You’ll notice that they’re all lists.

Numbers on a list have advantages. They present information in bite-sized forms for us people with short attention spans. They hook us in and give us the feeling that there are actually only 10 ways to lose that extra 10 pounds, and who can’t do just 10 things? Well, me, to be honest, but That’s beside the point.

I’ve always wondered why we like lists so much. We not only read them, but make them: the to do-lists, the shopping lists, lists of places we’d like to go, books we want to read, and movies we need to see. If you’ll forgive the expression, the list goes on.

My lists are usually of the to-do type and are generally written like commands: ?Do not forget flea stuff for dog!? which of course I always do until about three days after the due date. I figure that if I’m consistently three days late, then really I’m on time.

?Finish that client’s bookkeeping!!? screams another item on the list, obviously written by my logical left hemisphere. ?Why?? questions her sister to the right, ?the meeting’s not for another week, isn’t it?? Despite my best intentions, another list bites the dust.

I started looking at lists differently when I came across a Der Spiegel interview with Italian philosopher and author Umberto Eco. Eco suggests that ?[we] like lists because we don’t want to die.?

He goes on to explain. ?The list is the origin of culture,? Eco continues. ?What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible . . . And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists.?

I had always thought that I made lists because?as someone once pointed out to me?I was a bit uptight. Now I can proudly say that It’s because I’m attempting to comprehend infinity and grasp the incomprehensible. I’ve always liked Umberto Eco.

But back to the checkout counter. If you look closely you’ll see that It’s generally women’s magazines that favour lists. The subjects tend to be ones that the magazine editors figure are near and dear to our hearts: weight loss, making our loved ones happy, weight loss, getting the kids to eat green things, weight loss, succeeding at work, weight loss, and stress management, which is needed if we are to lose weight while being good at all the other stuff.

If you think about it, we were conditioned from childhood to work with and make lists. Think of the fairy tales. Once you get past the cutting off of heads, the boiling of children, and the cannibalism, you will notice that everything happens according to a list. The hero always has a list of tasks to perform, the heroine has a list of balls to attend, and the wicked wolf is keen to check off the list of pigs and little girls with grannies.

It overflowed into real life, too. When my mother wanted me to do something, she never just told me to do one thing. It was a list: ?Go over to your Auntie Peg’s house and tell her I’ll be by later. Stop off at the butcher’s on the way back and pick up some bacon. Pay the newsagent. And buy a bag of wine gums while You’re there. Now repeat the list of what you have to do.? I could recite it all perfectly in the moment, but my mother knew that either the butcher or the newsagent would get missed. Probably the butcher, because I liked wine gums.

The women’s magazine editors are obviously onto something: reel them in with a list. We can’t resist it. Because the great thing about lists is that they’re infinite?finish with one and You’re ready for another.

Umberto Eco is right. This is culture.

Skype, for those of you who are almost as ignorant of these things as I am, is a VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) that allows you to phone a long-lost childhood friend three thousand miles away and see her via a video connection in her curlers and dressing gown at any time of the day or night for free.

I don’t have any long-lost childhood friends; the friends I had as a child are lost for a reason: they were part of the decision to emigrate, and I have no intention of finding them. So I Skyped my brother in England.

My brother has two teenage children and is heavily into Internet marketing with his own business, so he’s up on these things. He courteously agreed to accept my call and I was able to see him in all his early Sunday evening glory, lounging on the couch, arms crossed over a recently acquired pot-belly, eyes red from the excesses of the night before, and looking for all the world like our dear departed father.

Our father would have found Skype an interesting experience. He bought three little video cameras for the computer when they first became popular back in the mid 1990s. There was no VoIP back then, but that didn’t stop our 70-something-year-old father from encouraging my brother and me to make little video clips of ourselves and attach them to an email. It was fun for a while, but I soon got bored of having to make sure I wasn’t having a bad hair day before ?talking? to my Dad.

During my Skype video conversation with my brother and his herd, I was able to fully appreciate my 17-year-old nephew yawning while not covering his mouth, my brother rolling his eyes while I was talking, and my 12-year-old niece applying blue eye shadow. This last fact in itself was distressing as one of the first fashion laws I learnt at the Wirral County Grammar School for Girls was that under no circumstances was one to wear blue eye shadow, even if your eyes or garments were blue. Miss Winifred Ashton, she who also taught us that the ugliest part of a woman’s body is the back of her knees, would have been horrified and is surely now turning in her grave.

But back to Skype. It’s easy to join (it has to be or I wouldn’t have been bothered). A two-minute software download, some sort of microphone capability, and the optional video webcam, and You’re all set. Call all your friends for free. Especially if You’re a pensioner.

Why does it make a difference if You’re a pensioner, I hear you query? Well, did you know that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CCPIB) paid $300 million for a stake in Skype Technologies back in late 2009? Who knew that our government-run pension plan was so cool?

Given that CPP recipients have a vested interest in the investments of the fund, it behooves them to make sure the venture is successful. Not that this will be difficult: Skype was valued at US$2.75 billion in November 2009 with the potential for huge positive returns. Just like futures and derivatives used to have.

They may actually be on to a good thing. Last time I logged on to Skype, there were 21,434,149 people worldwide also actively using the system. Now That’s a lot of people.

