Learning openings - experience or brute memory?

I'm about 6 months into my 're-discovery' of chess as an adult and am starting to take it a bit more seriously. I was wondering if anyone has any advice for how to go about building my repertoire of openings?

I have a copy of Batsford's Modern Chess Openings. I realise that at some point, studying chess has to involve memorising things, and that's OK - I figure memorising chess variations isn't too dissimilar an exercise from learning mathematical proofs or pieces of music, both of which I'm pretty good at. I managed to commit a couple of complete games to memory as a test, so I feel comfortable with my ability to do that.

BUT - I was wondering if that's really an effective way of learning the game? Learning by rote is one thing, but really understanding is another. Does anyone have any tips on how to mix the two? One tip I've come across is to find, say, 100 GM games with a particular opening, and play them through fairly quickly, to see how an opening can develop, which moves crop up repeatedly, etc. And how can I get the most out of the Batsford's MCO?

If anyone has any tips, they'd be much appreciated.

Don't memorize openings for now, save that for last. At your level, it's best to study tactics and basic endgames. You can memorize opening principles.

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/scholastic-chess/best-basic-opening-principles

What I do when learning a new opening is read as much as I can about it until I have memorized the first few moves for the most common responses. Then if my opponent plays something I've never seen I consult a book on the topic and see what it says I should have played after the game. Eventually you might be consulting the book on lines that are fairly deep.

I have used this process over the past four years with the Caro-Kann defense. One thing I did was instead of being discouraged when I thought a line was difficult to play and switching to a new opening I just learned the opening in more depth and that seemed to solve my problems.

Ya but whats he supposed to do when he plays a game. Ask the other player to wait until we get into the middlegame?