Left to My Own Devices

Hobbies and Habits

We all get caught up in the run around of our everyday lives from time to time as the demands of our personal lives clash with the demands of our professional lives, each competing for the majority share of our time and attention. I often get so caught up in my own drama that I feel as if my life is about to fall apart, and I forget that life is best when it's not taken too seriously. When stress levels are high, we need to hit a reset button by doing something to take our mind off whatever is causing the stress. Sometimes even a few minutes is all I need to recharge. But I've learned it is better to deal with the stress before it gets out of control than to hit the reset button over and over.

For several years, I worked an afternoon shift that started at 3:00 pm. Having my free time in the morning turned my days upside down. I had to be productive early in the day, often as soon as I woke up. Many mornings, I rushed around to get everything done so I could get to work on time, but there was always a period of at least an hour, after all the running around but before getting ready for work, when I had nothing to do. It was a built-in buffer time in case something took longer than expected in the morning. One day, I decided to have a cup of tea during that hour. The energy boost from the caffeine felt good, so the next day I had another cup of tea during that hour. And the day after that, I did it again. As my daily cup of tea became two cups of tea daily then an entire pot (2.5 cups) of tea every day, I found myself looking forward to that empty hour. I got much more from my tea time when I did nothing but drink tea. I felt more energized, more refreshed, and more ready to face the afternoon. That's how it started...my daily tea drinking habit. Every day, I made sure I had a full hour to sit on my sofa, drink tea, and stare at the wall. That hour became very important to me. I used the time to rest my mind, to allow it think about what it wanted to think about instead of what I wanted it to think about. I gave my mind a free hour every day, and it gave me the strength and clarity I needed to get through the day. It became my daily dose of solitude. I still do this, everyday. The hour of solitude allows me to destress and be ready for the day ahead. After twenty years, it's still the most powerful reset button I've encountered.

In case you're wondering what kind of tea I drink, it's Earl Peppermint, two parts Earl Grey one part Peppermint.

The Importance of Hobbies

A hobby is an enjoyable activity done in one's leisure time, but it is much more than just a way to kill time. A well chosen hobby provides a fulfilling, productive way to learn new skills while doing something you enjoy.

Creates Interesting Experiences. People who have hobbies experience things they can share with others. These experiences become stories they can tell to their friends, coworkers, and other people in their lives. They can also share the knowledge they gain from a hobby with anyone who is interested in learning more about it.

Relieves Stress. A hobby helps you relax as you experience pleasure in activities that are not associated with work or other responsibilities. It keeps you engaged in something you enjoy, providing a way to take your mind off the stress of everyday life. A hobby can provide an effective reset button take your mind off whatever might be bothering you.

Improves Social Skills. A hobby can often be enjoyed with other people, creating social bonds based on a common interest. Whether you join a club, play in a league, or help others learn or improve their skills, a hobby provides a good way to meet and get closer to people who have interests similar to your own.

Boosts Confidence and Self-Esteem. People who have hobbies develop specialized skills based on the knowledge gained from their hobbies. As they develop new skills, they realize they can do something only a limited number of people can do, which allows them to take pride in what they have accomplished.

Prevents bad habits. A hobby gives you something to do when you become bored, and it can even give you something to look forward to and get excited about, preventing boredom altogether. When you have a hobby to fill your free time, you will be less likely to spend that time on wasteful or negative activities that do not add to the quality of your life.

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My Hobbies

The best way to start a hobby is to try something new, something you'd like to learn more about, something that will help you take your mind of what is going on that day. All of my hobbies were started when I had a lot of free time on my hands and, somtimes, bored because of it. Over the years, my hobbies have truly enriched my life in many ways.

Website design. When this hobby started in 1999, I knew nothing about website design. I happened to have a lot of free time and wanted to spend it in a productive way. It seemed that the popularity of the Internet was about to skyrocket, and wanting to be relevant, I decided to build a website. Creating a successful website requires a balance between technical ability and creative expression. For me, the technical aspects of website design (HTML, CSS, etc) are pretty straight-forward and easy enough to understand, but the broader concepts of website design (navigation, search engine optimization, etc) are difficult to master. You have to be highly skilled in both to strike the perfect balance between them that will make your website a success. I wouldn't describe myself as highly skilled in either, but I thoroughly enjoy doing it.

