Hobbies to pick up if you are bored 🔭

Movie magic has always been elusive to me. With infinitely generated visuals displayed to me by nauseating ads, I’ve always found it difficult to find something to really look at. 2001’s triumph is its elegance, the magnificent weightlessness of the heaviest concepts, unmoored from Earth. Enemy’s triumph is its perversion, the grim and dizzying heights of a landscape built for titanic spiders that we are forced to fit ourselves into. But there is no geology in Jurassic Park. There is much to look at, but I was born much too late to appreciate it the way I’m meant to. The problem isn’t a lack of enchantment - I do love Jurassic Park. Movie magic will never die. The problem is that I live in the age of images.

That is why, to all those who love the outdoors, even those who have no interest in birding, I highly recommend investing in a pair of good binoculars. It’s such a pure joy to rediscover one’s own sense of sight. A view of a distant cliff, a Cardinalis cardinalis, whether that’s the 5 or the 202 in the distance: These sights are impossible.

My journey with a blue jay - from hearing its annoying pop song, to fruitlessly scouring the treetops (looking past the genteel grackle), to giving up just as I catch a glimpse of its flutter from one branch to another, to spotting it with my blurring binoculars, to zeroing in on it with the focus wheel - what a rollercoaster! All this to say nothing of the robin, cardinal, redstart, pewee, virio, and so little of the polite grackle.

And yet, even without binoculars, what journeys I can go on. I love to really look at my cat: I love to glare into her eyes, despite knowing that cats take this as a threat - I think a little playful ribbing is never undue, especially with such a close friend. I’ll spiral around her face - her nose has such a different texture than the fur all around it, or the lips below it. Her pupils may be narrow, slender like I want to be, in the shimmering daylight, or wide, like my eyes are, taking in as much light as they can. She is a black cat, but in the light she’s such a magnificent rough of darkness from which brown strands emerge and fizzle off into white mirrors, except for the two white spots on her belly. Her toe beans have the texture of stone, her tail forming artificial loops as she winds down her attention. So kind of her to be my subject.

It is trite to advise anyone to stop and smell the roses, and yet I feel like I must share my secret. Can everyone really see the stars at night, glimmering from light-millennia away? Perhaps my wonderment betrays my narcissism, thinking that I alone see and therefore am. At least it was a good writing exercise. I’ll end with a true confession, to repent.

A friend and I, while camping, spotted a man on the lake early in the morning. A lone kayaker, bright orange like a radiant fish, fitting perfectly in the water. Behold, Archimedes! He looked so picture-perfect, sitting in his vessel, totally ignorant of the fact that two twenty somethings were spying on him through 8-42 Nikons. My friend, a dedicated artist, could not forget that we live in the age of images - they had to draw him. The gentle sprinkle of rain smudged the picture, so that by the end of the sketch it looked like a comic book’s denotation that he was leaping out of the water. Did he know he was a superhero in our secret creeping? I wonder if he saw us; I wonder what he was looking at.