Smoketown’s potholed alleys are covered in ice and snow. By early afternoon it’s still below freezing, but Trellis Brewing’s parking lot is stuffed with stickered and bike-racked Outbacks and Tacomas and CX-5s. I blow into my hands and queue with 70 other cyclists memorializing the life of Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis mountain biker and ICU nurse killed by ICE agents on January 24, 2026.

The low, slate clouds over downtown Louisville spit wet snow on our helmets, mittened hands, and neoprene toe covers. We read out loud the signs we see on the backs of our contingent—“Chinga La Migra,” “ICE OUT NOW,” “Enough.” We wave to walkers who yell support, to drivers who honk in solidarity.

Alex Pretti rode bikes and died being a good neighbor. He was shot because he stood out, because he got in the way, because he challenged power. We pedal in remembrance, on big bikes and small ones, expensive bikes and cheap ones, joining 250 other rides around the world.

We roll out and face a driver who screams, honks her horn, flips us off with both hands, and charges into the group, braking her beat-up Nissan Altima two feet from a rider’s bent knee. Most of us shrug, because most of us are used to angry drivers. Most of us are used to anger.

At Tuesday Night Worlds, Lexington’s hardest group training ride, we get buzzed by trucks and muscle cars on Bryan Station Road. We’re doing 30 m.p.h. on our 20-pound bikes in our silly suits, and they’re passing within a couple feet at 50 or 60 m.p.h. in one- or two-ton vehicles, just flirting with some casual manslaughter. Lifted pickups slam brakes in front of us. Drivers use slurs as they throw what’s left of their daily Big Gulp out the window. These are good Americans who spray diesel exhaust and proudly display from their truck beds American and Confederate flags, whipping the wind.

We pedal hard, keep the bikes rubber side down, use our dumb heavy legs to make enough power to keep ourselves safe. Functional threshold power, FTP, is the magic number that tells us how much force, in watts, we can apply to the pedals in an hour. Our bike computers scoop up data on every ride, so we can compare ourselves to others.

It’s too cold to ride outside in the winter, so I sit on my indoor trainer, slurp green apple energy gels. I watch YouTube and Love is Blind and listen to Norwegian black metal when the plan calls for long, droning intervals. On these short, dark days the only power that matters is in the contact points. My stiff cycling shoes clipped into pedals, the torque of the sprint, the watts I can hold for 30 seconds or 5 minutes or an hour.

I’ve been forcing myself to spend more and more time at my threshold limit. Getting used to the pain as the minutes and miles pile up, working through the searing burn of lactic acid in my legs. Building tolerance. My FTP should improve, a new magic number bigger than the last. But I won’t know until I test myself.

I hate FTP tests. You mash the pedals for 20 minutes near and beyond your limit. But you pace yourself, too. FTP is an average of the effort you can hold over those 20 minutes of pain.

You grind. You ride at your current threshold for a few minutes and then you add more watts, a frog in a pot, a little more, 30 seconds at a little more, just one more minute at a little more. These efforts pile up and push back. You take belly breaths and drop your shoulders and make chicken arms. Your heart rate drifts, pumping harder each minute because it’s been pumping hard each minute. You doubt yourself. Your arms and back tense, you’re gripping too hard, fighting with muscles you shouldn’t be using. You tell yourself whatever you need to hear. You unclip and lie on the floor and wait for your hot thumping heart to hush.

How much more force can I tolerate?

Alex Pretti made himself big, tried to help. I hide at home, in the drops, curled like a question mark over my trainer. When the weather warms, I’ll roll Bluegrass tarmac, away from the city, alone.

Share

Leave a comment

Submit your Hobbies essay

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Brian McNely teaches at the University of Kentucky and races bikes. His work has appeared in Off Assignment, Bending Genres, Invisible City, Porridge, and in academic journals such as Philosophy & Rhetoric. IG: @bmcnely

Yarn is the common thread woven through all phases of my creative life. If it involves some form of string, I’ve probably explored it. Yet handspinning yarn is the hobby that lifts the most eyebrows and generates the most bewilderment over the time and effort involved. If you’re a person who wonders “Why would you spend hours knitting socks when you can buy a pack at Wal-mart for $5?” then I fear the economics of spinning one’s own yarn may shock you.

Very few get into fiber arts to save money. It can be done thriftily: using cheaper acrylic yarn, repurposing sweaters from yard sales, or selling finished items to support a yarn-buying habit. But the makers I know are in it for the beauty. We value the unique, the slow craft, the hand-dyed, and the precision with which we can make our visions come to life. Many of us have acquired a taste for ethically-made, long-lasting clothing. I could never afford (let alone find) a gold and green plus-sized cardigan in a Merino-cashmere blend from a retailer; but I have made one out of $280 and 18 months of intermittent effort, and I feel that value every time I wear it.

The allure of making one’s own yarn is harder to explain, even to dedicated crafters, since a braid of hand-painted fiber is not much cheaper than a skein of yarn, and making the yarn adds considerable time to the process. So, if neither time nor money are saved, why do we spin? For me, it’s because the act of making yarn is a bit of modern magic. You take a handful of fluff, mix it with physics at the tip of a spinning wand, and create something new out of nothing in an instant. Ta-da!

I could watch loose fibers twist themselves into orderly strands of yarn forever. The movements are so simple that pre-industrial era children as young as five years old were responsible for an entire household’s spinning needs. Using a spindle, it’s a portable form of relaxation and productivity. If you’re a neurodivergent dopamine-seeker like me, it’s a pleasant visual and tactile stim, with bonus yarn at the end! And it’s just one more avenue for creative expression and control over producing the exact garment you envision.

But I have a secret: For all that I love to spin, I haven’t finished very many handspun garments. It takes a long time to create something from nothing, and in my 16 years of spinning, I’ve completed only five projects from fiber to finished object. I’ve spun and knitted one hat, two cowls, one pair of mittens, and one shawl. This doesn’t sound like much, especially when compared to the ~260 projects I’ve knit or crocheted with commercial yarn over the years, but I treasure each handspun item more than any of the rest.

When I hold a handspun piece, I remember its origin, the feel and color of the wool as it flashed through my fingers, the specific way the fibers twisted into thread, the sometimes surprising characteristics of the finished skein after plying and washing, and the delicious energy it had during knitting that only handspun yarns possess. Each piece is a tactile reminder of when and where I was while I spun it, the stresses it soothed, and the pleasures it provided.

I started spinning while earning my Master of Science in natural resources management during graduate school. After hours of research stuck at a desk, I craved a creative outlet, and knitting just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I needed the excitement of learning a new skill, but it also had to be simple enough to calm my burnt-out brain. I needed a reason to get away from my desk and back into my body, which spinning does as well. So I watched a few videos, bought a spindle and the wrong type of fiber, and spun my first terrifyingly lumpy yarn—but I was nonetheless entranced because I had made it myself and that was amazing.

I dove into books about fiber and its sources, tried new techniques, and leveled up. I collected spindles and a couple of wheels. I spun as much as I could, through heartbreak and triumph and exhaustion and fear. Spinning was the perfect tangible demonstration of how small, stolen bits of time and effort added up to big accomplishments, something that I needed to see during grad school and afterward when I was planning a wedding, getting married, and struggling through my first pregnancy.

Soon, I was too busy and burnt out even for spinning. My toddler wouldn’t stay out of the spinning wheel and I couldn’t find a moment for myself. My spindles were bundled into pretty wooden bouquets and stuck in vases on the shelf. My rainbow of unspun fiber was stashed away. I focused on healing, working, mothering, and mending a marriage that was past its honeymoon phase. I got pregnant again, had my second son at the start of the first COVID lockdown, and life continued to spin out around me. I lost loved ones, had career shifts, and felt like all my energy went toward holding things together. For a while I became the spindle, and my efforts were the force that twisted a good life out of desperate handfuls of unruly time and raw materials.

Eventually, when my kids got older and home life became more manageable, global life became more stressful…so I picked up spinning again. This time around, I needed its grounding force. In the face of unending environmental and political horrors, I ached to make something beautiful. I savor the facts that my handspinning hobby is off the grid, that the resources I spend on it support women-owned small businesses, and that the items I make will outlast whatever happens during this shitshow of a political era. I want my children’s children’s children to be able to hold what I’ve made and know that hours of my energy were poured into it. I want them to know that when society seemed bent on destruction and things really sucked, some of us still made things. We makers create our own joy, beauty, and function out of nothing, and that is absolutely worth something.

