The peripatetic amongst us, growing up as we did on Nickelodeon and Nintendo (though I never had the former myself) have, in the age of instant access to glowing screens transmitting all manners of entertainment and information, have a hard time with hobbies. I mean real hobbies, too, one that require us to develop mastery of a skill for no reason other than interest in the subject matter or goal of the activity.
Hobbies are also solitary enterprises by nature. Be it making ships in a bottle or spinning furniture legs on a lathe or tying flies, hobbies are engrossments, fixations upon the minutiae of something that, generally speaking, pays poorly or not at all when practiced professionally. There are no famous ship in a bottle makers.
That's because you don't make ships in a bottle to be famous, though you may tire your friends by making them look at them. You may not even keep the fruits of your labor- how many tiny sailing vessels can cut cleanly through the oak of the b
uilt-in cabinets in the study, anyway, their prows proudly plowing towards Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy?
So it's also better if there is a shared groups of devotees of your hobby. It's great to make your ship in a bottle, but it's several orders of magnitude better if you can go to ship in a bottle making conferences, where ship in a bottle making experts weigh in on the relative merits and demerits of all sorts of tiny riggings, jobs and mizzenmasts. Hobbies require this in order to develop. Someone has to discuss and critique and suggest in order for the activity to standardize and advance. Otherwise, some of these yahoos putting vinyl sealant on their HMS Ark replicas might think that they're hot stuff, am I right?
Even if you have the interest, though, a lot of hobbies require the means. Sure, maybe you would love to work on cars or make furniture, but without a roof to keep the rain out (and heat to make the space useable in the winter, for those of us who have made the mistake of living in a cold climate) and an array of forged steel tools, you are S.O.L., my friend. Don't have a workbench to stretch and rig tiny canvas sails? Don't have a utility closet to keep all of the X-Actos and the Dremel and the tiny planks of oak?
Well, I bet you have a TV and a computer, and I bet your friends do, too. Thus are many of the hobbyists of the aughts equipped. And of all the hobbies that they choose, fantasy sports continues to dominate. Football is the most popular, but the obsession fly trap I myself have become adhered to is fantasy basketball. I'm an NBA fan going a long way back, and I have played in a league once before (in high school- weirdly, that team had many of the same deficiencies) and so, this year, I got a group of friends and co-workers together and started a league. Now I find myself disturbingly addicted to it. I check scores several times a night. I consider a waiver pick-up on a daily basis. I have used all three of my players add this week alone. I already know who I will add this week.
I feel fine about this, though, because I have turned fantasy basketball into a seriously cerebral holiday from reality. With Microsoft Excel as my ally, I am digging deeper and deeper into the giant piles of numbers that modern sports produces, and finding it much more rewarding intellectually than I would have imagined. I don't watch SportsCenter, and I usually choose to drift away from conversations about sports at parties or group gatherings, but I cannot get enough of projecting weekly scores and comparing the number of standard deviations away from the mean one player's assist-to-turnover ratio is. I create weekly power ranking emails and send them to my coworkers. I have created The World's Greatest Fantasy Basketball Manager's Dashboard Spreadsheet, and I am proud of it.
World's greatest is an exaggeration, to be sure, but I am proud of my handiwork. In the above dashboard element, I am predicting the outcome of the upcoming week's game by projecting the production of each player on my team in each of the eleven statistical categories my league competes in. I have other elements that evaluate the player's impact as compared to the league, my team, or on a weekly basis, factoring in the number of games played.
I find the process of working on this spreadsheet extremely satisfying. I have never worked much with numbers, though I have always had a preference for statistical data over anecdotal reporting, so it comes as a mild surprise to me that I am this engrossed in something that I think is, fundamentally unimportant. Who cares how many rebounds Josh Smith gets per game (a lot) or how many of them are offensive (also a lot) when there's starving kids in China or whatever? It's not the subject matter, though, it's just the exercise of it. I have several math-oriented competitors in this league. The last math class I took was freshman calculus, which was a repeat of senior year of high school's AP Calculus, and I got a C- in both. So, I am motivated to show myself I can do better, and this is how I am proving it.
It also has the hallmarks of a great hobby. It is solitary in the sense that you manage your team, have little to no contact with your competitors, and yet, there is a huge community of people out there that share your interest. The level of intellectual engagement is high, the ability to differentiate yourself through research and effort is, too, and the metrics for success (winning categories and, eventually, the league) are easy to measure.
My father made fly rods, tied flys, sharpened and waxed his own skis, trains horses, and on and on. I travel for a living and I don't care for the outdoors, so I guess it's fantasy basketball for me, for now.
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