I occasionally joke that I am a woman without hobbies. To some extent, this is true–when asked what I do for fun at job interviews (or, you know, dates, if I want to pretend to be less weird), I have difficulty coming up with anything. I like to take naps and listen to music while staring into space.

But, as this weekend reminded me, the joke isn’t entirely true. I know this because I indulged in almost all of my hobbies this weekend. To wit:

Organizing things: Something in my soul finds it deeply soothing to fold my clothing into bundles, and so I did. Every piece of underwear and every t-shirt I own is now ranger rolled, and opening my dresser is now a profoundly soothing experience. Neuroses!

Eating food on patios: I wound up lunching at Tomatillos, ie the only tex-mex place in Atlanta that isn’t trying to do some misguided fusion thing. For $5, they will give you pinto beans and cheese on your choice of tortilla. They have an outdoor patio, and sangria–like the tacos–is $5. There is nothing in life that I like quite so much as that kind of food, and this is the only place in town that approaches anything in the midwest. The weather was nice, and my friend was hysterical, and afterwards we got to go to a used book shop that had both a VC Andrews and a PG Wodehouse novel available for a reasonable price. (Did I buy the Wodehouse so the clerk wouldn’t judge me? Maaaaybe.)

Reading vaguely political small-press books: There are three books that have made it with me through every move since I left for college. Get Crafty, for its madeline recipe; Making Stuff and Doing Things for its wine recipe and revolutionary fervor; and The Freedom Manifesto, for its encouragement of mindfulness, idleness, and the making of things. It had been months since I bothered to read any of them, and reading The Freedom Manifesto this weekend has done what therapy didn’t and made me feel a little more relaxed about life. The author has a wonderful passage about the freedom that comes with realizing that your life is more-or-less insignificant, and for someone prone to self-absorption and fretting, it is wonderfully soothing.

Biscuits with eggs: One of the very few things I miss about eating meat is the ability to eat gravy in restaurants, as most gravy in town has sausage in it. So instead of getting biscuits and gravy, I now get biscuits with egg and cheese. At a breakfast meetup this weekend, I added a side of cheese grits, because cheese. It was perfection, and–additionally–provided me with the fuel I needed to go sit for a few hours in a nearby coffee shop and crank out a few more bedraggled pages of my thesis’ shitty first draft*. The writing is terrible right now, but I cannot physically make it worse, and so at least I know that.

And really truly, more or less, those are my hobbies. There are a few more that I might add (British television, watching improv theatre, slightly-competitive bar trivia, good beer and bad wine), but all in all these are them. I am a weirdo, but right at this moment I am one who had a really delightful weekend, full of patios and limping productivity. And at this point, right now, that’s really all I’m hoping for.

* Have you not read Bird by Bird? Stop right now and check it out from the library, because every single line of that book is just deliciously correct.