Choosing the right hobby – harder than it looks

Before I begin, I would like to state up front that I am not about to write about how to pick the best hobby to match your personality/lifestyle.  In fact, I am the last person anyone should ask for advice on this topic. Unless running through hobbies like paper towel somehow makes me an expert.

I’ve tried … knitting, crocheting, scrapbooking, painting, drawing, photography, cooking, baking, reading, wine-drinking (it’s a hobby!), tweeting … anyway, you get the picture. And during these many, many attempts to find the hobby that suits me best, what have I learned?

1. I have a rough time sticking to any one thing for longer than a month at a time.
2. Hobbies, even the ones that keep you at home most of the time, are expensive.
3. Doing a hobby that you love can make you a more well-rounded individual, and
4. I still really, really want to find a hobby that I can stick with.

And so, as part of my quest to find the perfect hobby, I did one of those on-line surveys this week that’s supposed to help you pick the best hobby to suit your personality. Yeah, I know, lame. That fact notwithstanding, I took the survey and the result that came up was ‘travel writing’. Sounds pretty freaking great, right? Well yes, in theory travel writing would be the ideal hobby for me as travelling is my one true passion. I should point out, however, that not all of my travel experiences have exactly been five-star. I’ve:

Train Station - Amsterdam

•  slept on a concrete floor in a train station in Amsterdam on New Year’s Day,
•  witnessed people having sex/playing chess in an outdoor therapeutic bath in Budapest,
• peed in a unisex toilet with no stall doors at a 100000-capacity football game in Kiev,
• had my ass groped by three different men during one subway ride (again, in Kiev),
• been forced to sleep in snow pants in a hostel in Rome,
• discovered “unidentified street smell” in New York,
• gotten painfully lost and communed with pigeons in Venice,
• stayed in the ‘hood of Paris,   
• taught English to teenagers in Odessa (Ukraine, not Texas) and, last but not least,



Dynamo Kyiv
Kiev, Ukraine's football team

• been stranded for HOURS in various airports.

I know. That last one’s a real shocker. Yet there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that I would rather be doing. I share this with you to drive home the point that it’s hardly a surprise that an on-line survey would show travel writing as the best hobby for me. But here’s the thing - who do you know that can afford to do travel writing as a hobby? Anyone? Anyone? That’s right. Pretty much the only individuals who can afford this type of hobby are the 1% of the population being targeted by the Occupy Movement… and I’m thinking they have other things going on.

Where am I going with this? I have no idea. I guess that remains to be seen. For now, I will continue on this quest to find the perfect hobby and maybe, just maybe, I’ll write about my next trip to the Super Walmart in Presque Isle, ME. 


You’d read about that, right? Right?