Share

Leave a comment

Submit your Hobbies essay

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Alicia Morandi is a biologist, environmental consultant, and mother of two from Rhode Island who writes poetry and essays during the midnight hours. She likes to spin yarn, knit, crochet, and play ukelele during stolen moments. She posts on Substack at unmask & make and Instagram @amorandimakes.

I get obsessed with word counts. I think most writers do. And yet, I have picked up a new hobby that involves words I never count: writing and sending cards and postcards.

This hobby is actually a return to old habits. As a member of Generation X, I saw my first computer in high school. After a summer away from home, I made friends who lived all over the country and we spent the next few years writing long letters to each other about our lives. My parents divorced when I was in high school, and when I left home, my childhood belongings were largely scattered or disappeared. I would love to find those letters again.

When social media started becoming popular in the early 2000s, I was a little hesitant. But it reconnected me with some people who were important and that drew me in. Ten years later social media was an important part of my work as a non-profit communications and fundraising manager, and it was also a tool I used to connect with friends all over the world. I was certain it was a net positive. It didn’t give me the negative feelings about myself that other people reported, I figured I was adapting to the pace of technology.

Like almost everyone else, my trip downhill on the social internet happened slowly; I almost didn’t notice. I stopped reading except for articles that were posted by friends, and eventually fed to me by the algorithm. Focusing on writing felt impossible. Time went by, and habits became a lifestyle. Then last summer I got a new phone, and didn’t log into Facebook, X, or Instagram. I kept only Substack.

I got so much time back. I’d spent hours of my life scrolling through things that weren’t necessarily bad, but they weren’t things I deliberately selected. Instead, they were presented to me as if I’d stumbled upon them, but they weren’t my proactive choices.

Enter postcards, which I have complete control over. Postcards give me an opportunity to look at an image, think about who that image reminds me of, and then send a short and directly relevant message to that person.

My girlfriend bought me a set of pens and stamps in January 2025, and I started buying postcards. Now I’m experimenting with making my own. I’m not claiming any kind of anti-tech analog purity; I write them in front of the TV while watching basketball, Stephen Colbert, or Gilmore Girls. Then I walk down to the mailbox and send them away.

This is a wildly imperfect system, and I love that. There is no “sent mail” folder, and I often completely forget what I‘ve written to someone and have to rack my brain when they respond. I also don’t keep track of who I’ve sent postcards to. If you adopt this habit, you might be more vigilant, especially if you worry about equity or have siblings who’ll be upset if you sent a card to one but not the other.

Another small word of caution: So many of us are feeling overstretched, stressed out, and at max capacity, and there are people who receive postcards or letters in the mail and take their arrival as a kind of guilt-inducing act. I know that I’ve felt this way in the past when folks have reached out to me and I haven’t had the energy to respond.

I chose to follow my instincts here and focus as much as possible on people who express interest in the practice. Lots of my friends send texts saying that my postcard made their day. They talk about what a joy it is to get real mail. Many of them have started buying and sending their own. My last post on Facebook, after not posting for quite some time, was to ask if anyone wanted to join my postcard list. It drew a very positive response.

One of the most recent cards I sent was to the daughter of one of my oldest friends after we met for dinner over the holidays. I wrote something like this:

Someday you’ll be at dinner with a friend that you know right now and they, or both of you, will bring one of your grown children. It will feel like a total blur, and a total blessing. xoxo -- Emma

Share

Leave a comment

Submit your Hobbies essay

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Emma Margraf is a Northwest writer with words in The New York Times, Folks, and her Substack, Bites of Change. As a former Sassy magazine reader she is also very excited to have contributed to Another Jane Pratt Thing.

Two Februaries ago, I sat in a bar in Shoreditch watching the Kansas City Chiefs play the Philadelphia Eagles for the Super Bowl at 2 a.m. I’d never cared about sports enough to go to bed quite that late before. But I was actually invested in this game, partially because of the homesickness I felt after recently moving abroad, and partially because of the then-novel romance between my favorite songwriter, Taylor Swift, and some tight end. I wasn’t a football fan, and hadn’t been one—at least, not since the Pittsburgh Steelers gave the NFL a regular run for their money circa 2009. Still, I convinced a group of friends to gather and watch the Big Game for the first time in years.

The bar’s environment was exhilarating. Just for the night, I’d chosen to root for Kansas City, and every suspenseful play or ambiguous call got my blood pumping. Not only was I having fun, I felt like I was part of a community, maybe for the first time since moving to London in January 2024. When I cheered, so did half the room. When I gasped, so did someone else three tables back. Having neglected sports for theater early in my academic career and attended a college where attending the weekly football game was almost laughable (sorry, boys), I was pleasantly surprised by just how much fun I was having.

I waited another year for my next Super Bowl experience, and after that game, I craved more of that feeling: sitting on the edge of your seat, banking on chance and a prayer, feeling the excitement of the strangers beside you and holding your breath together.

I decided to just pick a sport to get into and begin learning it. Basketball was an easy choice. Why? The NBA was the one league where Pittsburgh didn’t have a team. For me, football, hockey, and baseball were already covered. But I could untraitorously root for the New York Knicks in the city I’d lived in since college.

I can’t claim I had absolutely zero experience with the sport. My dad was a local basketball star in high school, and I’d followed in his footsteps—up until middle school. Not a natural athlete by any means, it was clear quickly that my above-average height for a 10-year-old girl didn’t make up for my lack of ball-handling skills. More so, at the time, I thought that athleticism was something you were born with, not something to work at. You either had it or you didn’t. So I set my basketball knowledge on a shelf, only to return to it 15 years later.

I began by zooming in closely, learning my chosen team first. A friend of mine gave me the advice to “First, just learn the name of a single player you find hot. Then learn the name of the guy he passes the ball to. And keep going.” Although I didn’t lead with a basketball crush, I did follow her advice in part.

I learned the key players of the team, googling their records and alma maters and going down ESPN rabbit holes to figure out when exactly they’d joined the team and how their stats had changed. I watched games with one eye on the television and the other on my phone, following the Google play-by-play to make sure I didn’t miss any moves.

It was one of the biggest learning challenges I’d thrown at myself in years. I was practically starting from nothing. But that admission of absolute ignorance gave me absolute freedom. I had no shame in searching, “What is a field goal?” or “Difference between a guard and a point guard,” because how would I have known the answers?

After I watched a game, I’d tune into the Knicks Film School podcast by , listening to the breakdown of the previous night’s matchup and the hosts’ predictions for future games. I learned what their cited statistics meant and compared them to our rival teams’ stats. When I didn’t understand something, I had friends to ask.

Being vocal about learning the sport has come with its own rewards. Twice now, friends have offered me spare Knicks tickets. The first time I walked into Madison Square Garden for a game, I was absolutely beaming at the chance to watch the action live alongside my fellow fans—with even NBA legends in attendance (even if, at first, I had to look up who they were). I’m proud to still be learning about basketball, and unlike in my career-adjacent interests, like writing and filmmaking, where I feel the pressure to be an expert all of the time, with basketball, I’m happy to lay all of my cards on the table. A year ago, I knew nothing. Now, I know something. Isn’t that something?

My sporting experience has been a reminder that I can always start over from zero, and not every interest has to be a career-driving opportunity. When it comes to basketball, I’m proud to admit that I don’t know the answer. Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll figure it out.

Share

Leave a comment

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Alexis Buncich (she/her) is a writer, actor, and producer based in between New York, London, and Western Pennsylvania. She loves writing about the Earth, culture, love, and the comedy in being alive. You can find her work in Worth and Nonprofit Quarterly. She explains Taylor Swift lyrics at Taylor Swift, Explained and runs a weekly NYC/London events newsletter at Overt Consumption. Learn more about her work at alexisbuncich.com.

I can’t do anything.

It’s a secret I clutched close to my chest, stuffed under my bra like a wad of tissues masquerading as desirability. And the masquerade had been pretty successful for the past four years. I’d graduated high school with well over a 4.0, I’d played soccer, worked as a lifeguard, volunteered at summer camps, led Model UN and the school newspaper and the Arabic Honor Society and several other clubs I’ve completely forgotten about at this point.

I could fool anyone. Hell, I even fooled my dream university—tricked them into offering me a full scholarship.

But the joke’s on them.

