In a previous life, I was an attorney with too much student debt. I figured if I sacrificed my feminist principles and allowed the men I dated to buy my meals, and otherwise subsisted on packaged noodles, I could in one year, on a corporate lawyer’s salary, pay down the loan sufficiently to at least keep me from having a panic attack every time I opened my bank statement. I bought an unfortunate double-breasted suit at Filene’s Basement, and sat for a dozen interviews with law firms. Every interviewer asked me the same bizarre question: what are your hobbies? They might as well have said, “Tell me what will you miss most when you’re putting in fourteen-hour days beneath the fluorescent lights of our tastefully-decorated offices?”Article continues after advertisement
Still they expected an answer. The first time I was so taken aback that I said, “Uh. I don’t really have any hobbies. I read a lot.” I didn’t get that job. After that I began to say, “Reading is my hobby. Mostly fiction, sometimes memoir. Also, I ski.” I do not ski. My father and brothers, however, were skiers, and I had been schlepped up the bunny slope enough to convincingly fake a conversation about schussing and moguls.
