Paragraphs are awesome.

You can build a wheel without a truing stand. Make sure that your hub and your rim have the same number of holes, and visit Sheldon Brown's website for a great tutorial and a list of spoke-length predicting resources. Once you lace up the wheel yourself, take it to a shop and have them true and tension it. It will probably only cost about $10-$15 to have them do that, which is much less than a full wheel build.