While I was writing about widowed and orphaned paragraphs and blank lines, I was also watching a gymnastics competition streaming online, and Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” came on. Fitting! Between rotations the stream defaulted to a screen with the Pacific Rims logo and background pop music. My boyfriend says that the only time he ever hears pop music and the reason he recognizes most of these songs is that he watches so much hockey.

The way he watches hockey: he records it and then fast forwards through pieces of it so that the game ends up taking closer to an hour and a half to watch, instead of three hours or so. Apparently a hockey expert can discern based on the flight patterns and migrations of the players, the clusters and the spread of them, whether something exciting is imminent or not. I wondered out loud if he could make a profession out of doing this: cut the games into an enjoyable but more manageable size for fans who are pressed for time (it seems I was overlooking the existence of highlight packages done by networks, though they have their own agendas and talking heads). Or: could he watch the entire game, but in a slightly faster speed? In the days before Netflix had online streaming, I sometimes did this with movies that I needed to return–watched them at 1.2 or 1.4x. You lose nothing! Everyone just sounds like they’re a little more excited or they’ve had too much coffee.

Over the course of my life I’ve often been sad when my interests–whatever form they’ve taken, from an obsession with baby names when I was 13 (and frequented the AOL Parents baby name message boards) to a fascination with Mount Everest and any book, show or movie about it, to gymnastics–have started to wane, or to feel like work. Perhaps you go to a website, or forum, that you’ve frequented for years, and feel compelled to read every single post even though doing so feels like a chore. Or you wait eagerly for a gymnastics competition that’s actually televised (I often lament that neither of the sports I like to watch, tennis and gymnastics, have multiple games a week–a WEEK!–even as I realize how overwhelming that could be (like hockey is)) but when the competition airs you find yourself tuning out some of the routines, or being sated but not wanting to miss any part of the broadcast because that will somehow make you feel incomplete.

For now I’m still watching every routine–on the women’s side, anyway; for the men I watch the floor, vault, high bar, and anything Kohei does–and reading a dozen threads on the International Gymnast message boards. But I wish I had another hobby waiting in the wings for when this one inevitably begins to lose its pull. Such is the nature of change.

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