Hobbies

A list of things I used to do but were gradually extinguished by my devastating job

1. Medium-large home improvement projects like reorganizing the whole basement, repainting rooms, landscaping.

2. Small home improvement projects like refinishing an old piece of furniture, choosing and framing and hanging new art on the walls, cleaning out drawers and closets.

3. Crafty things like sewing, by machine or hand, and knitting

4. Everyday type baking stuff like muffins, bar cookies, and anything that requires only one bowl.

5. Preserving: putting up fruit jams and butters, weird pickles.

6. Bread baking, sometimes with sourdough and almost always with a wide variety of whole grains and shit

7. Photography, film and digital, culling and organizing and sharing said photographs

8. Enjoying cooking at all, including but not limited to: searching out new recipes, experimenting with new ingredients, exploring all the myriad grocery stores and markets available to me, making dinner on a weeknight, project cooking like that time I made exceptionally good carnitas for my extended family, even wanting to eat

9. Enjoying television, like binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy and other easy nighttime soaps that make me cry; enjoying movies of any stripe but especially ones that require emotional investment.

A list of things I still do because apparently you can’t beat them out of me

1. Reading all the things all the time. Especially novels.

2. Writing. Especially poems.

3. Baking BIG, IMPRESSIVE, ELABORATE cakes and stuff.

4. Yoga.

This is a homemade funfetti cake with three layers, three colors of frosting, birthday cake crumbles, and a custom sprinkle mix. Yes I made it. Yes it was good.

What I have done instead of any of these fun things

1. Write lesson plans.

2. Write unit plans.

3. Reread texts to teach them better.

4. Revise lesson plans from prior year to improve them.

5. Refine unit plans form prior year to improve them.

6. Develop new units after throwing out less successful units.

7. Get ground up by institutional machinery.

8. Get REALLY into Barre workouts, especially the Brawl ones where you “kickbox” but really it’s like dancing.

9. SKINCARE: I’ve been a routine user of acids and sunscreen since at least 2005. But I really embraced the multi-step skincare routines of Asian beauty, along with snail mucin, multiple layers of watery toner, and many many sheet masks.

10. Sleep. (Do I have a sleep disorder?)

11. Twitter and too much internet; dissociate.