So by now it’s abundantly—absurdly—clear: I have a few hobbies. My hobbies got hobbies. Or, to pretend—just for a moment!—that I’m typing this out on a new iphone4, one that I have customized the now fully customizable dictionary on: My hobbits have hobbits. My hobbies have hobbits who in turn have hobbies. Duck Yes.

For example. (Warning: If you think I’m cool now, just wait until the next few sentences.) Each morning I roll into work, brew a pot of coffee, and then spend a minute or so deciding which coffee mug I’d like to use. Upon selection, I pour myself a piping hot cup of bitter elixir, and then I photograph it. And upload it to Flickr. And Tweet it. These are my Mug Shots. Really: typing it out is bumming me out. It sounds so totally sad, but I enjoy it, and there are literally about 1.4 dozen folks who seem to enjoy them as well. I could see making a book of them one day. A coffee-table book of coffee-mug shots. Coffee mug shots that all sort of have a corner of keyboard in them. But still.

There are also the toys. The stretched pennies. The books. The bar mats. Catchers in the Ryes. The Big Troubles in Little Chinas. On and On. The collection of collections. The talking about them. The boyish excitement that comes with wasting money on them. I took a picture yesterday—secretly hoping that it would cast some spell of silent, voyeuristic envy on our own John Prolly (it worked)—of my Dokugans and it was all fun and games until I switched into Jack Donaghy vision where everything has a pricetag floating above it’s head. Even on the lowball, we’re talking divorce numbers.

Still, though: my hobby choice(s) belie my passion for ‘things’: I’m pretty sure I’m just looking for something to say. Period. I made the statement—yes, I did—the other day that I do my damnedest to enjoy the internet as little as possible. As some of you may or may not know, The Internet is more or less an integral part of My Job, and as such, I try to imagine it as my own personal cubicle: I do my best to not hang out there on my own time. But once I said it, I realized that it wasn’t entirely true: I fuck around for hours a week uploading photos, making posts, shooting links, talking to other folks about the stuff they’re posting/uploading/shooting, etc. And that’s all stuff that is decidedly not a part of my job. So what gives?

Is my main hobby telling—showing—the internet who I am? If all this is (this, right here) merely my injection of myself—my personality—out of my fingers and into your eyeballs via these pixels, what am I actually saying about what I’m saying? Is the message the medium?

I can save you the suspense—O tireless reader—it is. My hobby is to have hobbies. And I guess the only reason I really have them is so I can tell people like you about them. Hopefully in a less-than-annoying, relatively suave and unassuming way, sure, but still. A pretender is a pretender. I collect stories to tell you…just like I collect everything else.

Dark as it all may seem, I feel good about this realization: it’s very meta, and I like feeling like I’m a particularly meta person, true or not. But what caused it? What brought it about?

I think I realized I felt this way when I started to realize how much sculpting Paul Kaiju has been doing. Rather: when I realized how much sculpting stuff Paul Kaiju has been posting to his Flickr page lately. I mean, it’s all in the name: Paul likes Kaiju. But he also has a very visible and distinct passion for lots of other stuff: sculpting little monsters, little mecha-windup-awesome monsters, and, well, he’s absolutely INCREDIBLE at putting makeup, clothes, and poses onto female dolls. And doing little photo shoots.

That’s right. He’s really big in the Blythe customizing scene (Mrs. Hateball’s Niche Fetish) and between that and the vinyls, I’m kicking around links to his Flickr page several times a week. He’s a true talent, to be sure. A talent that cares about what he’s doing, how he’s doing it, AND how he’s getting it out there. It’s amazing. Really.

And that is sort of my point: my hobbies more or less start and stop with talking about shit or spending money on shit. Here’s a guy actually spending time on those things—sure—but there’s a dimension of creation and craft that I just don’t hit. And that is an absolute critique of and throwdown-of-the-gauntlet upon me (and anyone like me), not him. And, and: he’s just one dude out of tens of dudes in the little tiny pool of dudes who I have come into contact with over the years. Not to mention Koji, Ricky, Joel, Prolly: all these dudes spending time, money AND heart on stuff that—last time I checked—isn’t even close to being their main bread and butter gig.

I make a habit of having hobbies. I would like—at some point—to make a habit of having hobbies that I am willing to commit to. I am starting with my Mug Shots. They cost a bare minimum of time and energy, but! we’ll see where it goes.

EPILOGUE

The whole reason I started writing this post (which turned into this cosmic soapbox…sorry) is so I could share links to this dude whose hobby is buying, restoring, and then tarting up lifesize mannequins. Look at the pictures. LOOK AT THEM.

- Hateball