All Hams Need Comfy Slippers, Or, Are Hobbies A Waste Of Time?
Hobbies perplex me. I can be pretty intense about mine. I first put a pair of wheels on my feet when I was in junior high, and have been roller skating ever since. My Grandma taught me how to crochet when I was even younger than that. She would sit and sew a blanket while I would do my best to single stitch some straight lines. Every so often the urge to crochet rears up and I make something. A pair of slippers for AA1F seemed a perfect way to spend a Valentine’s Day evening readying for the incoming snowstorm. And the radio theme made me feel connected to my current most dominant hobby, amateur radio, even if I was otherwise avoiding the airwaves.
I am someone that easily fills up time. I am never bored. Even after I finish this blog post I have my next activity lined up. A pre-calculus book sits open awaiting a night of problem solving. I plan on working my way first through this tome on algebra, functions, trigonometry, and matrices before tackling an early transcendentals version of a calculus text. Because, despite having concentrated (my alma mater’s odd way of saying “majored”) in mathematics, I really have forgotten way too much of it to be fluid. Thirty years of not using a particular knowledge has a way of making it evaporate I’ve found. And why is that important? Well my radio hobby led to an electronics hobby which led to me formally studying electronics which led to me realizing that there was no point in formally studying electronics anymore if I could not remember basic mathematics well enough to apply it which led me to establish the goal of relearning precalculus and calculus…whew… I certainly know how to engage in a hobby!
But here is the real question. Why? Why bother having a hobby? As much as AA1F likes his new slippers, I could have bought a pair for about the same cost and a fraction of time. I can relearn to derive and integrate trigonometric functions, but who besides me will actually care? At least the physical benefits of roller skating — cardiovascular and proprioceptive — are tangible…
It did not take me a single night to stitch up those slippers. It took me nearly four of them. And days. The snowstorm kept us locked in the city — if we dare move our trucks from their curbside locations, we may be waiting until winter is over before we can find another place to put them. South Boston is notorious for its winter parking wars! Crocheting wasn’t a bad way to hunker down for a long weekend. I refused to stop until the yarn boots were finished.
AA1F tried them on. They fit. He liked them. The right slipper came out great. The left slipper is slightly twisted on itself. It works fine and I say it has character. My fingers feel a bit arthritic and contracted from competing in this fiber arts production marathon, but I’ll forget the discomfort of the repetitive performance of a couple thousand stitches in a few days.
Do my hobbies make me a better person? They certainly make me seem like a better person to myself. And I suppose this blog may entertain somebody out there every so often. But I would venture that most people could care less about what I do in my free time. My hobbies are quite irrelevant. And to the vast amount of the world, I am quite irrelevant.
This is not AA1F’s first pair of crocheted slippers. I made him a pair several years ago now. I forgot I made them, but turns out he had them with him at our RV campsite. He would wear them every night until he put a hole in them. And for a while he still wore them despite their gaping, unraveling wound.
The problem with worrying about whether or not hobbies are a waste of time is that it makes you wonder if everything is a waste of time. If a hobby is pointless, what about a job? If a job is pointless, what about? Well, I’ll stop there, but you kinda can see my point. It is truly existential, and possibly existential crises, thinking. The old, why are we here? And I haven’t even mentioned my other favorite activity, hiking up mountains. Sisyphus, anybody?
I guess it is just hard to face the fact that we are all just here filling up time on this Earth. The most important amongst us are so amazingly inconsequential. Compared to the sun and the oceans.
And this is where my thought process follows a circular track. If I am irrelevant and inconsequential, then I have the freedom to explore the vast landscape of my curiosity without limit (of course within the boundaries set forth by God and humankind). I am not beholden or confined to the path taken by others. My hobbies, born from a completely sober brain, provide the backdrop needed to identify the interesting and challenging corners, spirals, and wormholes of the intellect. I can sail the oceans of my mind, captaining my own Santa Maria, daring to challenge what other think untrue, setting off to prove the unproven, and maybe most importantly, learning to believe what exactly it is that I believe.
Why are we here? The world is a mysterious place. I guarantee we will never find out if we never look. And perhaps, just perhaps, our hobbies are our way of looking.
Philosophically yours,
KM1NDY
P.S. Just a little fun postscript here…. The AI prompt used to create the cartoon up above was: “1950s housewife giving homemade slippers to her ham radio operator husband in his home amateur radio shack on valentine’s day in the style of an old-fashioned black & white magazine cartoon”. Not too bad AI! I did crop the results a bit though to get the look I was going for… (and, no, over my cold dead body would I ever let a computer program ever write a single word on my behalf…)
