Do I just need to suck it up and get a host?

So, I’ve decided to spend the evening trying to acquaint myself with wordpress and get my blog rolling.

I’m finding it MUCH more difficult than blogger, which is a good and bad thing (I’m learning something new and more complex, but I’m moving slow).

One thing I keep running into trying to customize my page with widgets and such, is that everything seems to say that I need to upload something to my wp-content folder. I can’t access that unless I’m hosted, can I?

This may be a really stupid question, so feel free to talk to me like I’m a five year old.

I want to customize my site (which I was considerably free to do with blogger), but I keep running into walls.

For instance, I’m trying to put gabby or babelfish widget on my page via the text button on the “available widgets” thing, and I can’t get it to work!

Any help someone could give me would be very welcome.