The other night someone asked me what my “thing” is.

It sounds very vague, but in retrospect it’s actually quite a probing question.

It’s like asking someone what their deal is. Or “who do you think you are?”

It’s one of those questions that is difficult to answer without overthinking too much.

I know it was meant to mean, “What is your hobby?” But that’s not really a question you ask. I mean, people don’t really have hobbies anymore. No one paints model airplanes or collects stamps. Think about it, what are your hobbies? Like, what do you do when you’re not working, sleeping or trying to avoid eye contact on the bus?

After typing “define hobby” into Google, I learnt the widely-accepted definition of a hobby is an activity one does with their leisure time for the purposes of pleasure.

So technically you could call re-watching the Shark-ira video a hobby. You could also call compulsively smoothing my hair while loosing all sense of reality in the silky sensation a hobby. Even slowly walking past a construction site to sniff the scent of freshly-cut lumber could fall under the definition of a hobby.

Sure, they’re done in my leisure time and they bring my pleasure, but you can’t really list those things off when someone asks what your hobby is.

You see, a hobby is something that usually is done in pursuit of an interest. Now, there’s a difference between a hobby and in interest. A hobby is something you actively do, while an interest isn’t so tangible. It’s more of a feeling – like something you’re intrigued and excited by. It’s almost like a theme, in a way. Importantly, you can be interested in something without actually doing it. So even though you could say my hobby is eating chicken schnitzels and drinking beer, I can still be interested in having a ripped rig.

So what are my interests then? That’s a tough one. My interests would have to include myself and dessert items that won’t give me another chin. And my related hobby for pursing this interest currently is eating frozen mango cubes and scrolling back through my Instagram posts to remind myself just how bitchin I am.

I guess you could call this blog a hobby, but sometimes it derives me of pleasure as I can’t organise my time properly and find myself staying up into the early hours crafting it – poorly, might I add – when I desperately need to sleep.

The “what’s your thing” question continues to play on my mind, because there’s so many ways to read into it. And maybe I’ll unpack that later down the track when I’ve run out of ideas but for now I am focusing on the hobby angle.

When I answered, I told the asker that I drew trees. Which is true. When I get bored, I will doodle a tree on a scrap of paper. My old court reporting notebooks were full of trees. It doesn’t make me edgy or anything – it’s just the only thing I learned to draw in art at school.

I like doing it, but I rarely do. Even though I get home at like 3.45pm most days and have apartment to myself for at least two hours, I never break out the pencils and paper. I’m somehow always too busy.

And this has got me thinking about the way I spend my time. Like, I can say what my hobbies are: writing, drawing, reading etc. but how many of them do I actually do?

And if I’m not filling my leisure time with those activities, what am I filling it with? And then it all comes back to that over-arching question: what the fuck am I doing with my time?

It’s at this point where I’m considering keeping an activity log, in which I’ll record what I did and why I did it. And because my idea of a wild Friday night was going to bed early after reading Little Women, I feel like I will at least attempt this task. I’ll probably log logging my time under the “hobby” category, because lately my idea of pleasure has become a little beige. I mean, my idea of the mile high club is purchasing an egg and lettuce sandwich off the flight attendant snack cart.

I expect the results of this experiment to be confronting but boring and very, very depressing.