Programming. When I was building the original version of this website in 1999, I began to realize that I was enjoying the experience quite a lot. In particular, I enjoyed the ability to create something out of nothing. By entering a bunch of letters, numbers, and symbols into a text editor in a particular order, I was able to create webpages that were purely graphical in nature. I decided to enhance that skill by learning to code in several object oriented programming languages, including C++, Java, Javascript, PHP, and Android. My programming skills are not well developed, but I understand the basic concepts and have been able to use these skills many times in both personal and work related projects.

Geneology. This hobby started one afternoon when I saw an Ancestry.com ad on TV. I opened a free trial account and entered a minimal amount of information about myself and my parents. I knew very little about my grandparents, but I entered what little I knew. Then I got distracted for a few hours. When I shifted my focus back to the Ancestry website a few hours later, I already had several notifications. One of those notifications was a picture of my maternal great-grandmother who died before I was born. I had never seen a picture of her. I cannot put into words how wonderful that moment was for me. Since then, I have tracked my family's geneology back to 200 AD and discovered many interesting things about my bloodline. For instance, my twenty-third great-grandfather, the originator of my last name, was the First Grandmaster of the Knights of the Templar. As it turns out, that isn't such a big deal, but it's always an good conversation starter.

People watching. Human behavior has always fascinated me, and people watching is the best way I know to witness the always entertaining and often educational idiosyncrasies of human behavior. I sit for hours, carefully and deliberately watching the people around me to determine whether they are smart or dumb, interesting and fun or boring and dull, happy or sad, anxious or relaxed. I spin theories in my head about their lives and sometimes even the lives of the people who are close to them, all based on the way they hold themselves, their sense of fashion, the state of their clothes, and other superficial characteristics. I imagine what it must be like to be them, to walk in their shoes. A had a friend once who liked to make a game of it whenever we went to a gay bar. We'd stand in the corner of the bar, survey the guys around us, then take turns spinning stories about them, sometimes detailed and extravagant, other times short and sweet, all times wildly entertaining.

We all view the world around us through our own unique lens, developed from our lifetime of unique experiences, and it is through our unique lens that we make sense of everything we experience. This is what makes people watching so entertaining for me. Seeing how different people interact with one another and with the physical environment, each interpreting the situation through their own unique perspective, has helped me gain a greater understanding of human behavior in general and my own behavior in particular. This is the kind of stuff they don't teach in school but is so extremely important for success in life. Over the years, I've noticed some places are better than others for this activity.

.....Gay sex club Gay men operate on their natural instincts when hunting for sex. If you've ever been to a gay sex club, you know what I mean. Horny gay men wearing, at most, a small towel that barely covers the important parts walk around the club chasing guy after guy, with the goal of having sex with as many men as they can within the six hour time limit. It's a constant game of cat and mouse that plays out over and over, and I can attest from personal experience that if you chase a guy around a sex club long enough, he will eventually give in.

.....Airport: Delayed flights, cancelled vacations, snarled traffic, slow moving taxis that get you to the airport too late. These are just a few of the things that cause the stress levels of weary passengers to skyrocket at airports around the world. I worked for a major airline for 23 years, and I've spent thousands of hours at airports. There is no other place on Earth where you will see such a total disregard for human kindness. I've been yelled at, pushed, made fun of, and spat on by upset passengers. That same aggression is aimed at other passengers too, giving host to a variety of bad behavior that simply would not be accepted anywhere else.

.....San Francisco Muni: Public transportation systems around the world have provided me with memorable people watching moments, and San Francisco city busses are the cream of this particular crop. One Muni bus line in particular attracts more than its fair share of extraordinary behavior, the 71 Haight/Noriega. I have witnessed spit ball fights, physical disagreements, and a host of other unusual behaviors on this bus. It's a travelling freak show that always seems to be dripping in drama. And it's well worth the bus fare, no matter how high it is.

