I try to develop a bit of skill at things that I am interested in or that are important to me, and it tends to have mixed results.  For example, I enjoy eating, and while I go out to eat fairly often, I decided that I wanted to learn how to cook some fancy things for myself, too, so I took a cooking class (which was a lot of fun, btw, but that will have to wait for another post).  I ended up making some pretty good things in that class, and a few times a week or month I’ll make myself a nice dinner at home.  It helped me get a feel for how the different ingredients work together which helped me better understand what I do and don’t like, and now I can even come up with some new dishes which are pretty good sometimes.

I also like art.  I’ve got some sculptures and paintings in my home, so I figured it might be fun to take a painting class.  We all had painting class in elementary school and it was fun, right?  So an a painting class now as an adult should also be fun.  Well, I think I will stick to buying my art, because I am not very good at painting.  It’s a good thing we didn’t get a grade in this class that goes on our transcript or anything because I would’ve gotten a D.  The first assignment was to blend paint colors to make the color you want.  Apparently some artists don’t buy green paint, but if they need green they will just mix blue and yellow to make green.  So we had to do it like that to make all the colors we wanted and I just couldn’t get the paints to mix well.  Each time they were a different shade, and the end result didn’t look very good.

Another thing I like is home design.  I like my place to look cool because it makes me enjoy coming home.  I can tell the difference between a place that is arranged well and one that needs some work, but I don’t seem to be able to make it look nice myself.  I’ve read a bunch of books on it but I still don’t know what I’m doing.  I’ve decided that I will always need to hire an interior designer to make my place look nice.  In fact, the first time I ever did this was when I was living in Shanghai where I was sent on a business trip.  My apartment was kind of small and I just couldn’t get it to look nice no matter how I tried to arrange everything, so I finally gave in and called a designer and let them do their magic.  I don’t know what it is they do, but it looks nice.  I took pictures of it in case I ever need to use it as reference in the future if I’m living somewhere else.