Chelsea, Interrupted

Before I got so busy with work and school and extracurriculars, most of my days revolved around crochet. I was crocheting whenever I could. During class, in the middle of the night, fighting through car sickness on my bus rides home. My lack of shame has caused me to have the same conversation a million times.

“I could never do that. I’ve tried, but I could never get it.”

And to that I would say that I understood. It took me years to get crocheting right. My grandma had tried to teach me as a little girl and I couldn’t complete a project till I was 14. Then,

“Do you sell what you make? Could you make me something?”

I used to get flustered and try to beat around the bush with maybes and kindas. Now my common response is a laugh. I ask, “Do you know how long a blanket takes? A stuffed animal?” Now they are the flustered ones.

A blanket, if I worked day and night nonstop, might take me a week. To spread that work across my few minutes, maybe an hour, of freetime, it takes months. What’s so difficult about selling art is that the wage is almost never fair. I would be hard pressed to find an average, working person who would spend more than a 100 dollars on a blanket. If I was paid minimum wage (10.70 in Ohio) for 120 hours (5 whole days) I would be paid 1,284 dollars. For, again, one blanket.
I’m sure when I answer this way I seem cruel, and I think a big part of my aggression is the resentment that I have started to harbor. In our generation, fed on the culmination of disappearing attention spans and economical crises, a hobby must be making money to be considered worthwhile. With adult lives being dominated by work schedules, sometimes multiple work schedules, I wouldn’t even consider pastimes common. The joy of hobbies have gone and been replaced by the ingrained need to produce and consume.
This loss is dangerous. This loss puts the cold productivity of machines over the intimacy of human hands. When we lose the meaning of “meaningless” pursuits, celebrated for centuries, we lose the culture of humanity.