Reading: I have great respect for good storytellers, someone who can not only tell a story but also make it appealing enough to others that it pulls them into the story's action. My undergraduate degree is in English Literature. That is how I learned to read between the lines, to understand the meaning hidden behind a story's action. It is also how I learned to appreciate the use of literary techniques to engage the reader. Every writer uses a host of techniques to capture the reader's interest and pull them closer to the story. These techniques are very often transparent to the reader, silent mechanisms that work on the reader's pysche in a way that allows them to better enjoy a story. I'm not a big fan of poetry, and non-fiction is usually too uninterersting. Fiction is my genre. What I most appreciate about good fiction is that the story might be made up, its meaning and message is very real. Stories put words to how things in the world work, and they help us learn to navigate these thing without having first hand experience. Good storytellers know how to unpack our feelings toward the human experience and teach us how to decode its dynamics. This can help us start paying attention to feelings we previously experienced but didn't get enough of our attention because maybe we didn't understand or we were too busy focusing on something else. A good storyteller lets us take on some of their sensitivity to the world, making our lives become richer, clearer, and not as lonely. Every story teaches us something about the world and provides us with different perspective from which to view it. The greatest stories transport us to a different place and time, allowing us to interact with the story without actually leaving our home. Not every storyteller is a good storyteller, and it's always a good feeling when we find a writer we enjoy. Here are a few of the writers who have entertained and amazed me by being unique in their storytelling.

.....Salman Rushdie: Rushdie's brand of storytelling is unqiue in many ways. My favorite is the reader character. In each of his novels, there is a character who represents the reader, and Rushdie has such tight control over his story that he knows what questions the reader has in their mind. The reader character interupts the story's action to ask these questions just as the reader is asking these questions in their mind. This allows the reader to connect with the story's action in a very fundamental way. Rushdie is also known for his unreliable narrators. The narrator of a story has unquestioned credibility to the reader, who believes everything the narrator says. Rushdie challenges this notion by creating narrators who lie, mislead, and sometimes even play with the reader's perception of what is going on in the story. This adds new dimensions to a story, layer after layer of perception and awareness.

.....William Faulkner: Faulkner's unique ability is to confuse the fuck out of the reader, often making them second guess their decision to read his story. For instance, the first quarter of The Sound and the Fury is told from the perspective of a mentally challenged person. It describes a series of non-chronological events presented as a stream of consciousness, all told in the present tense. The first time you read it, you are left utterly confused, and you have literally no idea what you just read. It is only after several readings that it begins to make sense. But note, millions of readers have taken the time and effort to read it multiple times in their effort to understand what Faulkner has to say. He transports the reader into the mind of this mentally challenged character, and once there, the reader begins to view the world as this mentally challenged character views the world, jumbled snippets of confusion with no real sense of when, why, or where. This is the genius of Faulkner's writing. This section of the book is so different from anything that has ever been written that it is quite literally one-of-a-kind.

.....Jane Austen: Austen's sentences are long, very long. The use of compound sentences, two or more simple sentences each with one subject and one predicate combined to create one complex sentence, is a major part of her literary style. Pick up any Austen novel and turn to any page, and it will be filled with sentences that seem to continue indefinitely. The thing about Austen's long sentences is that they are exquisite, each one a perfectly balanced repository of multisyllabic, Latinate words that elegantly and beautifully describe the events of the story. Austen was the primary writer of the literary genre the novel of manners, fiction that focused on the social conventions of a particular class in a particular time and place. All of Austen's novel take place within Georgian society and particularly within the aristacracy that so characterizes this society. Her novels question the legitimacy of the aristocracy and its dependence on status and class to determine an individual's place in society and the ridiculousness of inherited nobility. These criticisms are especially interesting when you consider that she published her novels in her own name at a time when very few female writers were afforded such a liberty, and she was only able to do this because her family held high rank in the social hierarchy and were well connected in social circles of the publishing industry.

