It runs in the family
My father used to have two small cabinets on wheels in his office, each with twenty or so small drawers. Some drawers were meticulously labelled ‘pencils’ or ‘scalpel blades’ or more generally ‘drawing’ and ‘office’. The largest section by far was labelled ‘Krimskrams’ (the German version of ‘knickknacks’). From a very young age, way too young to be around scalpel blades unsupervised, these drawers fascinated me. I opened them, one by one, investigating their contents so many times that I remember them better than my own drawers and cupboards from that time. I remember their smell, a mix of the leather that softened some of the drawer bottoms, the graphite of the pencil lead refills, the metallic tinge of the various hobby knives and office supplies and the chemical overtone of the inks and glues and markers. The feel of the hard plastic cupboards and the slight rattle when opening the drawers. They always opened super smoothly, but the knickknacks rattled. Everything in those drawers was magical to me.
The man without limits
How much my father actually used the things in these drawers, I don’t know. He had many things, thousands of books, tools, big and small, bottles of cheap and expensive booze, cigars, pipes and at some point a whole wall with shoes in boxes stacked to the ceiling. I think he intended to sell those, but he either didn’t sell many or restocked often. My father was married three times and had five children with four different women. He hated rules, conventions and limits and lived live maniacally in many regards. He drank and smoked at every opportunity, but always with intention.
When I picture him drinking, I picture him with a decanter of red wine and an impractically large and wide glass. Or a tumbler of Scottish whiskey; a cup would do when we were camping, but the whiskey had to be special. When I picture him smoking, I see one of many pipes from the daily rotation stuffed with sweet tobacco during his morning phone hours, making appointments for the week (he was a chiropractor). He also smoked the occasional cigarette and drank beer, but always with the air of a cigar smoker and whiskey drinker. In the years before his death, old and lonely, financially ruined and moved out of his rural mansion into a small ground floor apartment in a small town, he developed a taste for Champagne and Prosecco. The small wheel cabinets had moved with him into a now much smaller office, but I had become too old to open them one by one. I knew what was in them.
I also had begun hating my father. At first in addition to loving him, but after he died, I almost exclusively hated him. That was easier than grieving a complicated man that loved me, but hated his own father too much and was too occupied with his own happiness, freedom and pleasure to be a responsible parent. When we cleaned out his apartment, I did not take anything from the Krimskrams-drawers. I wanted to live a minimal and clean life. With conventions, rules and limits and without knickknacks. I didn’t want to be a dreamer that had drawers full of unused supplies for hobbies that I never engage with. I didn’t want to be like my father.
An incomplete and unsorted list of my hobbies
What follows here, are all the hobbies I consider ‘mine’ to some extent, meaning that I have dedicated supplies to engage with them. This does not include the instruments (flute, clarinet, guitar, bass) and sports (judo, football, badminton) I played as a kid/young adult or the hobbies I tried then but abandoned (is being a goth a hobby?).
Cross stitch - I consider myself to be a poor artist. When I try to make pretty things ‘free hand’, they often end up ugly. Cross stitch and other pattern-based crafts produce beauty in a mechanical process. Haptically super pleasing! Easy to learn, doesn’t require a lot of space, medium expensive.
#craft #mastery #skill #pretty
Crochet - Another fairly mechanical craft. I learned crochet in school and had phases growing up and over the past years where I crocheted a lot. Medium easy to learn but once you get the hang of it, very straightforward. Mistakes are easy to fix compared to knitting and arbitrary shapes are easier to make. Yarn takes lots of space and yarn crafts often devolve into buying yarn with or without a project in mind, because it’s pretty, but then it never gets used. Can be cheap if one has discipline (I don’t).
#craft #mastery #skill #pretty #collecting
Knitting - Very similar to crochet in theory, but I am much worse at it. It seems more fiddly, I only ever knitted one sock. The result is a lot stretchier and better for clothes, but I lack the practice to knit with confidence. Dropping a mask and having to fix it is so much worse than crochet. It feels like defusing a bomb. But once one has routine, it seems it’s much easier to do ‘blind’ than crochet.
#craft #mastery #skill #pretty #collecting
Fountain pens - I have always had a big love for fountain pens and fondly remember the cheap calligraphy set and colored inks it came with that I had as a kid. In school, fountain pens were mandatory for a period and I remember having a difficult relationship with them. I always made smudges, partially due to lack of care and partially because of my sweaty hands. Recently I started getting back into fountain pens and inks and discovered waterproof inks and better paper. Can get really expensive, but there are good, affordable pens and inks. Probably done buying pens and ink for a good while.
#pretty #collecting #equipment #social
Stationery - Nice paper, notebooks, washi tape and similar are kind of a side arm of the fountain pen hobby. Medium expensive and like the pens themselves, has practical use when collected/shopped in moderation.
#pretty #collecting #equipment #social
Keyboards - I don’t have many mechanical keyboards. Since I developed mild RSI after using regular layouts, I transitioned to split ergo layouts completely. This locks me out of most of the mainstream customization and models. But part of what I love about mechanical keyboards as a hobby are the haptics and optimizing the interface with the computer, so I am satisfied with my ZSA Voyager and Moonlander as my daily drivers at home and work. Can get very expensive and does not have a super cheap entry point. At some point I might build one from scratch…
#collecting #equipment #technical #pretty
Programming - This has in large part become work, but I still program in my free time for fun. It’s very satisfying to puzzle through a problem and find an elegant solution that clicks in place. It can be very creative and free-form or very mechanical and paint-by-numbers. Not always the most relaxing thing to do. Basically free.
