During the night
I clean my house.
What do you do in your free time?
I never have a good answer to that question. Not because I don't do anything. It's rather complicated.
Unless I have a good chunk of the day to discuss about my interest with the person asking, (and the person is willing to sit through that,) my usual answer for this question is :
"I clean my house all day."
This might sound rude to some people, and I feel bad every time I answer with my lousy non-answer.
I feel bad because this is definitely a conversation stopper.
Why I freeze when I am asked this question, is that I have so many things going on. In my head I'm trying to pick one of my current interests that is relevant to the person I'm talking to, but that's really hard.
And I do whatever I feel like doing that day surely isn't a great answer either.
So in that moment, I default to a very generic thing I do every day which is keeping my space clean
for the activities that matter to me.
The Curse of the Generalist.
There are so many things one can try and do in a lifetime, and it sometimes terrify me. What if I die without even knowing I could have spent my life doing that?
I think I had this kind of idea very early on in my life, and it shaped me into a generalist.
I've had an affinity to creative and artistic activities, and a generalist mindset led me to try all sorts of medium and consume a lot of information regarding these topics. Some I haven't even tried but just sat down and passively consumed information about them.
A drawing of mine (more about this here) accidentally led me to discovering making music (with modular synthesizers) as an interest, and that has been occupying my head as well.
After picking up that interest, I realized it is a very expensive hobby. This led me to pick up basic electronics, which enabled me to DIY a lot of my synthesizers to shave off a little bit of the cost.
This is just a slice of what I am doing with my time, and I'm talking about this to illustrate a point. My point being, that one thing leads to another, like a stream of consciousness. There are also multiples of these streams. I can't possibly figure out a bite-sized answer to such a multi-layer question on the spot.
Some might say I have ADHD, and I suspect that too. But the doctors won't listen to me :)
Localizing the question.
I do realize when someone asks me What do you do in your free time?, they aren't interested in
my life saga of trying to make sense of the world; they are interested in what I'm up to these days.
I do realize that, but my brain actively blocks that out of my head when I'm asked this question.
I'm bad at smalltalk.
Multi-layer questions require multi-layer answers, so I need a way to internally localize it to a smaller question when I'm prompted with it.
The now page is where I attempt to solve that. It is where I record what I am up to these days, and I will be regularly updating that page so that I can point people to it, or just have myself prepared with a what's-going-on-in-my-life-right-now answer.
Other than that, I am also finding ways to tame my endless stream of consciousness and free-flowing thoughts into something more tangible and manageable (for me and others who seek). I started this website to facilitate that in the first place.
So, that was my roundabout way of telling you to go check out my now page instead as I don't really have a clean and simple answer to describe how I am as a person right now. The rest of my website will serve to slowly fill in the extra details that are not mentioned in that page.
(or maybe I'll figure out my elevator pitch one day...)
