Socializing

[unspeakablehorror]

On the one hand I think it's important to always try to improve my social skills.  On the other hand, the only way it seems I can really improve with  that is to socialize.  Which means that failure seems a lot more dire than practicing something in a hypothetical situation.  I always try to gain as much insight as I can from observing other people's social habits and different reactions to those, but there are limits to how far observation alone can help.  At some point I have to go beyond observation and hypotheticals about how people might react and how I should react, and decide what I'm going to actually do. 

I just don't think there's any good way to practice socializing like practicing other activities.  I can read about it and observe it, or I can actually do it.  There's not a lot of in-between.