My Hobby is Collecting Hobbies

I n recent months I've attempted to take up cake decorating as a hobby. The results have ranged from borderline professional (the only-slightly-mangled owl cake I made for my cousin's graduation) to screaminducing (the notorious Malformed Grayish-Purple Macaroni Flower Torte of Dooooom!)

The good news is that most of my efforts, if not entirely appetizing, do seem to make the dog very happy as icing plops out the back of my decorating bag and onto the stickier-by-the-minute kitchen floor.

I should probably stop before North America runs out of powdered sugar. But I'm a creative (read: craftinclined but endowed with poor spatial skills) person, so I persist in this.

And the balloon-animal tying.

And the quilling.

And the ukulele songwriting. (Anyone for "***School Name Deleted*** Is A Bunch Of Big Sissies and They Cheated Us Out of Fourth Place in 2011?" And has anyone else noticed that homemade songs don't have the same appeal as, say, homemade sugar cookies? Just an observation.)

Now that I'm getting to the time in my academic career where I need to fill out scholarship applications, I always groan when they ask me to describe my hobbies in 150 words or less. So I've come up with a fantastic solution: I simply write down that my hobby is collecting hobbies. It works great and saves 145 words' worth of ink.

People tell me that I'm "well-rounded" because of my manifold interests. And, thankfully, most colleges don't ask for photos of your Tortes of Doom as part of the application process.

Actually, as long as we're talking about cakes and colleges, I was reading a college admissions guidebook that had a very handy section on what not to do. They quoted one admissions counselor who was talking about a bizarre incident that had happened to a colleague. One student, bent on admission to the college of his choice, had decorated a cake in a manner that conveyed as much. He then learned the colleague's address, snuck into his backyard at night, and left the cake on his porch. I'm pretty sure that there's no SAT score high enough to overshadow that encounter. But as with my own personal cake debacles, his frosted fiasco spread happiness to a number of smaller creatures - ants.

A year or so ago, I took up jewelry making. It seems like there should be a fancier term for that, like jewlering or beadstringery, but there isn't. That's a bit of a bummer, because when people hear "jewelry making" the first image to pop into their heads usually entails an elementary-school teacher and a "Valu-Size!" bag of pony beads.

Between that and the yodeling and the leather braiding and the scrapbooking and the modular origami, my collection's fairly impressive, even if the contents themselves lack a certain degree of luster. And even if I won't have anything in the Louvre anytime soon, I'm having fun - and that's all that matters.

Sing me off, everybody! "In 2011 when I was a freshman / I was in Knowledge Bowl and we were the best, man / But our glory got swiped by a bunch of preppy dudes in name-brand suits / I think that they and the moderator were secretly in cahoots!"