to Google before including in this post. As far as I can tell, calisthenics can involve jumping rope for many minutes straight, participating in excruciating abdominal exercises, jumping in a particular way while punching the air in a particular way, and more. Though these calisthenics are difficult, especially because the martial arts loft in which boxing class takes place is not air conditioned, they make me feel industrious and disciplined, which is a good feeling, and I am certainly not being very industrious or disciplined when it comes to my writing.

But I’m trying! I just am having realizations, realizations that go, oh shit, yikes, what is this first draft, maybe I really do need to switch to third person, but oh, that means losing first person, and first person can be so fun, but third, third has more range, third gives me more options, in third I have more control and am free of the trappings of my frivolous narrator’s subconscious, including her low attention span and general narcissism, but the attention span and narcissism are funny sometimes and are part of the whole deal, aren’t they, yes, they are, but third person is more dignified, okay sure, but is that just something a bunch of old people have forced you to believe, because you do realize, don’t you, that now you’re free, your degree is your own, you have read all the things and absorbed all the education and are informed, you are in control of the story you want to tell, you see, every choice you make is a conscious one and you are equipped with understanding the virtues and drawbacks of each point of view and can thus deploy first with intelligence and moxie, but third, third will give you that crucial distance between storyteller and character— blah blah, it’s all very typical and annoying! (I’ve decided to switch to third.)

Speaking of points of views, I was having a conversation with friends C and N back in Nashville several weeks ago over board games and Bearwalkers about our inner monologues—about what our thoughts sound like, and what it’s like to exist in our own minds. C described her mind as, I believe, a washing machine, with every thought tumbling around, disorganized and pressing. For her, thoughts emerge in her mind and spill out of her mouth encountering no filter. Imagining how she will convey a thought to another person via dialogue is a huge part of the way her mind is oriented. In contrast, she described her partner’s mind as being more of a camcorder, very present and practical, processing thoughts one at a time as they arise. N, while describing the way his mind works, stated that his inner monologue occurs in the first person. I interjected to say that my inner monologue often takes place in second person. Both C and N looked at me in alarm. Second person? they said. I don’t like that, that scares me, C said. That doesn’t sound very kind, N said.

(You need to go to bed, why did you do that stupid thing that one time long ago?, you’re running late and you need to hurry up, why do you always do this, you’re almost there, did you take your meds?, what are you even talking about right now?, you need to drink more water or your head is going to hurt, remember the last time you — )

Anywho! These kinds of conversations with friends (hello Sally) are some of my favorite ways to spend my time. Listening to others dissect their ways of viewing the world, and dissecting my ways, too. Talking, prodding, asking questions, considering. Learning what it is that makes my dear friends the way they are. I seek to understand people fully, and love when I can arrive closer towards that understanding. It’s what’s so fun to me about writing a new character: trying to inhabit that person and their specific ways of understanding their experiences or that which surrounds them. Arriving gradually at a psychological profile of a character scene by scene, one moment of interiority to the next. Friends familiar with my writing may remember my tendency to toss in a seemingly unrelated memory into a character’s perception of the scene unfolding around them. I recalled, suddenly, my mother’s blah blah blah. He remembered, with startling clarity, the way she blah blah blah. Classic me move. Lovers familiar with me as a person will probably attest to the fact that I ask a lot of questions. What is this like, what is that like? I want to know what everything is like. I want to inhabit other people and understand them fully, especially those that I care about, which is simply impossible, so instead I invent people in the form of characters over whom I can lord omnipotence and exercise complete and total control. Super healthy and normal stuff. (That sounds scary. That doesn’t sound very kind.)

I started this post talking about hobbies. I guess writing could be considered one, though somewhere over the last few years, writing moved from the hobby-like category of “something I do in my free time that makes me happy :)” to the professional category of “my Work.” This is a huge blessing, in so many ways, and I know this, but the workiness of writing makes me, a person who hates work in theory and in practice, not want to write. This whole changing-from-first-person-to-third-person-and-rewriting-major-points-of-my-novel stuff is a slog. It is work. But there are moments during this process where I encounter that freedom and movement that make me love writing, that freedom that takes away from the workiness. I float above the page, making jokes, adding flourishes, deploying special words in special orderings, having tiny epiphanies. I find a not-perfect but more-perfect way of describing a feeling and it’s just so sticky and satisfying. I delete scaffolding that served its purpose and now must be discarded, and I find the true, less bloated shape of a story beneath it. I’ve always been more of a maximalist and it’s my work in revision to pare away that which is unnecessary—that which is just me making myself laugh for no good reason or belaboring an image or argument—to uncover what is essential.

I sat at my desk today and I wrote. I am writing this post, which probably doesn’t count, and I worked on the novel, faithfully translating a scene from first to third, but also unfaithfully adding new elements to this very familiar scene that I’ve already worked on countless times and read even more times. I sat here today and said, Why does it need to be like that? and changed it. I decided certain characters who were previously well acquainted don’t need to know each other at all. I decided the beginning is not where I thought it was. I decided a character might not even be the very thing that previously defined them. Why not? While writing this novel is, and should be by definition, a lot of hard work, I want to lean in to these moments of lightness, moments where I destroy what was previously true in the world of the book and make room for another truth.

Somewhere down the line, calling writing a hobby cheapened it in my mind, but why? Aren’t hobbies fun? I should find more hobbies. I should be unafraid to try something and fail, finding within that collapse space to try again.