This is a short video which will mean something to some people and leave others completely cold. If you aren’t identifying with the fellow on some level in a very short time, probably you wouldn’t need to keep watching. Oh, the video starts when you click the link in case that is a problem for anyone’s computer. I couldn’t seem to make it do otherwise.
OMG, tears are coming out i’m laughing so hard.
i guess i identify.
thanks for the link.
Uhhh …
me too.
Does this mean we get a ward to ourselves?
I think my wife is worse though (thank goodness).
My kids are doomed.
No answers or solutions. Just whining about it won’t change anything. The one about boxes is worse.
Kinda depressing, really.
djm
Holy crap it’s me!
That was amazing.
I’m always getting distracted by shiny new things and it costs me a frickin fortune. Mainly because I have to research it all to make sure I do it right. My soul bleeds if I enter into a new hobby in some half arsed newbie way.
I am geek, hear me obsess pointlessly about many trivial things.
The vid won’t play for me. I suppose I have to download something.
You need quicktime.
here it is on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXKKtATfASY
I tried to download that, and it took freakin’ forever (“Quicktime” it was not), the 'puter seized up, and the download never took, anyway. Feh.
Thanks, rh.
Okay, saw the routine. I understand where djm is coming from. I watched the whole thing thinking how sad - even though realising that it was just a comedy skit - that he would grasp serially at activities like a drowning man, as if they would relieve the great boredom, or lack of fulfillment, with life that he apparently experiences. Or maybe he thinks that he *ought* to have a hobby, any hobby, as that's what people do, or something. Who knows. And it wasn't so much the parade of unfinished and ill-approached activities that struck me, it was the whining. If it hurts, why keep doing it?
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I kept thinking he ought to learn to just sit quietly, doing nothing. His coming to a point of revulsion with his frantic habit puts him in a prime position to give it a go.
Sorry for the lack of humor on my part. :frowning:I only ever did that with backpacking gear. About 10 years ago. Jeff and I both backpacked when we were younger, and liked it, so I determined that we’d start up again and drag the kids along. Other aspects of life happened instead.
I’ve used the tents a number of times. And the sleeping bags. And the Coleman stove during ice storms when we lost power for 2 days. (on the front porch, I’m not that nuts.) I gave the green spatterwear to Rachel for college. I think she will probably take my backpack soon. It’s nice.
But we were going to hike the Continental Divide trail, once the kids all got independent enough to leave behind. A health problem happened.
That idea is scotched. Well, maybe the teardrop trailer, which I won’t buy until I know I can use it.
I dunno, Em; I don’t see that as the same situation.
Ha! I keep looking at vehicles, wondering how they’d fare hauling one. 
i won’t speak for anyone else, but for me it’s probably a mild form of OCD.
i don’t whine about it (if anything i laugh about it), but i could definitely identify with the character, even if he’s kind of over the top. and i’ve been at it long enough that i can recognize it in myself and slow myself down a bit before totally going off the deep end.
it’s hard to explain, i suppose, to somebody who doesn’t share the geeky obsessiveness gene…
that’s what i’m talkin bout…
No, it wouldn’t be! It was hard enough to get them all in the car in the old days.
Good grief, that whole thing was so manic! 
Was it shot that way on purpose? Kind of like kids cartoons now…the voices speak so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. I really can’t take it…it makes my head spin.
Apparently, I didn’t identify with it 
I was determined not to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself. 
I think I relate to a degree… Thanks, Cynth, I enjoyed it!
M
I took it on a much lighter note…as the humorous entertainment I believe it was meant to be. Like most good humor, it makes me laugh more if I can relate to it at least a little bit. It was over the top, and not an overview of a real person (I think).
I also think the maudlin music in the background had a huge effect on the films impact…perhaps even more so with C & F folks since they are musically inclined to begin with.
It was just for laughs, and I enjoyed it!
I saw a version of myself in the fellow instantly, like rh and chrisoff, or I wouldn’t have watched much of the video at all probably. And I seemed to take it on a pretty heavy note—but then I would .
For me, and everyone would be seeing it a different way I’m sure, there were some funny parts, more toward the beginning, but I actually found it quite saddening as it went on and I never took it to be a comedy skit—I think whoever made it must have been going for more than laughs. I didn’t feel the guy was whining. I thought he was ranting at himself. He is angry at himself. At one point he says “C****t, I’m a f*****g idiot”. He means it too. No one would wish more than he that he could stop doing it. But he can’t.
I think that, as chrisoff and rh said, he is an all or nothing person. Everything has to be perfect—there is no middle ground. And he never gets to the point of actually DOING the hobby. His interest is genuine in some sense, but by the time he gets perfectly prepared (his need to find the perfect engineer’s hat, for example) he has gotten burnt out or lost interest or has found it is just all too much to deal with. He is sort of leading an armchair existence. He experiences things only by reading how to do them, how to best prepare for them, not by actually doing them. I think this is not very funny at all.
Why does he keep doing it if it hurts? I don’t know. Is his perfectionism getting in the way of his doing things he might actually really enjoy doing, or is his perfectionism serving as a mechanism to avoid really doing anything at all? Why would he want to avoid doing anything at all? I don’t think the questions are that simple to answer. I interpreted his manic affect to be a manifestation of his intense anxiety—I mean, he is one supremely anxious person in my opinion.
I am finding the huge variation in responses very interesting.
Oh, and I don’t seem to understand what you are meaning by “the one about boxes”, my little chickadee 
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I don’t really identify with the video..but it totally captures my wife’s brief obsessions with hobbies!
i HAD a friend like that. i google him every now & then just to be on the safe side.
There is a series of five short films on the first web page you linked to, all on the basic topic of Regret. You selected the Regrets: Hobbies one, but I watched some of the others, like Regret: Boxes which I mentioned. The more I watched, the less funny they seemed.
Yes, I definitely recognize myself in the Regret: Hobbies film. I am an armchair nothing. But I found no humour in the ranting, and no resolution offered, so what use is the film; to me, at least, if to no-one else? The rest of the films just get sadder and sadder. (Well, okay, Regrets: Spoon was pretty funny)
djm