My husband is stretching with new determination. Before joining him, I shout a huge Thank You to the ocean, glad we are starting the new year here at Cypress Inn in Half Moon Bay.

So, what makes you odd? you ask.

I’m a serial learner. I’m always signing up for lessons—CSS, HTML 5, Urdu, Kathak, tabla, violin, Bollywood aerobics, Bollywood dancing, elementary education, photography, you name it. At one point I was taking five different language, music, and dance classes every week!  

And that’s odd? you sneer.

What do you think, grownups don’t rush from class to class, they rush their children from class to class.

Family and friends have learned that the one constant in my life is that I do classes. “How are your lessons going?” is a safe conversation starter. Even the woman at the beauty parlor I visit thrice a year knows that. Once, years ago, she had offered me some space in her parlor to hold classes. Now she knows I’m not likely to graduate to teaching anytime soon and sticks to asking what I’m learning these days.

As a kid, I wanted to do every kind of job there was in the world. As an adult, I want to sign up for every lesson that will accept adult beginners. And I’m fortunate to live in a time and place where there are many of those.

But, do you know what’s odder still? Life lessons are not welcome in my house. All doors and windows are boarded up against them. Learning new skills is heroic, learning life lessons is defeat, I feel. But, lately, I sometimes think, What if…

Is that a sign I’m ready to join the world of “normal” grownups?

People have strange compulsions. This is one of mine. It’s happened a hundred times. I stop to watch a bit of some movie and then I’m condemned to watch all of it. ”Condemned” because I don’t really like movies. I never have. After wasting a couple of hours over an irrational Christmas movie last Sunday, I realized it wasn’t the first time that particular movie had eaten up a few good hours. Holiday Switch was in its last leg, winding down to a highly unsatisfactory end. It’s déjà vu all over again. Part of growing old is learning to forget things we don’t like. I just wish I’d remembered what a letdown this movie was. But now there was no escaping the embarrassment of knowing that I had succumbed to its lure not once, but twice.

Come November, Lifetime starts streaming Christmas stories every weekend. I embraced them as an annual personal tradition a few years ago after watching half a dozen or so happy endings. I’d finally found a genre that did only pleasant, feel-good stuff.

I was wrong. The genre also does magic, seemingly harmless “miracles” that make for really unsatisfactory endings. Don’t get me wrong, not all miracles are a drag—Jason Bourne surviving yet another death-defying situation at the end of Bourne Ultimatum, with its promise of another magnificent return, is an ending that never fails to thrill. But there just ain’t no satisfaction in a miracle meant to make people accept their situation in life. For now, this happy-ending junkie is sticking to thrillers and romances.

• Good Boxes and Arrows article “UI Pattern Documentation Review” by Patrick Stapleton on 2009/06/29

Pattern resources:

• Quince UX Patterns Explorer
• UI Pattern Factory
• Jennifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces
• Bill Scott & Theresa Neil’s Designing Web Interfaces
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

• Lexipedia: For word maps to explore related nouns and verbs, synonyms, antonyms, etc for a word; free; web-based
• Swivel: For visualizing spreadsheets; $12 a month, 30-day free trial; web-based
• xtimeline: For timelines; free; web-based
• Prefuse Visualization Toolkit: Java-based development toolkit, last release (Beta version) in Oct 2007

Resources include:

• Eric Blue’s post about “Dataesthetics” (2006)

Good examples include:

• America by the numbers (Time, Oct 2006)
• Gapminder.org: A modern “museum” to foster the use of statistics to explore the world 

Garner’s says:

• website
• webpage
• the Web

Pick up the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage, if you haven’t yet. There’s even a 35% discount on it at Amazon (http://TwitPWR.com/pez/).