Sept 1 - Having to be a student again by taking lessons from Rick Fielding and spending time practicing the guitar has brought me at least one insight: physical skillwork brings out into the open not just your personal flaws, but also shows why it also a method for dealing with microfrustration, to coin an ugly word. It is clear, for instance, that not only do today's young students at schools and universities have no intellectual skills training because of the "self-esteem" movement, they also have almost no physical skills -- except for those in sports, or those lucky enough to have a strong committment to some art form in spite of lack of encouragement. So they have little training in dealing with frustration.

Skillwork is learning how to overcome (or adapt to) your physical limitations, laziness, vagueness, and the fascinating resistance of materials. It flushes these obstacles and their accompanying frustrations out where you can see them and maybe work with them. Our macrofrustrations - anxieties, emotional clouds, existential concerns -- cannot be handled easily (if at all). Brain work tends to make this worse, not better, in part because it is hard to pin down concrete progress and achievement in this sphere, unless you are already a trained intellectual skillsworker such as a serious writer or scholar. And even then they go through cloudy hells of their own.

Physical skillwork may not resolve all those global frustrations, but it can bring some of them to workable ground, like a transformer taking the high voltage transmission line down to the point where it will operate your toaster. It is a bitter irony that the old school curriculum I scorned growing up -- Shop, Music, Home Ec -- for intellectual pursuits -- Latin, Greek, Math -- now makes perfect sense to me, and is being cut to ribbons by governments and school boards everywhere. Meanwhile, young people everywhere are turned off by school, obsessed with sports, and spend endless hours at that most recent of all repetitive incremental improvement skills based exercise machines, the video game.