I’ve learned now that it doesn’t matter. A half-finished project may not yeild a useful prototype at the end, but it was process in which I learned and had fun, and the next time I have a project, there will be one less process I’ll be completely unfamiliar with.

Nike is right… just do it.

Some of this stuff looks fun and within my price range – especially the pop-up 3D words and messages on the Instructables site. I’m not gonna have a chance to work on anything this weekend, and I don’t really have anything relevant to say, but that won’t stop me. Picking up on your introductory stuff about Dads and Granddads disappearing into the garage or the basement for a few weeks and then emerging with a finished project, here is a portion of an edited essay by Chuck Close (I couldn’t locate the unedited original.):

Handicapped people hate phrases like physically challenged. We like to call ourselves cripples and gimps. It helps take the sting out of it. It helps us accept the handicapped part of us.

I became a quadriplegic thirteen years ago, at the age of forty-eight, when an artery in my spine collapsed. I had already had a great career as an artist, with paintings in museums around the world. I knew who I was. The problem was getting back to what I loved. The two great fears of any artist are that you’re going to lose your eyes or you’re going to lose your hands. I [had] always thought of them as equally bad. [It] turns out, if you’re going to lose one, it had better be your hands. Which is exactly the way of thinking that helped me in my life, weighing out what makes any situation positive relative to another state of affairs.

My father died when I was eleven, so I think I learned early on that you could suffer a terrible tragedy and still be happy again. We didn’t have any money but my father was extremely handy, and he made all my toys (bicycles from scratch and model trains). It was very intimidating because he could do anything with his hands.

I’ve always been a gimp in some sense. When I was a kid, I had a lot of problems. Back then, no one thought there was such a thing as learning disabilities. You were just dumb, or lazy …. I couldn’t memorize anything, didn’t know the multiplication tables, didn’t know how to add six and seven without using my fingers. I couldn’t even recognize faces. I was a klutz. [I couldn’t] … catch a ball. But art gave me something to do that made me feel special. Probably, had my father lived, I might not have even tried a lot of projects, but when he died I inherited his tool kit and all his power tools, and I [tried] to make stuff myself.

…
…

In life, you have to deal with your fear, the part of you that says, “I can’t do it.” You have to rely on the part of you that says, “Well, it doesn’t look that bad.” And you have to keep going even though there are no guarantees. I’ve found a way to work for myself by breaking everything down to the smallest pieces. I just keep working at each little unit of the painting. Today I’ll do what I did yesterday and tomorrow I’ll do what I did today, the same thing in pieces small enough for me to handle.

I hope that that wasn’t completely irrelevant.

B’bye,
Mr. Monkey