That out of the way, I have successfully seasoned a cast iron skillet. "Big deal" many may say, and they are probably right, but it was fun, and its even more fun cooking in the thing, because, after every meal, I get this little sense of accomplishment... a little thrill that I was able to cook whatever because I successfully seasoned this skillet.
The first thing you need to know is that you CAN screw it up. I did...
As you can find all sorts of instructions on how to do it on YouTube, I'll not go into all the nitty gritty details, but hit the highlights.
The first thing they will tell you is if you have a brand new piece of cast iron cookware, you will need to strip it, and you can find ALL sorts of ways to do that from homemade electrolysis devices to spray oven cleaner. I didn't bother with any of those, I just used soap and hot water. Its the only time you will ever use soap on your CI cookware, so enjoy it. Now, I'm not a smart man, but I know what rust is, so I dried the skillet in the oven, but I let it cool to room temperature afterwards, and that was a mistake. When you start applying oil to the pan, it should be warm enough that you need to use a towel or oven mittens to handle it, but not so hot that you can't apply the oil. There is something about the iron being hot (or the oil being hot) that makes it stick better to the skillet.
The first thing I tried was to follow the instruction for seasoning on the packaging...that's all wrong. The best I did there was to get a layer of goop on the pan that burned and turned my food black. Then I found a site that said to put like a half inch of oil in the pan and bake at like 350. That just made more goo... I was re-inventing the sticky part of the sticky-notes. That was a little hard to clean off, so I thought I would cook it off... it was essentially cooking oil, after all... After cooking some chicken breasts in it, it developed a fine soot like dust. Back to the soap and hot water with it...
After that, I learned that the best way to season a cast iron skillet is to apply very fine layers of oil to a hot pan, then bake it (upside down) at 400 for about an hour. To get a very fine layer, you oil the pan lightly, then you get a cotton rag and dry the oil off. You will not be able to dry off ALL the oil, there will remain a light film of oil... that's what will polymerize and make a non-stick surface. Four layers was all I needed. The next step is to cook in it as much as you can, so I baked some biscuits and scrambled some eggs, and will soon grill a steak in it. The biscuits fell right out and the cooked on egg cleaned right up. I think I'm going to have fun cooking in this thing, and if I ever get an induction stove top, it's the only cookware I have that will work on it.
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