#mastery #skill #technical #social #craft
Lego - Another hobby that carried over from childhood. Unlike then, I have the resources to buy large kits now. Unlike then, I don’t play with them anymore once I’m done building. Luckily I have a kid now and they love Lego! Can be very expensive, requires no skill, very satisfying and haptically pleasing.
#craft #collecting #toy #pretty
Gunpla (Gundam plastic models) - The evolution of Lego. None of the gluing and painting of real model kits (unless you want to) and many ways to get lost in details and perfection when cutting and cleaning the plastic off the runners. Satisfying builds and cheap compared to Lego! I have been building Gunpla for some years now and I love returning to it ocassionally.
#craft #collecting #mastery #skill #prett
Hot Wheels - I just love the little cars in their cool packages. Didn’t have many as a kid, I wasn’t really that much into cars. After a very intense fascination, where I got around a hundred Hot Wheels in a very short time, most of them are now unpacked and played with or given away as gifts to kids that play with them. Looking at them is nice, but I don’t want to be the kind of dad that has a toy collection that is off limits for actual play. This week I rediscovered 3Dbotmaker’s videos. Little model cars are just really fun. If I ever have the space, I will definitely get into model trains again as well. Those I had and loved as a kid. Hot Wheels are fairly cheap. Getting a 50-pack of mystery Hot Wheels (individually packed) is affordable and makes for great gifts once one is done looking at them.
#collecting #toy
Watches - What can I say. Watches are just cool. I like fashion in general (not enough to consider it a hobby) and a nice Casio watch is my kind of fashion in addition to being useful and technically fascinating. Medium to expensive.
#collecting #equipment #pretty
Computers - I always liked tinkering with computers on a software and hardware level. I don’t consider myself a hardware expert, but I love learning about the technical details and following all the current parts and peripherals. A big part of hobbies, for me, is to learn about the intricacies of what the respective enthusiasts consider ‘good’ and why. Computers are so mainstream that there is endless detail to get lost in, both technically and product-wise. Tends to get expensive, even when you tell yourself it’s budget.
#technical #equipment #mastery
Rubik’s cubes - Just really fun. Learning to solve the different sized cubes is mostly memorization, but the haptics together with the puzzling and the feeling of mastery are very satisfying. Can get very complex and competitive if one gets into speed cubing. Can be surprisingly cheap for good cubes.
#mastery #toy #collecting
Origami - Like crochet, but paper. So much fun to make figures and modular structures. My most recent hobby. Very little equipment required, but there is a lot of really nice paper out there! Cheap.
#craft #pretty #collecting #toy #mastery #skill
Pokemon/other TCGs - Like Hot Wheels, but I occasionally play with the cards. Not a ton, but this tends to be a holiday activity where my wife and I get into a card game and play it a lot for some days. Opening booster packs and looking at nice cards is fun in the same way gambling in the casino is fun. Easy and expensive dopamine!
#toy #collecting #pretty #social
Board Games - I’m not a huge fan of the traditional board game evening. It tends to be too much time learning rules, too many hurt feelings and arguments about details of the game. But for a time we played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons (board-game-adjacent) and had fun. I also love games like Go and Chess that are more puzzles than board games. Chess or Go will probably have a come back when my kid is old enough.
#mastery #social #toy
Video Games - This is hardly one singular hobby and probably worth its own dedicated post. In essence, video games scratch a lot of the itches other hobbies do. Most often I build or craft things in video games, sometimes I master skills or collect stuff, sometimes I play with my wife or friends. Probably the most expensive of my hobbies over the years in total money spent, but easily the one I spent most time on as well.
#mastery #toy #social
Beading - This never really took off, I got distracted by Rubik’s cubes. But I also lost interest because it was way more fiddly than I thought initially. I will get back to it at some point. Fairly cheap.
#pretty #mastery #craft
Writing - I wrote enough about writing in my last post.
#craft #skill
Limits and enjoying life
As I previously reflected on in my posts on enjoying my free time and boredom and burnout, I struggle finding a consistent source of relaxation and fulfillment. I find lots of things fun and engaging, but I am often not in the mood to have fun or be engaged. Having this many hobbies (and I’m sure I come up with more if I think hard) is a symptom of getting bored after I learn something sufficiently well. The research phase and acquiring new tools or items in anticipation of engaging with them are in turn symptoms of my hunger for more enjoyment and my need to feel accomplishment through new skills. Of course these phases, research, shopping, curation and mastery are fleeting parts of a hobby. This doesn’t mean that I never engage with a hobby when these phases are over, but I usually need to put it down for a while to be fascinated again. My sister knits socks. She has knitted socks for years and will continue doing so. She uses the same technique and equipment and derives great joy from it. She’s living the ideal that I strove for when cleaning out my father’s apartment.
But I learned to accept that this is who I am. I enjoy being a guy who has many skills and interests. I’m not an expert in any of them, but I am proficient enough to nerd out with enthusiasts. It enriches my life, although I wish I had more space for all this stuff.
My father’s Krimskrams drawers were one of the most tidy and stable parts of his life. Whether he ever opened them or restocked them, or even thought about all these things, whether he considered them hobby implements, I don’t know. But I know that he loved collecting and building things. Although his life and house were in a persistent state of chaos, disrepair and renewal, there were always some parts that were spotless, expensive and fun. There were signs of a man longing for limits, order and an end to the searching. I also accepted, that in this regard, I am a lot like my father. I think about him when I look at my ink collection and my model kits. I think about him when I feel that first pinch of interest in a new thing. When I promise myself to not pick up another hobby while already thinking about which things need to go to the basement if I were to get more stuff. When I feel the magical feeling that I felt opening those drawers.