What do you do for fun?

"What do you do for fun?" asked the graduate student who had joined me for my attempt at a Friday afternoon hike.
I was not sure how to answer that. So I put the question back to him.
"I asked you first," he said with intonation reminiscent of a grad school kid.
I suspected him of being uncertain to the answer to his own question. It's a harder question to answer than one might think it is.
"Well," I said stalling, "I like hiking." I gestured to what we were doing. "Um I like bird watching. I like playing with the ferrets and having tea parties." I was certain there was a myriad of other things  I like to for fun but I couldn't think of them. It made me feel like very boring person. "I like biking," I said, "but I haven't done it much this year." Lots of other things I used to do but don't right now flooded into my head. That just made me feel more lame. So I ended there and turned the question over to the original asker.
"What about you? What do you do for fun?"
"Pretty much the same things that you like to do," he said, "only without the ferrets and tea parties. I do drink a lot of tea though." He had a dog who had also joined me for the hike so that was a plus one that he was forgetting. He obviously spent a fair bit of his fun time on the dog who had come up in a high percentage of the non-schoolwork conversations I'd had with him. I unconsciously concluded that 'what do you do for fun' is a bad question to ask somebody if you actually want to know the answer to it. You'll find out more by asking about what a person did last weekend or just letting a conversation ramble. The conversation wandered from there into tea, favorite tea and where to buy it. It seems to me that ninety percent of the meaningful conversations that I have with people involve food, pets, family or lovers.
So what do you do for fun? Now that I have time to think about it I remember that I left of some of the most important items on the list. I spend time cuddling with my my Andrew watching community, bones or some other show. I cuddle Alex, Ember, Ferrets, Chickens. I spend a lot of time messing around in the garden. I write stories. I write in this blog. I talk on the phone with my family and friends who are too far away to see. I go on cleaning rampages, road-trips, reading marathons, random adventures to the grocery store. The list of things that I used to do and probably will again is more exciting: draw, ride horses, backpacking, hanging upside down from playgrounds (I should really do that again), martial arts, biking.
I dunno it's still a fuzzy picture even when I try to put it in writing. Not everything one likes to do is fun. Some of it is a bit painful like weeding for example. Sore arm muscles aren't exactly fun or are they? They're satisfying. It makes me happy.
How would you answer that question. What do you do for fun?
Here's another question I don't know how to answer (I first ran across it almost a decade ago): are you and optimistic person or a pessimistic person?
My answer. Err ummm... I'm a person. In other words I don't classify well. Like most people, I'm a hopeful pessimist and an apprehensive optimist. I have my ups and downs everything from top of the world to the depths of despair. I think if you really want to know about the optimistic/pessimistic nature of a person you might want to ask about range of emotions. Some people are more stable than others. The problem with binary questions and even 'what do you do for fun' questions is that they assume a steady state. Most people aren't steady state. I suppose my answer should go something like this, "I'm inconsistent..." I often envy people who stick with just one of two things and get really, really good at them. I'm nearly always obsessively enthusiastic about something. It's just a matter of what.