The joke’s on them because I cannot, in fact, actually do anything.

I dropped out of college two months into my freshman year, my years of repressed sadness suddenly exploding all over my life, drowning me in a cesspool of my own rotten waste.

I know I can’t do anything, because when I went to seek help from one of the university psychiatrists, he told me after a ten-minute conversation that I should take a leave of absence.

I guess I couldn’t fool him.

I filed the withdrawal paperwork the next day. I moved back home the next week. My boyfriend dumped me over text the next month. Just like that, everything I’d built for myself collapsed into oblivion.

So, there you go: I can’t do anything.

I was so fixated on this idea, so convinced that I was a complete and utter failure, so sure that I’d never be able to achieve anything new ever again, that it became my defining narrative. As I blew the next year of my life out the window in endless puffs of smoke, my parents began quietly urging me to try something again. Try applying to another university, try taking some classes at the community college, try something. But who were they kidding. We all knew I couldn’t do anything.

Bleary-eyed and desperate after wasting away my first year of adulthood in my childhood bedroom, I confided in a friend about my ineptitude. “You just need to try achieving something really small to rebuild your confidence,” he advised. I knew he was right. No stakes. No pressure. Just something to convince my brain that I was, indeed, capable of doing something.

I don’t know why I picked crochet. I hadn’t dabbled in the textile arts since my grandmother had briefly tried to teach me to sew when I was ten. But something about the repetitive motions, the individual skills that meticulously built upon each other, the material outcome of your labor—it just sounded so relaxing, so tangible, so purposeful. It seemed like just the thing to get me out of my funk, and to prove to myself that I could actually do something.

The next day, I drove to the YMCA thrift shop and spent $40 on hooks and multicolored yarn. I started watching and rewatching YouTube tutorials that walked me through the basics. How to make a chain. How to start a new row. How to create a magic circle. How to fasten off. I followed along with the videos at half speed, practicing the skills over and over before undoing all my work and starting again. I found solace in the trance-like repetition of it, and sunk hours just into making and undoing long, meandering chains and messy, uneven rows.

But with all the hours I spent on it, I watched my skill level quickly skyrocket. Suddenly, my chains achieved just the right tension, and my rows started looking even and uniform. After seeing my proficiency advance like that, crocheting quickly became an obsession. Slowly but surely, I built up my confidence enough to try actually making things. A purse. A wallet. A sweater. As I gained confidence in my crocheting, lo and behold, I slowly started gaining confidence in other areas of my life, too.

It started with one class—a women’s studies class I decided to take at my local community college. When that didn’t end in disaster, I decided to take a full load. My confidence grew tenfold, and before I knew it, I put myself on a fast track to get my associate’s. I applied and got into another university. I overstuffed every semester with every class I could fit in, including over the summer and winter breaks. I graduated at the top of my class, earning my associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in a total of two and a half years.

And somewhere along the way, I realized that maybe the one who had really been fooled by me…was me.

All crochet projects start with one chain. Building blocks that pile on top of each other, inch by inch, until you have a beautiful tapestry. I can’t help but think that without that first chain, without trying to teach myself the very basics of a new skill, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I would still be stuck in my parents’ house, chain-smoking and binge-watching TV in an effort to escape all the fears and self-doubt I’m afraid to confront. Still convinced I can’t do anything at all. Still too scared to start weaving the miraculous tapestry of the life I live today.

So, yes, okay. Maybe I can do something after all.

Share

Leave a comment

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

Bethany Hansel is a freelance writer and communications specialist who can, in fact, do some things. When she’s not writing and running communications for nonprofits, Bethany loves to write her own stories that explore her grapplings with mental health, identity, and belonging.

I was a pre-teen girl, 11 or 12 years old, when my grandma gave me a pair of roller skates. I don’t know why she gave them to me; I can’t remember ever voicing a desire for roller skates. Goodness knows I wasn’t the sporty try-something-new type. Now that I’m writing this I realize maybe that’s why she gave them to me: to get my nose out of a book, get some action out of my head and into my body.

Whatever the reason, I fell in love. My sister and I went skating at our local roller rink, loving the lights and the music. Singing and skating together amongst strangers.

But with my own skates I was free to skate alone, at any time. And I did. I spent hours on the basketball court behind our house in Ontario, Canada, skating around and around and around while singing and imagining to myself.

I never tried to get good at skating, only to be comfortable at it. I wanted enough skill on skates that I could let my body move while my mind imagined. (Sorry, grandma. This kid isn’t getting out of her head no matter how many wheels you put under her.)

That freedom, that place where childhood is still intact but at a slightly older age, permitting you to take it places, was phenomenal. It lasted until…

My stepdad molested me when I was 12 or 13. My memory of the touching is cruelly intact, the specific age of my budding body less so.

My thoughts shifted from examining the experience of life to determining what to do with it.

I stopped skating.

I’m 51 now.

A few years ago, I invested in a pair of roller skates.

I had reminisced for decades about those carefree roller days, but it hadn’t ever moved beyond remembering into doing.

Then my grandma died and left us grandchildren some money. With mine, I invested in roller skates. (I’m only now realizing that grandma bought both of my pairs of roller skates. Well done, grandma.)

I’ve spent the last few years skating around our backyard swimming pool, singing passionately to myself.

Why now?

It’s simple: I want my beginning back.

I stopped skating after being sexually abused, but I didn’t stop moving.

When I was 21, a mother of two, I moved to Texas. While there, I had two more children. We lived in Texas, then California, then Texas, and back to California— around and around and around. Now one of my sons lives in Texas, two live in California with their children, my gorgeous grandchildren.

And one son lives in Quebec, Canada, with me.

Now that I’m back home, in Canada, maybe I want my beginning back. I’m steeped in reminders of it here.

These seasons, these smells, these languages, are the ones I grew up with.

Canada and the southern United States are similar, but different. In the United States I was still driving on the right side of the road, meeting people of diverse backgrounds, and telling my children they were free to become who they wanted to be. I was still paying with dollars and tipping waitstaff. I was still going to McDonald’s to let my children use the playland. Returning to Canada, though, I was hearing French again, experiencing familiar immersion again, seeing open windows on the houses when I went for walks again. I was eating Nanaimo bars and Poutine. Drinking Tim Horton’s coffee and turning up The Tragically Hip on the radio.

This stirring of my youth had me remembering my story, thinking of the events—beginning with the abuse by my stepdad—that pushed and pulled me in a variety of directions.

This stirring is perhaps why I went beyond remembering into action, investing almost $400 CAD in a pair of simple roller skates.

When the skates arrived, I was thrilled. I was also out of practice. Skating wasn’t like riding a bike; my muscles hadn’t memorized the motions. I was wobbly and unbalanced, like a baby learning to walk. I hid in the basement, where I could use the walls and pool table to catch myself, and where any onlookers would be people who love me.

Soon, though, I worried about ruining the floorboards with my stoppers (ah, yes, I’m definitely an adult now!) and headed to the concrete in the backyard. Around and around our swimming pool I went, the water at first a frightful threat (I’m not a good swimmer at the best of times, never mind in skates) and then simply a lovely friend. Me going around and around and around, singing to myself, while the pool offered guidance and atmosphere.

I’ve spent the last several summers roller skating.

When the skating is smooth, when the songs are just right, when the breeze is gentle and the pool shimmers, I’m my young self again. I’m that girl in skates on the basketball court.

But I’m not only that girl; I’m also a woman with grown sons and five grandchildren. I’m also a woman distracting herself between visits. I’m also a woman expanding herself in this space. I’m also a woman practicing balance and celebrating life.

I’m also a woman willing to look silly, singing with wild abandon while skating in circles.

I’m not doing any of it particularly well, but I’m doing it all with everything I’ve got.

I’m not fooled; I didn’t get my beginning back.

But this is another beginning.

And it’s a good one.

Share

Leave a comment

Tsara Shelton is a writer of musings, a sipper of coffee, a reader of stories, and a reluctant performer. Her work has appeared in publications such as Blank Spaces, The Medley, The Mighty, Disabled World, and Sexual Diversity, among others. Tsara enjoys mixing insight with humor via her blog, Autism Answers with Tsara Shelton.

Submit your Hobbies essay

Every annual appointment, my doctor asks me if I have hobbies. I guess it’s important to our overall health. My answers never quite fit. Cooking? No, that’s more of an essential chore. Writing? No, that’s my profession.

