How-To: Do Everything

In case you didn't know, I'm a huge nerd. I love learning. I hate class and homework as much as anyone, but when I get curious about something, I jump in with both feet -- no, I fall in. It's involuntary.

I was at Borders tonight, looking for the first season of Arrested Development on DVD. No luck. And I still probably had an hour to kill before my sister was done shopping next door at Old Navy. I looked at aisle after aisle of fiction: romance, sci-fi, literature. I don't get it. Every once in a while, I'll read a story that really grips me for one reason or another: The Killer Angels, for the way it gets inside the heads of the officers at Gettysburg; Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for its off-the-wall satire of the human race; Harry Potter, for... well... the way Jim Dale reads it to me. But for the most part, I just can't really get into fiction, or any narrative stories for that matter. So, I turned around, and found what I really wanted to read: Reference books. Textbooks. How-To books.

Go ahead. Laugh at my irrepressible inner engineer. I would gladly have spent all night sitting on the floor in Borders, reading The Art of Electronics, The Private Pilot Manual, The Associated Press Stylebook, Vibrations and Waves, or Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production. I have this insane drive to learn how to do everything. There's hardly a job in the world I wouldn't love to try for a day. (Okay, I might be done with some after fifteen minutes, but you get the idea.) I don't know what it is. I don't have the time or freedom or talent or money to try even ten percent of the things I would like to try, so I guess I try to learn as much as I can by reading about them. That way, if the opportunity ever arises, I at least have a head start.

Recently, I've been thinking about graduating college this December, and entering the 8-to-5 full-time workforce. Part of me cringes at the thought of it. Two or three weeks of vacation a year is not enough to really get involved with anything. Even if I had the money to do these things, I don't think I'll ever have the time. I spend so much mental energy dreaming about all these hobbies, and I might only ever get to try a tiny fraction of them. I don't really want to think about it anymore. I'll just get back to my how-to books and keep dreaming now.