My Trendy Hipster Hobby: I don't have one

I was flipping through a magazine the other day, and I came across this tampon ad featuring a girl who writes a blog about knitting. Immediately I think: "I'm not as cool as her." Given my history with knitting, this thought is fairly surprising.

I first considered the craft when I was probably about 10 years old, and I bought some knitting needles and yarn with the intention of making really amazing things. Except the fate of the knitting needles was to be props in my make-believe games, specifically in those that required me to impersonate an old lady. Just go with it - my childhood pretend games were pretty convoluted.

Maybe four years later, Kim (my sister - she writes here sometimes) decided to learn to knit for real, and she tried to convince me to do the same. I, however, adopted the knitting-is-for-old-ladies-and-spinsters attitude. I had realized neither that spinsters no longer exist, nor that all properly cool girls these days must behave and dress like old ladies from time to time. In addition to being oblivious to cultural trends, I failed to acknowledge how cool it would be to knit my own scarves. Seriously, if I could knit, I would knit scarves by the thousands.

In many ways, my relationship with knitting resembles my relationships with all other hobbies. This means that I pretended to do a lot of things as a child, became too cool to even consider doing these things as a teenager, and then really wished I could do them as a young adult. Hypothetically, I know that it's never too late to take up a hobby, but every time I try, the experience is somewhat akin to dying my hair, in that it seems exciting at first, but I eventually decide that the upkeep requires more effort than it's worth. At least this has been my experience with my forays into photography, sewing, drawing, and writing poetry.

Don't take this to mean that I spend all of my time doing nothing. I cook things from time to time and do what I like to call food-ography:

Occasionally I acquire random new skills, like sailing:

I read things, I write things, I listen to music, but I don't really make anything by hand. Sometimes this troubles me, because I really like the idea of coming up with a concept and then creating this thing from raw(ish) materials. The fact that I read a lot of blogs by very creative people only compounds the problem. They're like, "Oh, look, I woke up today and decided to hand paint a rug" And I'm like, "Cool. I painted my toenails last week." 

I think the secret to having creative hobbies is having creative ideas, and maybe this is where my major failing lies. Or maybe I'm just lazy. Maybe I don't make anything because every time I think, "I'd really like a new shirt," I never consider making my own or repurposing one from a thrift store. Usually I just go to Forever 21. 

Could it be to my advantage, though, to begin making more things as I take on my grad school debt? Quite possibly. Maybe the desire to look really cool won't inspire me to be creative, but maybe financial necessity will...

Maybe learning to knit wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.