“Do you collect anything?” she asked.

“CORKS!” I yelled.

She sat up straighter on her stool, likely due to my enthusiasm.

“Maybe we need to check your liver enzymes,” she said as she wrote up my blood test order.

As an Italian, wine is part of my food pyramid. Growing up, my family cooked with it almost daily, even though they only drank it socially. It was never high-end—just your basic Chianti that came in those straw-decorated decanters you later stuck a red candle in and used as a centerpiece on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth.

Later in life, when I married a man who collected wine, I started saving the corks. If we drank a pricey wine for a special occasion like an anniversary or a promotion, I’d write on the cork to remember the wine and the event. As our cellar grew, so did our wine-tasting parties. The first one, in North Hollywood, called NoHo Wine Club, met monthly because all four of us were local and loved visiting wineries in Santa Ynez, Paso Robles, and Napa.

Over the years, the club’s name changed as we moved to the suburbs to start a family. We only got together about 4 times a year, and now we were The Four Seasons Wine Club. These tastings, along with wine with dinner, supported my cork collecting. I had bowls, vases, and baskets full of corks.

When my son was in preschool, the teacher sent home a wish list of arts-and-crafts items, like paper towel holders, egg cartons, and coffee cans. When I saw corks on the list, I was excited! Finally! My corks served a purpose! I knew I could use them to make a cork wreath or a trivet, but I only had time to accumulate these corks, not enough time to do anything with them.

I emptied all my cork holdings into two Trader Joe’s paper bags and happily walked into the preschool, handing them off to my son’s teacher. Her eyes popped out of her head, similar to the corks being born from my many bottles. Oh, shit. Is she about to report me to Child Services? I wondered. I started explaining that we were collectors and had a wine cellar. We were part of a robust wine club. These were corks collected over a five-year span! She tentatively took the two bags and stared at my son, I guess to make sure he wasn’t missing his lunch box or shoes.

Even with giving away all those corks, my collection built up once again. In kindergarten, my son had a playdate, and when they got tired of Legos, he decided to play with a basket of corks, throwing them at each other. They were light, so I didn’t think much of it until they poured the entire basket on top of the friend’s mother’s head from the top of the stairs when she came to pick up her son. After that, play dates were at her house.

The corks were also practical. When my son started doing math, and I was of no help, we used corks as visual aids to solve problems while lining them up on the table. It worked! We figured out how long it took a train leaving the station traveling at a certain MPH to reach its destination.

Today, I continue to collect my corks, but they aren’t as invasive. I blame that on acid reflux and cutting back on my wine-pairing habit. Still, my corks bring back memories I don’t want to forget, and at some point, corks may be obsolete. More and more wineries are opting for screw caps; corks could become more of a novelty, like bottle caps, restaurant matches, and other things that have gone to the wayside because of a more practical alternative.

Maybe before the holidays approach next year, I’ll find time to build a cork Christmas tree or a few cork reindeer, or maybe I’ll just save them for future grandkids who can throw them on top of unassuming visitors just for the fun of it. They are harmless, after all—in moderation.

Share

Leave a comment

Andrea Tate is an essayist and writing professor at Antioch University, where she teaches Writing and Publishing in the Individual Master of Arts program. Andrea’s published essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, Manifest Station, and more. Originally from New York, Andrea now lives in Southern California with her family and their 100-pound shepherd, Brody Bo Beau. To learn more about Andrea, visit her website at andreatate.net.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

It’s hot today, I say to the dust motes. They hover in a listless sunbeam cracking through the high windows of my community pottery studio—suspended, caught in a liminal place. They’re airborne now, but meant to be part of something larger, more solid.

“It’s Monday, October 6th,” NPR broadcasts live from their Washington, D.C. studio, just a mile or two down the road. Hamas, apparently, will accept a peace deal with Israel. Strange to hear that here first, with clay already making a sludgy paste on my fingertips. I should have learned that at work, had I not been furloughed in the government shutdown. I would normally have dug into the news more closely, to draft remarks or perhaps a report. But I’m here instead.

I slash into the still-damp lamp base I’m working on, my carving knife coaxing wilting dogwoods and curling leaves from the raw hunk of mud. A woman works next to me on a fresh batch of mugs. She’s furloughed, too, and has heard through the grapevine it could be two to six weeks until we return to office.

Unseasonable, this heat—I scratch at a fresh welt, though the mosquitoes should be sleeping now. The trees in Rock Creek Park should be turning golden and russet, too, but they’re holding out for change. For a cooldown, for the temperature to lower a bit before they decide what to do.

The stubborn green canopy camouflages National Guard troops, still here in the city. Still lugging huge rifles around, shadowed by chunky government buildings. They stroll, fatigued in garb and spirit, Starbucks in hand. They hang around packed oyster bars where loud Georgetown students, desperate for fall, down expensive Pinot and sweat through cropped sweaters and knee-high boots. They meander past young couples laden with farmer’s market totes that say What’s More Punk than the Public Library, bouncy with bright emerald kale. Outside pre-season hockey games they laugh and lurk, these tight blocks of close-shaven young men, while Capitals fans bleed red, white, and blue in a vital artery from the metro to the stadium.

What are you working on? the woman asks. The studio has been empty this morning save us two. What do I usually do? I’m a civil servant. Am I making pottery a full-time job? No. Am I still employed? Yes, I reply. About eighty percent of my colleagues were fired this year, I tell her. I’ve stumbled into them around town, heard they now work at supermarkets and bookstores. It’s a company town, people say, and the company has shuttered. It’s a loss for America, she says. I nod.

It was my dream job, to serve. I love my country, even when it’s wincing in pain. But I’m not sure how much more I can tolerate.

I may leave, I say, testing the idea, feeling it hard and heavy on my tongue. It tastes bitter. How could I, when so many were let go and I remain? There was a time it was inconceivable, when the mission was all that mattered. But torn between selfishness and sacrifice, stability and uncertainty, I falter.

Am I resilient enough to stay?

A bead of moisture crawls down my torso, drawing my attention to my clenched stomach. Past my lunchtime. The studio is busy now. The woman and I scoot over on our workbench to make room for the newcomers. I’ve heard about three-quarters of my fellow students also work for the federal government, and the studio has extended open hours to accommodate us all. Maybe we bureaucrats are just eager to create, to mold and shape, whether from policy or clay.

I want to stay. If I do go, one day I’d like to return, rebuild. I’m still in my early thirties and I care. I have time to re-invent myself. But I wonder about those more seasoned than I, who have already given so much time.

Some of these thoughts have spilled into the air between my neighbor and I as we continue to chat away. I don’t know why they would return, I say. After long careers in government, they were just tossed away.

She speaks to the workbench without hesitation. Because they’re patriots.

Soon, it will be the top of the hour. I doubt there will be a shutdown update, but I’m on high alert so turn the radio back on. Every minute or two, the door cracks open and a new face appears, bathed in blistering light from the outside.

They sit down to throw, joining us, hypnotized into something like acceptance by the dozen spinning pottery wheels, elbow-deep in mud. Too many of us now, for noon on a weekday.

It’s hot, they say.

We’re all charred inside, burning out.

Share

Leave a comment

Madison Chapman is a writer and proud federal worker living in Washington D.C. You can find her work in The New York Times, HuffPost, The Washington Post, TIME, Outside, and elsewhere.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

A few minutes after we arrived at the fair, my 10-year-old daughter found the golden prize of her dreams. Just past the group of children throwing tiny plastic balls into cups on a table, underneath the fluorescent lights of the hallway in our Catholic parish, a teenager was holding a tiny plastic bag filled with water—and an aquatic inhabitant.

“PLEASE, PLEASE, CAN I PLEASE WIN A GOLDFISH?” my daughter begged. My husband and I redirected her to cotton candy and an educational scavenger hunt. Her eyes shone with hope; she continued to plead. She knew it was now or never.

Of course I folded. Three dollars and two ping-pong balls later, the fish was hers.

At home, we found an old glass coffee pot, poured in fresh water from the sink, and gently tipped Leonardo da Fishi inside. My daughter carefully, joyfully used the handle to carry him to a prime spot on the mantle, where she fed him a boiled pea. I looked at him and just felt guilty.

Did you know that a fair fish can live for 10 to 15 years if taken care of properly? Did you know that a common goldfish can grow to over a foot long, is a voracious eater, and at its full size, needs a 55-gallon tank, minimum, so it doesn’t smother to death from the chemicals released by its own poop?

