TGIF

It's Friday. Thank GOD. It has been an incredibly long week. From actors dropping out of the play to tedious class periods spent sanding the floor, from frantically trying to get scripts printed to a body which felt like it had been hit by a large semi about 37 times before being put through all sorts of other pain, from the sudden onslaught of previously nonexistent "love life" to frantic pre-NaNo planning. Boy, has it been a long week.

I learn more every day than I could ever put into a weekly blog post. And hell, why should I put everything into a blog post? I can't learn lessons for you. I learn things I already know all the time. Being told things doesn't make it intuition, doesn't make it instinct. To think that I could somehow put the knowledge life experience has taught me into your brain is ridiculous; it won't happen.

Not that you can't learn from reading. Maybe this is just me, but one of the things I love about books is being able to learn from the character's mistakes. Hell, acting does this too. It's weird. You put yourself so deeply into the life of someone else, live out their life somehow, and then you step away and still have the lessons you learned as that character.

But stepping into the shoes of another will not teach you everything. Reading, as incredible as it can be, is not the same as doing. The best writers can take you very, very, very close to experiencing and learning with the characters, but it still can't beat reality.

So instead of trying to tell you what I've learned this week, I'm just going to tell you to go live life a little, make some mistakes, and learn from them. Nothing you read can come close to teaching you what living can.