Also true... I was sitting on my Kawasaki Vulcan motorcycle at a red light behind a line of cars in a very light rain. A distracted driver piled into me from behind, causing me a very quick acceleration followed by a quick deceleration when I hit the car directly in front of me. Fortunately I had a good hold of the handlebars and flipped over them and thrown at about "10 o'clock" in a 360 somersault with a quarter twist, landing on my feet. It happened so fast I had no time to react. Standing there untouched looking at my wrecked bike was surreal. I can't do a decent flip off a diving board, I would have to attribute that to dumb luck. Though in retrospect, I did have many years of martial arts, including judo, so maybe that helped.

Anyways, I'm now 53 (yikes!), and I've been learning perl on and (mostly) off for maybe 5 years. Learning is to some degree a social process. As a late-bloomer hobbyist, I found it important to find support for my new hobby. Thus I joined perlmonks in 2007.

The PM Seekers section has been helpful. I try to answer the "newby" type questions that come up, then learn from the experienced monks replies.

I got involved in Movable Type and developed some plugins on Github. Getting involved in a GitHub perl project is a great way to be active and code "socially".

The best of course is to incorporate perl into your work. I left a career in chemistry and started building websites (many in movable type), and was able to learn enough programming and administration skills over a few years to land a job as the technical support coordinator at a local private school. I am not making as much as I was earning at chemistry, but I love it, and now I can find excuses to use perl all the time. :)

Update: Don't forget your local PerMongers group!