I didn’t either. Not until after we had the goldfish, who, I might add, had been blessed. I tried not to look at the statue of St. Francis petting a rabbit in my front yard.

Before three days were up, I had earned a Reddit Ph.D. in proper fish care. I was a new freelancer and didn’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on a proper setup—but I had also found out about the term feeder fish. If we surrendered Leo to a pet store, the best outcome for him would probably be a quick death by turtle.

I posted on Facebook asking if anyone I knew owned a pond. As I asked myself why I couldn’t just let it go, I scoured Marketplace for a tank. “If it’s meant to be, we’ll find a free aquarium,” I told my daughter.

We found a free aquarium.

I set the 20-gallon tank up with the filter, an air bubbler, and the plastic decorations that came with it. My conscience was clear, at least for the moment. I stared at Leo swimming under the LED lights, which felt surprisingly relaxing, then subscribed to the Father Fish channel on YouTube. My daughter assured me that I had saved a life; I felt like a hero as I pooh-poohed the idea.

When I was growing up, I had always loved visiting the Shedd Aquarium, but never seriously entertained the idea of owning a fish. They were peaceful to look at, sure. But there was complicated equipment involved. Strange smells from the water. Testing with little vials. Fish were only enjoyable if someone else was doing the work. Who wants to spend their free time doing chemistry?

I guess I did. Three-and-a-half months after the parish fair, Leonardo da Fishi is now living in the Hilton of tanks: a 29-gallon planted aquarium inspired by the Walstad method. He spends his days eating duckweed, sifting through substrate, and dancing along the front of the glass, mouthing about how he hasn’t been fed in days. I’m still looking for a friend with a pond, but also sales on 60-gallon tanks…just in case.

Share

Leave a comment

Mary Stachyra Lopez is a freelancer in Virginia. She was an editor on The Atlantic’s audience team for five years. Her writing has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists DC chapter and Catholic Media Association. When she’s not busy upgrading fish tanks, she’s telling her daughter they’re not getting a second dog.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

All crafters are familiar with the concept of a “Stash.” Anyone who shares a living space with a crafter will also know of this phenomenon. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a “Craft Stash” is an indeterminate (and often not fully disclosed) amount of crafting material which is stored by a crafter for use in unspecified (and often as yet unknown) future craft projects which may or may not ever be started, let alone completed. Different types of crafters have different types of Stashes, but we all recognize their importance.

There are certain unwritten rules about “The Stash,”, known only to crafters. These include:

“Non-crafters will never fully understand the value of The Stash,” and

“The reasons for the contents of The Stash must never be questioned.”

My own, ever-patient spouse is well-versed in these rules. After three decades of cohabiting, he now acknowledges my purchases with a resigned roll of his eyes and the question, “More ‘making’ stuff?”

But even I, a seasoned crafter, had to acknowledge that things may be getting out of hand when I realized that my Stash had morphed into a hoard!

I know how it came about. The empty wardrobe in the spare bedroom had long been my hiding place for Stash that I wished to remain discreetly unobserved. Nothing awful, I just didn’t need to admit to it if it was out of sight. Then we had a visitor coming to stay for a prolonged period. I had to clear out the wardrobe for him to use. I emptied the wardrobe, packaging everything up and discovering, happily, that it could be secreted beneath the spare bed.

Problem sorted. Our friend stayed for the summer, and the wardrobe was used for the storage of his clothes.

The problem really started after he left. I didn’t retrieve the items from under the bed. Instead, I left them there and started to refill the wardrobe with new Stash items. I know it’s naughty, but….no, I can’t think of an excuse. Crafters will understand.

I wasn’t aware of how out-of-hand things had become until I wanted a specific item for a project: a small bag of bells. I know I have them. I thought I knew where they were. There’s a bag under the bed with a selection of costume pieces, and I was sure the bells were in a side pocket of that bag. They were not. That triggered a full search. Every drawer, box, and bag, every cupboard and cranny I use to store materials was meticulously emptied, studied, and repacked. The entire contents under the bed were pulled out and examined. All the official storage places, as well as the unofficial, the discreet and the hidden places, were all ransacked. I didn’t find the bells.

However, I did find that there were a lot of surprises in my Stash. There were items I knew I had, of course. There were items I knew I had but had forgotten where I’d put them. There were items that I’d forgotten I had but remembered as soon as I saw them. Then, there were items that I had absolutely no recollection of ever having had! Those were the disturbing ones.

At that point, I had to face the fact that at some point, without my knowledge, my craft Stash had turned into a Hoard. I use the word advisedly. A quick search on Bing came up with the definition, “Hoard: A stock or store of money or valued objects, typically one that is secret or carefully guarded.” It seems to sum up the situation admirably. And, like all true hoards, it is filled with unexpected treasures beyond the understanding of the uninitiated.

The problem is, it’s housed in a home of limited size in West London. As such (and I write this with huge sadness), it must be kept under control. Further growth must be curbed, or there will be unpleasant consequences. To this end, I have made a pledge to myself: no more purchases until I‘ve used up enough of the Hoard to reduce it back to a recognizable Stash; no more visiting craft stores to browse (too tempting); no more opening emails from fabric suppliers (too many bargains!). I will be ruthless with myself. I will be strong.

I never did find that bag of bells, though, and I can’t complete the current project without them. Maybe just one quick look online…

Share

Leave a comment

Hilary worked as an actress, entertainer and hospital clown until she was incapacitated by a hereditary medical condition (now fondly described as “The Family Curse”). The need for a more sedentary lifestyle led her to redirect her energy into more writing, alongside a varied selection of textile projects.

She lives in London with her husband, their Romanian rescue dog, a plethora of ideas, and an undisclosed hoard of craft materials. She hopes to complete all ongoing projects (written and textile) at some point in the year 2135.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

I grew up with exactly two 1970s space exploration Lego sets. Just space, with a small s, in the days before Lego realized there was much more money to be made in collaboration with upper-case intellectual properties.

My sensitive, gender-confused farm-kid heart loved playing with Lego, especially when my oversized sensitive emotions seemed to be inconveniencing the people around me, which seemed like always.

You can’t stab together Lego pieces in anger, frustration, or impatience. If you’re sad or lonely, building with Lego can be distracting. You might not feel less sad or lonely, but you might not feel sad or lonely about feeling sad and lonely, and preventing that spiral can be darn handy.

I’m 100 percent sure I wouldn’t have called playing with Lego “self-regulation,” partly because it would be decades before adults said such words in casual conversation, let alone children. But much more because in my stoic Germanic family, it was assumed we would not have feelings, let alone regulate them.

But in retrospect, building with Lego was my undercover soothing mechanism.

I was a closet self-regulator.

My fervently Christian grandmother’s living room featured artwork that also soothed me: a movie-poster-sized reprint of a watercolor painting of the tallest building in the United Nations complex. Beside the tallest building in the United Nations complex stood a casual-looking Jesus. A 40-story-tall casual-looking Jesus. He was leaning over a bit, peering into the topmost floors in a Savior-Meets-Peeping-Tom mashup. Super Tall Jesus is mid-knock, his knuckles in contact with the windows around the 35th floor, his face in an intense partial frown. The expression was probably meant to convey concern. But if the image were nicknamed Our Lord ff The Ongoing Constipation Tendency, it might be considered in poor taste, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate.

Visits to my grandmother’s house did involve a lot of church attendance. But they also involved awe-inspiring meatloaf, very tasty scalloped potatoes, apple pies, and patience with me and my overly sensitive and inconvenient feelings. I retained my love for the artistic rendering of UN Jesus long after I retained belief that any actual Jesus was involved in a constructive manner with humankind, mediated by the UN or otherwise.

In adulthood, I rediscovered Lego as an almost unnervingly powerful self-regulation tool.

Some folks meditate. Some folks journal.

Some folks do yoga.

Me?

Although I am allegedly a radical queer anticapitalist, I hand over my hard-earned cash to purchase a box of tiny corporate plastic rectangles. And squares. And triangles. And hinges. And windows. And doors. And a round orange piece that is a basketball in one set, the foundation of Oscar the Grouch in another set, and a droid of some kind in the Star Wars set.

