Some things, you only learn by really sticking your feet in, and doing the damn thing. I know this sounds totally obvious, but it’s applied to a whole lot of crap recently, and so, though it’s not necessarily a revelation, I think what’s happening is that my resistance to learning by doing is lessening to a certain degree.

* Cooking – obviously, you learn to cook by cooking. You can read about all sorts of stuff, from detailed explanation of the denaturing of proteins, to reading cooking “manuals” like the Joy of Cooking, but basically, you’ll suck at it, without question, until you get your ass in the kitchen and put fire to food. No amount of reading will replace the experience you gain by tasting something, thinking it’s horrible, and trying to figure out a.) where you went wrong, and b.) how you can fix it. Learning some of the fundamental properties at work goes a long way towards making b.) easier, and paying attention while you’re cooking makes a.) easier to figure out. So there’s definite value in absorbing as much outside information as possible, but there’s no replacement for the hands on experience.

* Home Repair – a lot of times, this can be really intimidating. For some reason, even relatively simple crap like fixing the fence took me forever – it required all of screwing in a bunch of L-brackets. That’s it. But so much has gone wrong, and the house, as a complete project, is so freakin’ HUGE that it’s sometimes hard to realize that the baby steps are actually easy. So, putting up trim broke down a lot of the barriers in terms of “hey, with a miter saw, this is really quite trivial.” There’s a LOT left to do, and I can’t do a good portion of it myself, but a lot’s possible. One thing I hope to do is build some sort of bench/chest for the space below the downstairs window in the living room. Hands on, I think.

* Photography – I should really have just said, “taking pictures” at this point because all I’m doing is largely point-and-shoot. But trying to figure out why something’s lit poorly, or how to capture moving subjects, or even what looks good on screen vs. in the viewfinder – it’s just a matter of taking a bunch of pictures and figuring out what works.

I dunno – it’s all so obvious. But between NaNoWriMo forcing me to actually WRITE, and all the myriad random crap I’ve tried to pick up in the last few years, it’s just been good to finally internalize that no one’s gonna show or tell me how to do a huge portion of this stuff, and that learning by fucking it all up a couple times isn’t, for the most part, going to cause any permanent damage. 🙂