Phases

My life (and pretty much anyone else's life, I believe) has always had these phases where I tend to do one or two or three things more often than others.

I would say as a kid, playing games and sports were the best things ever. What I played at any given time was decided by the season: The rains meant "hand tennis" on the basketball courts, winter meant cricket in school and badminton at home, the summers meant cricket in the morning and badminton in the evenings. Then as I grew older (in the higher standards) my performance at school competitions meant phases of Chess (I used to play 20 match championships with my sis and friends and stay up late to watch whoever Gary Kasparov was playing in the world championships then).

At all other times it was either TV/books. I took up to reading at a very young age, partly because there weren't so many people my age to play with as a kid and partly because there wasn't much on TV. Then satellite television and cable entered my life and changed it forever. Books were kind of relegated as something to be read when there is nothing interesting on TV or on a train trip (but never on a bus/car trip with all my motion sickness). I also started playing video games at my cousin's place and thought of how nice it would be when I could move into the "video games" phase.

School also introduced co curricular activities and cultural activities in which I was particularly good at quizzing. So obviously there was a quizzing phase and towards the end of secondary school even a dramatics phase.

As I entered high school, there were very few ppl my age to play with, so I used to play imagine cricket (either pretend as a bowler in a purple patch taking all 10 wickets, discover a new delivery/pretend as a batsman facing deliveries bounced off a wall and score the fastest century to save your team from collapse) all alone/invent board games based on sports. I entered the video games phase at this time, where I would try to one up my sister at Mario and try to team up against the game at Contra.
Also at this time, I hit the "music phase", where I started to develop a sense of music and bought a lot of audio cassettes.

So by this time the playing went from playing sports to video games, TV was still going pretty strong and Reading was beginning to co exist with music.

And then computers happened. And life was never the same again... Actually at that time..all this meant was more games and movies on VCDs and later DVDs[:)] and some programming and some photoshop....

So now I'm in college and in the "Music+Reading+Games+Videos" phase. This phase pretty much continued thru my work life and thru grad school, and my transition to a sedentary worker was completed [:)]. Also I had moved from PC to PSP at this time for games.

In 2007, I played my first euro game. (I had played board games before and had been in that phase at some point of time but this was limited to Monopoly, Scotland Yard, Mastermind and some of my own invented board games.) I was instantly hooked, this was my true calling. Although I never played a single game of Ticket to Ride since, I jumped in with both feet and now own more games than all my friends combined:
Settlers of the Stone Age,
Power Grid (most played),
Clue,
Thurns and Taxis,
Space Alert,
For Sale,
Dominion (Original + Seaside + Intrigue)
Several card games,
Power Grid Factory Manager

Not a lot of my friends (not even my wife) share this enthusiasm of games, which has caused me to play online starting at YourTurnMyTurn.com and more recently BSW.

I have also moved on from PSP to PS3 and this also includes playing RockBand (my usual set is WonderWall + Jeremy + Don't Speak + Pretty Fly for a wise guy + Uncle John's band)

My reading has graduated from plain text literature to graphic novels and experimental books.

Observations

My phases have actually all stuck with me. Some of them have merged:

Music + Reading + Puzzle/mystery solving -> Video games
Reading + Videos/Games -> Graphic Novels
Music + Video Games -> Rockband
Video games + need for interaction + strategy - > euro games

At this point of time, I spend my average day (what's that?) (and yes my day starts after work ends) either playing video games (Arkham Asylum/Rockband) or playing boardgames (Dominion/Power Grid on BSW) or badminton or table tennis. Sometimes I play a tune on my keyboard or watch free to air TV / hulu. And sometimes I even read a graphic novel or two.

Hobbies you say. Just phases according to me. So many options, such few hours.



Disclaimer:

I do the things mentioned above only when I'm not doing the more important things in life: spending time with my wife, eating/cooking, talking to my folks back home in India, watching cricket or watching college football. Sleep, as always, is optional.