The small three-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment I share with two other unrelated folks in the unintentional intentional community we call Queer Study Hall is a Lego sanctuary. There are flowers, spaceships, a boat, more than a few dinosaurs. A city skyline. A train associated with a now known to be grossly transphobic intellectual property. This train is being terrorized by two dinosaurs wearing tiny trans flags as capes.

It might sound like a tremendous amount of brickwork, but I have safety guidelines for how often and under what conditions I permit myself to procure Lego. My Lego purchases aren’t reckless, yet they often come with a poke of shame. Why does it take tiny plastic objects to calm me down?

A few years ago, I had a routine knee replacement that went awry. The bone-level infection turned an uncomplicated orthopedic procedure into a very complicated seven-surgery ordeal, with MyChart mentions of “20 cc of frothy brown fluid” and “round-the-clock use of portable wound vac.”

During one particularly bleak stretch, when the implant had to be removed entirely in an effort to clear the infection, a friend visited me as I sat on my couch with my painful, kneeless leg propped up on pillows, surrounded by Lego bags and instruction books.

I was putting the finishing touches on the Lego United Nations tower, a set gifted to me for a birthday many years past. As I finished, I grabbed a wind-up plastic Jesus from my past-life religious tchotchke shelf to stand beside it.

I realized I had recreated the poster from my grandma’s living room. But in Lego.

A girlfriend had once found a copy of said poster at a garage sale and gifted it to me in a moment of “we’re not sure how ironic we’re being” humor. Now it hung with command strips, unframed but not unloved, on the back of our bathroom door.

Because of this, my friend also came to the same realization I had.

I was so embarrassed. It wasn’t just capitalist-plot Lego that was soothing me. Now it was the dumb poster and my weird childhood Christianity residue.

I guess I didn’t hide my embarrassment very well, because my friend immediately sat down on the couch beside me.

“You know, it’s not actually the plastic pieces or the weird giant Jesus working the magic, right?”

I opened my mouth to argue.

Um. Yeah, it was the plastic.

Obviously, it was bathroom-door Jesus.

“It’s the connections,” he said, becoming weirdly earnest and settling into the tone of voice used by the red-headed lady on Intervention.

“The Lego connects one little piece to another until something steadier appears.”

When did my friend become such a cornball?

“Or maybe you just get steadier! That poster connected you to someone who held space for you when no one else did. You learned early that you could build safety.”

I started to cry, which wasn’t that unusual. I didn’t have a knee. I cried a lot. Plus, an earnest emotional lecture from a queer who’s usually dry and sarcastic can also be a lot.

I gestured to my wind-up Jesus UN diorama. “It’s not weird?”

“Oh, it’s totally weird,” he said, grabbing me in a big hug. “Just in a way that also makes perfect sense.”

Share

Leave a comment

Kelli Dunham is a nonbinary ex-nun, trauma-informed comedian and storytelling nurse. Kelli is the author of seven hilarious books about not hilarious subjects including a bestselling book on puberty and the creator of the hilariously helpful (and helpfully hilarious) Substack, Hoping Intentionally.

I got punched in the nose the other day.

Nothing alarming. There was no blood, and it wasn’t even that painful—it was more that I’d never really gotten punched anywhere, at least not for real. Silly dares as a kid to see how much it hurt getting punched in the stomach were the extent of my experience in the matter—until I decided to take up boxing.

I’m still not entirely sure how this decision came to be, if I’m being honest. The why might be irrelevant, except that whenever I tell people I’m boxing, that’s the first thing they want to know. Maybe because I’m a woman, and I’m small, and except for my recent Buffy, the Vampire Slayer obsession, I’d never exhibited an interest in physical fighting. Did I want something new? Was this my post- breakup version of “I got bangs?” Did I feel the need to prove anything to someone, or to myself? Or was I just…bored?

Regardless of the reason, on a pretty uneventful Tuesday evening, I showed up at a trial class for women’s boxing. Nervous, awkward, feeling out of place amongst women who clearly knew what they were doing. But I was committed to liking it—I very, very badly wanted to. So I bought hand wraps, gloves, and a mouth guard, and I signed up.

Perhaps rather naively, one of the things that stood out to me during those first couple of classes was how much technique there is before you even attempt to punch something (or someone). We spent most of the hour burning our legs (squats, lunges, and some painful variations of both), learning how to move swiftly, aligning the body in a way that felt odd, foreign. It all moves as one: arms, elbows, core, legs, all together to hit, to block, to duck. I enjoyed the technicality, probably because it’s something my body is good at. It was a confidence boost, and in my sometimes overconfident brain, I could hear a voice saying, “Look at you, being so naturally good at this!”

And then, at the very end of my third class, my brain high on self-praise, we were told to spar.

I knew sparring was just a fake fight, but I felt immediate panic. No more confidence, just plain fear. I didn’t want to hit anyone, nor did I want to get hit back. A ridiculous notion, really, when I had willingly joined a sport in which the point is to knock someone out. What was I thinking?!

Within those first two minutes, the duration of a sparring round, it became clear to me (and to anyone looking) that I was undeniably bad at boxing. A true human punching bag, no technique whatsoever.

Be it stubbornness, hope, or simple stupidity, I kept showing up. Like a fish out of water, I wondered every class if maybe this just wasn’t the right sport for me. I dreaded a surprise sparring at the end of the day. I felt silly throwing out punches with my spaghetti arms, unable to move my head out of the way, my gloves only good at protecting me from the jabs and crosses that kept landing on me. My coach, blessed be her endless patience, shouting from the sides for me to move.

Sparring didn’t feel natural, didn’t feel fun—my brain easily forgetting everything it had learned the previous hour. No surprise to anyone that I got hit on the nose, to be fair. But I didn’t want to quit. There wasn’t any blood, after all. Yet.

We were stretching at the end of one of those earlier classes when my coach said something that stuck to my brain better than any technique or sparring instruction. On the floor, legs wide open, leaning forward to stretch the muscle in my inner thigh, she said ,“Ahora nos quedamos ahi, en la molestia.”.”We stay in the discomfort. My brain, very much trained to find analogies, metaphors, and meaning everywhere, clung to this phrase. We stay in the discomfort. She just meant stay where it hurts, where the muscles are stretching the way they should. No real hidden meaning in her words, no pep talk.

We stay in the discomfort. I repeated this to myself over and over again, at home, out and about, in bed, working, reading, walking the dog. Whenever I showed up at the boxing gym, hand wraps and gloves and mouth guard in my bag. Ready to suck, but also ready to learn, and hopefully suck a little bit less every day. Ready to stay in the discomfort, for as long as needed. I’d been hoping for some kind of cinematic montage: Disney’s Mulan suddenly finding her inner and outer strength in the span of a three-minute song. All I was given instead, all I could cling to, was patience in the face of deficiency.

Because I’m not doing this with any other intention than to just do it. I don’t want to compete, I don’t want to be the best. I want to be healthy and fit again, yes, and I wouldn’t mind getting better (which I am, for the record!), just enough to have a decent sparring round. But that’s about it.

There’s something freeing about taking up something without many expectations, even if this can make slow progress more challenging. I’ve found myself less and less worried about the discomfort, though, less bothered with not being as good as I’d want to be. I’m okay with not being the best, with never being the best at this. Not because I don’t care—would I be getting punched if I didn’t?—but simply because I don’t have to be.

I just need to be good enough not to get punched in the nose again, and even that might be unavoidable. But I’ll survive. Worst case scenario, broken nose and surgery it is.

Share

Leave a comment

Siham Lee is a Chilean writer. She holds an MLitt in Creative Writing and spends most of her time writing short stories, and personal essays in Unfortunately…No. In her free time she enjoys curating her TBR list, rewatching the same old romcoms and editing the first draft of her first novel, all at the same time.

I’ve had every kind of coffee meeting you can imagine. Drip coffee. Ice blended, cold brew. Half caff. Espresso. I’ve tried nearly every flavor. By the end of a meetup, I often felt drained. The conversations were fine. The networking was fine. But the energy? Flat. I would leave bloated from caffeine and pastries, wondering what a better way to connect with people would be.

Then I met pickleball.

A friend of mine, who’s also a colleague I once hired as a writer and producer for a comedy series where I was the showrunner, invited me to a pickleball pop-up. There was music, food, and tons of play. I had no idea the game would become my new obsession. Pickleball is a fast-paced game that I typically play on an outdoor tennis court. Each player has a paddle and you use a perforated ball. It’s a mix of tennis and ping pong. The first time I played was at a hosted pickleball event. I was nervous because I’m not good at tennis, but the trainers were so encouraging when I made mistakes.