.....Iam McEwan: McEwan has the unique ability to make the reader feel the emotions of the characters in the the story. In Atonement, he sets up a great love affair, two people who are destined to be together, then he violently snatches it away, leaving the reader to deal with the emotional loss, just like the characters must. He also has a way of transposing the raw emotion in uncomfortable silences onto the reader. He exposes the awkwardness and tension of these moments, describing them in a way that allows the reader to feel the emotional tension that makes these moments so uncomfortable. In another of his books, the protagonist buys a bag of potato chips just before boarding a train. He doses for a bit, then wakes up to find the passenger sitting across from him eating his potato chips. He takes a chip from the bag, then the other passenger, then him again, and so on and so on until the bag is empty. When he arrives at his destination, he finds the bag of chips he purchased in his coat pocket.

The Psychology of Habits

A habit is a behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur on a subconscious level, something we do seemingly without thinking about it. Habits are extremely important in both our personal and our professional lives. As much as 45% of what we do every day is done without thinking about it (Wood, 2019). Stated another way, almost half of our actions are not conscious choices but the result of our unconscious mind telling our body to act in a certain way. How we respond to the people around us, the way we conduct ourselves in meetings, the things we buy, when and how we eat, sleep, and drink, and many, many more of the things we do operate outside of our awareness, regardless of how complex they might be. The success of our careers, even the success of our companies, depend on the habits that form around how we perform our work duties (Duhigg, 2014). Habit formation is a psychological pattern that has three components: a cue, a routine, and a reward (ibid). A cue is a trigger that tells the brain to go into automatic mode and let a behavior happen. A routine is the habit itself, the behavior that is automatically started when triggered. A reward is a pleasant reaction to the behavior, something the brain likes that helps it encode the behavior for future use. Most habits are formed automatically. Although there are thoughts involved in the process, they are very often subconscious thoughts that do not get the attention of the conscious mind.

My Habits

I watch a lot of TV. When I was a kid, the only interesting thing in the house was the TV, and cable wasn't available where we lived until I was well into high school. Until then, we used rabbit ear antenae and had to switch back and forth between UHF and VHF, never getting a clear picture. Television techology has changed quite a lot since then. I think I've actively watched a TV show every year since. Cheers, Star Treak: The Next Generation, Frasier, Seinfeld, Ellen, Will and Grace, 3rd Rock from the Sun, South Park, Glee, Sex and the City, Modern Family, Big Bang Theory, How to Get Away with Murder.

I do things fast. I talk fast. I walk fast. I eat fast. Most of the things I do, I do fast. This pattern of behavior, doing things fast, got encoded into my brain as a habit when I was a kid, and it is the result of being next to the youngest of thirteen children. In our family, the squeaky wheel got the oil, and there usually wasn't enough oil to go around, so I learned to be squeaky sooner than my brothers and sisters. This is not necessarily a bad habit. From one perspective, it makes me efficient and productive. I can produce things quickly, which helps me in my professional life. But my communication skills suffer sometimes by talking too fast, which presents a challenge in my professional life. I can do things at a normal speed, but to do so, I must remain present and focused on what I'm doing. To sustain that mental state long-term is not always an easy thing to do. Like all things that we've done since we were children, breaking this habit has proven extremely difficult, if not impossible, so strength or weakness it seems to be here to stay.

I talk loud. This behavior also established itself as a habit when I was a kid, and it's another squeaky wheel thing. I come from a family of loud talkers, and whoever squeaked the loudest usually got the oil. When we are together, we talk to and over each other, different voices flying this way and that way, each competing to dominate the conversation. Seriously, there have been times that people across the street can hear us.

Diet and excercise. To be more specific, a terrible diet and no excercise. I eat a lot of junk food, all the time, and I wash it down with soda...usually Coca Cola or Grape Fanta. This is definitely a bad habit, and it makes me fatter than I should be. I have not suffered from any health problems because of it, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time before I do.

Being a homebody. I have always been the type of person who prefers to stay home all the time. When I was in my twenties, I socialized a lot more than I do today, which made me struggle with this habit, but as I've grown older, I have given into the habit more easily and struggled with it much less. Today, this habit makes me both fat and boring.

Works Cited

Duhigg, C. (2014). The power of habit: why we do what we do in life and business. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Wood, W. (2019). Good habits, bad habits: the science of making positive changes that stick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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