Let's try one more simple question: a hobby you can show off to others, or a hobby just for you?
Click the corresponding answer to see your options.
COOKING
Yeah, yeah, so what if you already cook. There's gotta be something you don't do every day. Baking, slow-cooking, pressure-cooking, pickling, making hot sauce, homebrew, whatever. Pick up a recipe book for stuff you've never tried. Invite some friends over! Make food!
GARDENING
Don't just look at the plants, grow them! We're in the Mid-Atlantic, it's easy. Get a spider plant and some hosta lillies. Ask someone in your family if they're planting anything this spring. Start with a houseplant if you gotta. A heart-leaf philodendron or a kalanchoe probably won't die on you. Grow something nice to look at instead of just grass around the property.
PICK UP A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
Any pawn shop has used ones. You can pick up a Casio keyboard on Craigslist. Upload bad covers to youtube. Threaten to get your guitar out at parties if the conversation takes a bad turn. Wield your endearing but absolutely unwanted new pastime as leverage against your friends. What's that? Someone wants to talk about geopolitics and no one's drunk yet? Party's over, get ready for Wonderwall.
TRAVEL
You can make a hobby of this, if you do it on the cheap and give yourself a reason. Concerts, museums, birdwatching, whatever. Catch a Greyhound anywhere in the continental 48. But listen. If anyone asks "what do you do for fun?" and you say you travel, they will go "oh, what's that like?" and pretend to love it, but inside, they hate you. Don't brag. Go enjoy it and then never tell a soul.
See, here's the trick on this one. If you're bad enough at it, any creative/performing hobby can go under that second category of "things you never show off to anyone." Meanwhile, if you're good enough at it, or love it enough, any quiet thinking/consuming activity could give you a level of knowledge or experience that you could show off. Listen. A better website would have three sets of buttons and a neatly indexed full hobby page, where you combine OUTDOOR/ALONE/SHOWOFF and end up at like, COMPETITIVE VEGETABLE GROWER, and the address bar url ends in .html#veg and you warp to that spot on the page... you know, nice smart stuff. But listen, getting overambitious on the final for a 101 level elective is just not where you want to be at 26, you know? You just want the dang thing to work. It's April and we could all get blown up in the next year. Am I the only one sleepwalking through every day thinking about getting blown up? I'm still getting A's and B's but man it feels hollow. Hobbies make things a little easier. Listen, seriously, everybody should get a hobby. Hit that "Home" button up at the top left and pretend I never said anything.