Before long, I was hooked. I started playing several times a week. I’ve always been active and focused on staying fit by working out at the gym and rollerblading. But I’m not a sports person, outside of playing with my kids at the park with sports that they play. After I started playing with my family, I decided to become certified as a pickleball instructor. Now, I invite friends, clients, and family members to play with me. It’s my favorite way to meet up with people. Instead of sitting across from someone at a café, we get to move, laugh, and talk between points.

Pickleball feels like solving a moving puzzle. You have to predict, respond, and adjust in seconds. The sound of the ball hitting the paddle is strangely satisfying. With every swing, my brain woke up. I could almost feel it rewiring itself. Part of the reset, I think, happens because I’m actually good at the sport. Pickleball also gives me a sense of challenge and accomplishment. From a brain science perspective, the rhythmic sound of the ball hitting the paddle and the repetitive motion activates parts of the brain that help with focus.

When I play, I feel calm and alert at the same time. I also think more clearly afterward. My creativity flows more easily. I notice that I listen better to my kids and to my husband. The game shakes off stress in a way that coffee never could. I’ve also tried plenty of activities such as yoga, standup paddleboarding, and basketball with my kids. With other sports, I feel like I’m moving and having fun, but none of them clear my mind like pickleball.

I only enjoy playing on outdoor courts. There’s something about feeling the sun on your face while chasing a ball that makes you grateful to be alive.

On the court, people reveal themselves. You can see patience, competitiveness, kindness, and humor all in one game. And the best part? I leave networking meetings feeling energized. My mind feels lighter. My spirit feels stronger. My body feels rejuvenated. It’s a full reset every time I play.

Playing pickleball with someone reveals their patience, humor, and willingness to try something new. I’m competitive by nature, but what I really respect is when someone shows up open-minded, especially if we’re exploring a new business relationship or opportunity. Whether I win or lose, the game helps me connect with others in a meaningful way.

I also love the community that comes with the sport. People cheer for each other. Strangers become doubles partners. There’s teasing and genuine connection.

Of course, the cute skirts are everything. The outfits make the sport a vibe. Pickleball taught me that networking doesn’t always have to be still. It can be active and joyful. The sport makes the space for new connections and opportunities.

Now when someone asks to meet for coffee, I pause. Sometimes I still say yes. But more often, I ask, “How about a game of pickleball?”

Share

Leave a comment

Angela Marie Hutchinson is the Head of IP & Talent Ventures at RPM Talent Agency. While scouting and cultivating elite talent, Angela develops intellectual property into scalable ventures across TV, film, books, podcasts, sports, live events, social media, and community-driven experiences. Angela is also the author of Create Your Yes!, which Forbes ranked as #4 book to transform your career. Angela resides in Los Angeles with her husband and their three children.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

Ninth grade is painful on a good day, but when you’re that special kind of weird which idolizes a nostalgia during which you never actually lived, the loneliness is even worse. Or at least that’s how I felt as a high school freshman at the turn of the millennium.

When all my friends were listening to NSYNC and Britney Spears—not that there’s anything wrong with that—I was knee-deep in the historical treasure trove of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I loved that I loved what I loved, but I hated that I had no one to share my obsessions with. It was a lonely practice to want to have someone to debate the merits of Paul versus John (it’s always Paul, for the record), but no one was speaking my language, and I certainly wasn’t speaking theirs, either.

Then I met my best friend’s boyfriend, Phil. He was a year older than me and witty, funny like me. Phil was obsessed with The Doors; he was a fellow stranger in the strange land of wrong timing. And he could drive.

Phil and I spent many afternoons of the early aughts picking through thrift stores. Phil hunted for pants which might make him look like a skosh of a hair of a reverie of an inkling of The Lizard King himself—Jim Morrison—and I liked to pick through the dirty costume jewelry, imagining what the rhinestones might shine back up to be. We flicked through yellowed paperback classics, their pages crusted with neglect and margins scratched with lead. We poked through ancient china collections, the metallic rims worn down from washing. And we pilfered through vinyl record stacks, inspecting the quality of their grooves in the light.

We imagined ourselves to be connoisseurs of items from eras in which we never lived or breathed, but we imagined so vividly. We talked about our thrifted treasures over endless cups of coffee while Phil chain smoked Camel Lights because you could still smoke in diners. In Phil’s beat up 1991 Mercury Cougar in 2003, we listened to David Bowie because we actually, painstakingly, after much heated debate, agreed on him.

In the early 2000s, we didn’t yet use phones to text message each other, but we knew that the yellow rotary phones we saw laying forsaken in thrift stores were special somehow.

25 years later, Phil and I have been married for a decade. We have two kids who we teach about The Beatles and Bowie and The Doors. Sometimes we take our kids treasure hunting in thrift stores so they can scavenge for bent license plates from different states, which they nail to their bedroom wall as decorations. We live in a house where there’s no phone attached to the wall at all, and we text each other on screens which respond to touch in specific spots on a smooth glass surface. There aren’t even buttons to press down and spring back up again.

The other day I was feeling distant, unlike myself. The pressures of the world and the headlines of the day got to me. With our kids in school for the afternoon and work unnecessary for the moment, I asked Phil if he wanted to go to a thrift store with me.

We wandered through the crystal vases and worn-down shoes. There were rows of orangey wooden cabinets, too boxed-in and restrictive for today’s television screens. In the media section, we flipped through discarded DVDs and fat clammy VHS cases. I picked up a CD case, misplaced music in the movie section, and held it up for Phil to see: It was a Coldplay album from when we were in high school, when I was a sophomore and he was a junior.

“I bought that for you when it came out,” he said and I nodded, knowing what he would say before he said it. It was a relic from a nostalgia we had actually lived through together this time.

And here we are, still living it at 40, looking back and collecting memories and thrifted treasures and dust.

Share

Leave a comment

Sara Knight Bidlack is a writer, dreamer, fat girl, and silly person who lives near Atlantic City, New Jersey with her husband and two young children. She earned degrees in creative writing, journalism, and literature, and is currently working on gentle parenting. Her drugs of choice are ice cream, honest human connection, late 90s pop/rock, and Harry Styles. Her Substack is .

I keep people. Not in the way museums do. I keep them in names, in relics, in screenshots, in brief notes, in the small things they leave behind. When I meet someone, I write their name in a notebook, usually followed by a thought: First impression, what they looked like, what they wore, how they might disappear from my life.

It started as a trick to remember faces, to make sense of teachers who were strangers behind school desks. Now it’s a hobby I don’t usually admit to. I have a drawer full of relics: Chinese yuan from a girl I never kissed, a Kyrgyz som from a coworker who wanted to experience the world and escape her tribe, a ticket from a ballet concert with someone I almost loved, a wooden keychain from one I couldn’t stand, a subway ticket from a city I’ve never visited. Each object carries someone else’s air. When I touch them, or look at them, it feels as if I’ve traveled to places without ever leaving my room.

I don’t collect them because I miss people. I do it because something in me insists on keeping proof that they existed, that I once crossed their orbits. Most of them are gone now: dead, forgotten, or living somewhere I’ll never go. Some I only met once but couldn’t forget. Other I spoke for months. The majority are friendships that were kept for years but they all end up reduced to a note: Talks too fast, smells like rose, has eyes that pretend not to know.

Some relics arrive without effort, tucked into the edges of my life. Others I invite: ‘Will you leave something for me that I can keep?’ and they offer what they can, a coin, a keychain, a note in their mother tongue, which I never translate. Afraid that memory alone might not be enough, I keep them all.

If I can’t keep a physical trace, I keep what’s left: A text, a picture, a screenshot. One cold evening in Brussels, while searching for my way, I stopped someone to ask for directions. She offered to walk me there. In that brief walk, she told me about her years living in Belgium, that she was Albanian, that she missed her family. She asked if I was studying here, if I’d be back soon. I told her it was my last day in the city. She paused, smiled, and suggested we stop for coffee. Then she was gone.

The only proof I have of her existence is a fading memory and the coffee bill we shared. So I kept it.

I store them like someone saving seeds before a famine. A private archive of faces, words, relics, wrappers, and bills. No one would know what they meant, except me.

