« As night's silky sheet falls upon the land | Main | Happiness Burns Blue »
September 25, 2005
Hobbies
life
Today I participated in a name meaning meme that passed by my part of MySpace. The meaning which the website gave me said, among other things, "You believe in putting one hundred per cent into all your activities of which there are many. " The second portion of this seems exceedingly true; I frequently feel that I have too many activities. From knitting to reading to uking to programming to writing poetry to blogging to crewing to gaming, I often have trouble using my time to the fullest and maintaining all of my hobbies.
My musical activities have especially suffered; I have trouble getting enough time to regularly practice on my ukulele, which is unfortunate. And when I don't play it, I forget how fun it is to play it, making me less likely to start practicing again. And beyond practicing, there are many things which I need to learn; I have a nice chords book I need to study, and I also need to get a good music theory book to pour over.
Many of my other hobbies aren't so important or necessary, and can survive a dry period. I've neglected my copy of the second volume of The Sandman, and I need to read more on Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, but those I can pick up any time. Likewise, my knitting is easy to stop and resume; other than a few pieces of terminology and such, there isn't much to relearn. In more skill-based areas like writing though, missing a few months of practice can cause your ability to dull, and it certainly won't help the ever-necessary sharpening. To become better at something, you must practice. But practice becomes difficult when you have so many things to practice.
For the moment I've pretty much dropped programming altogether. I still quite enjoy it, but now that I've gained a social life, not to mention a number of other recently-acquired hobbies, there's less time for it. I'm not too worried about it though; I doubt I'll forget much, and when it comes to learning there's always college. There aren't too many other hobbies which I can forget about though; I still want to knit, I definitely still want to play my ukulele, and movies and books are too delightful to forget about.
The solution would seem to be to cut out the meaningless fat which wastes time without much gain; namely, to cut down on the less-informative web surfing. The internet certainly can't be cut out altogether, as there's far too much to learn from it. But I think from now on I'll be making more of an effort to ensure that my time online is well-spent; the next time I'm just looking for something to do I'll make sure to whip out my ukulele and strum some chords instead.
Posted by Trevor Savage at September 25, 2005 10:17 PM