Getting a hobby

Joe's new woodworking hobby has really taken off, and it has given him some airs. One day, for instance, he noted that I didn't seem to have any hobbies. His tone clearly indicated that he wanted to know the reason for this and that the situation should be immediately rectified.

"I do too have hobbies," I said defensively. "I read."

"But you don't...produce anything," he said. "With hobbies, you produce something." He went on to give examples of things he is producing, which are eminently practical things like shelves and pegs for hanging our coats.

"I'm producing a broader mind," I said.

He was skeptical of this. "By reading mysteries? What do you learn -- how to poison someone?"

It crossed my mind, briefly, that this knowledge might come in handy, should one possess it. But I kept this to myself.

But perhaps he's right. Maybe I should get a hobby where I produce something. The problem is what to do with the things I would produce. Our place is too small to accommodate loads of craft projects, assuming I'd be interested in making any, which I am not. Our photos certainly could use a better home than they have now, which is a cardboard box languishing in the basement. But I am more inclined to just slap them in an album than to make them into a work of art with all those cute scrapbooking things they have now. (I have a suspicion that fancy treatments of your photos are a ploy to make your vacation or whatever seem more interesting than it really was.)

The one hobby I can think of that meets the important criteria of being enjoyable, something I actually might have the skills to do, and -- most important of all -- would not clutter up the house, is cake decorating. True, this would produce a lot of cakes, but I have a hunch they would not last long enough to actually produce clutter.

So over the weekend we went to Border's, where I looked through every cake decorating book they had. You might be surprised, as I was, to know just how many of these books there are. Now, since I'm a beginner, I want some simple instructions. How to make pretty little flowers with icing. How to write Happy Birthday with frosting without having it look like I indulged in some rum while writing it. I am not interested in knowing how to fashion marzipan into cute little panda bears, or body parts, or broccoli heads.

Nor am I interested in learning how to make cakes that lean. I can already do that. One book had a whole chapter on how to make, on purpose, leaning cakes. Don't bakers toil for hours to make their cakes perfectly straight? Why change the rules, especially in a book for beginners?

I came home a little discouraged after looking through these books. Although I haven't given up on the idea yet, cake decorating is perhaps not the best choice of endeavors right now anyway, when both of us are trying to eat a bit more sensibly. But I figure if my new hobby doesn't work out, I can always tell Joe I tried, and then maybe I can go back to reading mysteries.