Sometimes I don’t think I’m collecting people but pieces of myself. The way I looked at them, who I was before I met them, and what I became in their presence. When I read the notes, I remember each encounter and follow bits of myself. The collector becomes a part of the collection.

There’s comfort in this. To know every gesture, every brief exchange; even dislike or indifference leaves a residue. The archive keeps growing, new names, new handwriting, new currencies, new relics. It doesn’t make me lonelier or closer, it just makes their memory stay longer before they fade.

I’ve traveled widely through these objects. I’ve revisited conversations I barely remember, arguments I wish I’d managed differently, actions I missed out on taking, or gestures that passed unremarked at that time. The drawer is a map, archive, time capsule. A way to carry a world in the palm of my hand, or in the pages of my notebook.

Even on a quiet evening, I can pull a coin, a note, or a keychain, and be somewhere else, for just a moment. The objects remain, indifferent to me, and yet they are all I need to trail the outlines of a life that is both my own and the sum of countless others.

Share

Leave a comment

Adam T writes about desire, identity, and the moral gray areas of human connection. He draws from personal experience to explore how relationships shape, expand, and reveal who we are, often delving into the spaces between societal expectations and personal truth.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

At night, when the house settles into its own quiet, I open YouTube and visit the dead. A man with a calm voice walks through a cemetery in Los Angeles, his camera steady as he points to the names carved in marble. The title reads Hollywood Graveyard: Legends of Old Hollywood. I know his rhythm by now: the slow pan to a headstone, the hum of birds, the trimmed grass that looks almost staged.

I started watching in 2020 during the pandemic, when the world blurred between headlines and hospital counts. I wasn’t looking for comfort so much as confirmation. Death was everywhere, yet still out of reach. My father had died in 2016, and I had no grave to visit. He was cremated, but his urn still rests in my mother’s closet, a quiet weight that feels both temporary and permanent. There’s no stone to mark him, no plot to visit, only the thought of his ashes waiting, still and unseen, in the house that once echoed with his voice.

So, I found other graves.

Scott Michaels, host of Dearly Departed Tours, became my unlikely guide. He has the kind of voice that makes even tragedy sound like memory.

I learned how Marilyn Monroe’s crypt at Westwood Village Cemetery sits between strangers who once paid to be buried near her. Hugh Hefner bought the space beside her for $75,000. Visitors leave lipstick kisses and white roses. Nearby rests Natalie Wood, whose headstone reads Beloved Daughter, Wife, Mother, and Friend. I pause the video and imagine how many people have traced those same words with their fingertips, searching for a pulse in stone.

Then there’s Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin at Hollywood Forever, a bronze figure of him rising from a dark stone base. His parents visit and tend the site every day. People see them in lawn chairs beside the statue, talking to him, brushing leaves from the marble, resetting flowers and photographs. The grave feels alive in a way that startles me. Love keeps a schedule. Grief does the chores.

Each grave carries both an ending and a strange kind of persistence. Someone remembers them. Someone stands there, camera in hand, to prove it.

I told myself it was research, but it was grief in disguise. I wanted to understand what makes a death meaningful or maybe what makes a life remain visible. My father never had a marker, no stone to outlast weather or time. Just a name on a certificate and the weight of memory that slips a little each year.

The YouTube algorithm caught on. Soon my feed filled with thumbnails of graves: Jim Morrison’s graffiti-covered slab in Paris, cluttered with flowers, bottles, and notes from pilgrims who never met him. Rodney Dangerfield’s epitaph reads There Goes the Neighborhood. I began keeping a list of epitaphs that made death sound less like a full stop and more like a wink, a comma, a continuation.

There’s something intimate about walking through cemeteries with strangers. The camera glides past flowers, flags, small stones balanced on marble. I pause to read each name. Some have faded into the granite, almost gone. I imagine who still visits, who once promised they would.

If my father had a grave, I would have filled it with small talk. I would have told him about the kids, the weather, the rent. I would have left a golf tee or a seashell or something that said, I remember you even when you are silent. Instead, I talk to a screen and trace the shapes of other names. I have memorized the cracks in James Dean’s marker in Fairmount, Indiana, the way fans chip away bits of stone as souvenirs. Maybe I’m one of them, pressed up against memory, hoping for reflection.

My father used to call cemeteries the quietest neighborhoods. He didn’t mean it as a joke. He liked to drive through old ones, the kind with crumbling angels and moss that overtook the names. Once, when I was a kid, we stopped at a graveyard on the way to the grocery store. He walked between the stones, reading dates and shaking his head. “Imagine all the stories that just end,” he said.

I think that’s why I started watching again after he died. I wanted those stories to keep moving, even in pixels and narration. Every video reminded me that someone once loved these people enough to write their names down, to make their deaths worth revisiting.

Sometimes I fall asleep before the video ends. The voice fades, and the screen glows with another thumbnail, another grave, another name I will never know. Other nights, I let the autoplay continue, a steady loop of endings and memorials.

There’s comfort in repetition. Every grave says the same thing: We mattered once. The details change, the cause of death, the fame, the flowers, but the message endures. Maybe that’s all I want from my father’s death—a sense that it mattered somewhere beyond the boundaries of memory.

When my daughters are asleep and the house is still, I picture him scattered beneath the Florida sky, mingled with the same sand that clings to orange roots and palmetto leaves. I imagine the wind carrying his dust across the family yard, where stories never end but settle.

On the screen, the host’s voice softens. “Here lies another soul who made their mark,” he says.

I close the laptop and repeat the line, but I replace the name.

My father made his mark too.

Share

Leave a comment

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than eighty literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. A Best of the Net nominee, she has won Inscape Journal’s 2025 Flash Contest and Blue Earth Review’s 2025 Dog Daze Contest for Flash Fiction. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay

Ten months ago, I tripped and fell while running, slamming face-first into the asphalt. I couldn’t close my jaw, and I couldn’t walk a straight line. After seeing the dentist and my primary care physician, I was diagnosed with TMJ, whiplash, and a concussion.

After being told not to read, write, watch TV, or teach three-hour online courses, I returned to my first love: art.

When my adult daughter bought me two pocket-sized art journals the previous Christmas, I’d said, “Thank you,” but thought, What a silly gift. Doesn’t she know I don’t paint anymore? When she was growing up, I taught acrylic painting and scrapbooking in the after-school program. But I hadn’t seriously painted since my divorce 10 years ago. After the holidays, I tucked the two four-inch by four-inch books on a shelf behind my writing desk, never thinking of them again.

Then, in January, while I scrolled through Facebook searching for the online concussion support group my doctor recommended, I landed on an advertisement: “Journey with Color through Pocket-Sized Paintings.” For $25, I could buy a self-paced course with a professional licensing artist and join an international community of fellow art students. The course promised I would complete a pocket-sized painting each day in only 15 minutes.

I signed up right away.

Every day for the next month, I religiously painted each assignment, from patterns to portraits. Every painting was divided into three lessons. Each lesson only took five minutes to complete. Within an hour, the paint would dry, and I could move on to the next lesson. So, over the course of a day, in three five-minute intervals, I finished one four-by-four-inch painting.

Additionally, I made friends with other artists around the world. Whenever I posted pictures of my completed paintings on the private Facebook page, I received either kind comments or constructive criticism. Some friendships extended beyond the online group. I bought an original painting from a fellow artist in Australia. I learned how to make prints from an artist in Oregon. Most importantly, I learned how vital the arts are to being human, no matter where you live or who you are.

When the course was over, I enrolled in another one…and another…until I had purchased enough courses to fill one of the two pocket-sized art journals my daughter had gifted me at Christmas.

After I stopped taking courses, I expanded my art beyond painting. For some reason, the visual arts didn’t bother my brain like words did. I could smear paint with my fingers, rip paper into shapes, and mold figures with plaster. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I would get up and work on whatever art project occupied my desk or easel until I became drowsy again. This habit prevented me from becoming dependent on sleeping pills.

When depression, anxiety, and worry occupied my mind, I turned to the canvas to release how I felt instead of asking my primary care physician for more antidepressants or additional talk therapy. When I finally became well enough to read, write, watch TV, and teach online again, I continued painting. What started as a hobby became so much more, healing me in so many ways, I wrote a book about it.

Share

Leave a comment

Angela Lam is a visual artist in Northern California. Fallen: A Post-Concussion Memoir chronicles her healing journey through the arts following a concussion and is fully illustrated with her artwork.

Submit your Hobbies flash essay