Hobbies

You have got to have a hobby around here.

I was talking with a co-worker about another co-worker and it quickly became clear that this third co-worker's problem was that she had no hobby. When time becomes slack, and the work gets thin, and the day grows long, she has nothing to fall back on but chatting with her co-workers and complaining. These are fine, good even, in moderation, but one has also got to have a hobby! Well, that and also a little sunshine. One has to have a way of self-entertaining, one has to have a reason to want it to be slow at work. A simple desire to not work will not suffice in the face of there being not much work to do and yet still plenty of time to be put in for the day. One needs a hobby.

It does not matter what the hobby is. My co-workers have all kinds of hobbies. There are strange ones, like Polish Hate Speech, meaningless filing, or the Milwaukee Brewers, and there are more usual ones, like going to Italy or Singer Songwriters who wish it was still the seventies. Really almost any hobby will do. My work hobbies include writing, Spanish Soccer, video games (research and reading about, I don't play them at work), cooking, leftist politics, travel, and of course books, which is a natural for working at a library. That's seven hobbies! Is it good to have seven hobbies?

Well, no, that's a bit much, but don't go by me. I've always been a bit of an over-achiever in this kind of territory.