What are hobbies? Are the activities you enjoy doing or are they activities you do often irrespective of the joy? Y says she has no hobbies and goes on to cook things for joy. Was ‘writing’ a hobby when I didn’t like doing it and is it now a vocation if I do it regularly?
In this ambiguous space, let me introduce my quarantine hobbies/’things I do often enough that they might as well be hobbies’:
- pick out potato chips from snacks, like the chiwda that mumma makes for my after-medication hunger.
- look for R’s spectacles, then look for the unbroken pair.
- ask people to call me on my cellphone and then ask them to shut up, mute the TV, and the radios, so I can hear for my phone’s vibrations to locate it.
- read how to do a loud whistle using my fingers, so I can do those in the real world, in cinema hall when Tiger Shroff shows on the screen, on roads when I get cat-called, when I need to call R into a corner, etc.
- lose pens, look for one frantically in the middle of a call, or webinar, draw squiggles on the right corner of the page to check if it works, and place it back where it came from if it doesn’t.
- debate whether watching yoga videos is a form of exercise.
- try to figure out what made me go from treating my body like the pub whose bush you puke a mix of vodka and beer into treating it like a 5-star restaurant- while washing bartan. Sure, the online lessons help, and setting achievable short and long-term goals was important, but where did the motivation even come from?
- investigate which tab among multiple Youtube tabs from which browser on which screen is playing the music and then figure which player started playing the other set of music parallelly when I hit the play/pause button on the keyboard.
- have long conversations with Goldie, in which Goldie’s bark means whatever suits my conversation. Our favorite topic is discussing why R should do the dishes today, why mummy should leave us alone and how I am the smartest person he’s ever met
- look for the right half of my pair of house slippers.
- make new acronyms. LOLSNIHTETJTM: Laughed out loud so now I have to explain the joke to mummy.
- look for, save, draw, and envision potential tattoos for when I am given access to tattoo artists.