Apparently you can Skype anybody?whether you know them not. So, if You’re wondering what to do with all the spare time now that You’re fed up with the inane comments people put on their Facebook pages, you can just type a name into a box, press search, pick someone and call them. For free.

Just remember two things: get dressed before you call so that you stay onside with the indecency laws, and cover your mouth when you yawn.

Oh, and don’t use Skype to call for help from the fire or police departments. With 21,434,149 residences to check out worldwide, they’ll never find you in time.

I won’t bore you with all the intimate details, but Minnie, the springer spaniel, went from being the innocent babe of the puppy world to a competent swearer in bark language over the course of the first six months of her life. Sooky Treadlight, the cat, winced in her basket as I threw things when the computer asked for the seventieth time: ?Are you really sure you want to do this?? They both hid under (separate) tables when the inevitable blue screen of death reared its ugly head, knowing that I’d start foaming at the mouth. They put up with my endless and unanswered question, ?Why does it take over four minutes just to get to the ?welcome? screen?? When the arrival of Windows 7 was heralded, I almost wept with joy.

Not that I rushed out to buy it. Once bitten twice shy, as they say. I waited all of two minutes before running to the Internet to check out the initial reactions of the computer geeks. The comments all seemed positive and encouraging. Then I discovered that because I was enrolled in university courses I was eligible for a Windows 7 upgrade for $40. Sold! I signed up and downloaded. And then read the instructions.

The computer geeks on the web seemed to be unanimous that a ?clean install? was preferable over an upgrade. A clean install meant wiping the hard drive clean. An upgrade just wrote over what was already there. A clean install, they said, meant that all the junk your operating system had accumulated over time got erased, including that insidious little virus you didn’t even know was there but which had been slowing your system down. Sold again! I set aside the New Year’s weekend to accomplish the task. A New Year to wipe vexing Vista off the face of the earth. I could hardly wait.

It turns out that you do have to wait when switching operating systems. The difference between an upgrade and a clean install is that with the former you lose a little and with the latter you lose a lot. So, step one means putting everything That’s near and dear to your heart somewhere else. ?No problem,? said the perky little instructions, ?please use the Windows file transfer program, especially designed for just such a purpose.? Check.

?Are you sure you know what You’re doing?? cried the little voice in my head. ?Not really,? was the honest response. Okay, so the first time I got it wrong and installed the Windows 7 system alongside Vista (don’t ask: you need to be really ?clever? to do that, apparently) and ended up with not enough hard drive space to install the backed up information. The second time all appeared to go well. Of course, you learned from your mother that appearances can be deceiving, didn’t you? Mother was right.

That neat little Windows file transfer program reinstalled everything just where it should be. The problem is, if you don’t know where it should be, you don’t know where it is. As in, do you know where to find the root directory that houses your emails? Because when you switch from Vista to Windows 7, you lose the email program. And when you install a new one, you have to know where the emails now live. Not in their old house, I can assure you. And they don’t leave a forwarding address.

Oh, and you do know that the email attachments live in a different condo than the email they came with, right? Well, good for you, because I didn’t. Saved all the emails, lost all the attachments. And given that most of the emails with attachments exalted such illuminating information as ?just see attached,? this turned out to be a bigger problem than I imagined.

Nevertheless, I now have Windows 7 installed. I get to legitimately say ?What email attachment?? I smile sadly and sigh, ?Sorry, I lost your email address in the shuffle which is why I no longer acknowledge your existence.? I sound knowledgeable when I hold forth about clean installs versus upgrades, even though I’m still not clear what the difference is other than one requires more work and grief than the other.

Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. Anything’s better than Vista. And I mean anything. Minnie sleeps soundly without the interruption of cursing and swearing. Sooky’s gone back to ignoring us both. All is well with the world.

I caved on my long-standing aversion to groups of any kind (an invitation to a tea party is likely to send me running for the first ferry off the island or remember some long-standing, non-existent prior engagement).

This came at the behest of a cousin in England who informed me ?were all on!!get with it U!! U an im sb on 2!!!!!!!? (as in: we’re all on. Get with it, you. You and him should be on too).

Freedom from spelling and grammar rules, not to mention an allowable overuse of the apostrophe, is obviously a draw for some people.

Nevertheless, I thought I’d give it a whirl and so spent a relatively painless few minutes pasting a photo of my dog doing an imitation of me on my ?wall.? I carefully avoided all questions about what I like for breakfast, what I want to be when I grow up (still working on that one anyway), and where I like to go on vacation (get your own holiday ideas!).

Now, I have more ?friends? than I know what to do with; half of them I don’t actually know and half of the other half I’m not sure I’d socialize with in the ?real? world. Each day, Facebook gives me hints as to who might make a good friend. Generally, if You’re a friend of another friend then You’re deemed good enough to be my friend. I thought this was very generous of the nice people who administer Facebook, until my husband’s ex-wife was suggested. Repeatedly.

I was an awkward teenager (there are some who would say that I’m still awkward, but That’s another topic altogether) and found it difficult to make friends. If I was a teenager today, it would be so easy: just click that ?Add as friend? button, wait for them to confirm, and You’re all set. Then, when people see that You’re a friend of Joe Smith over in New York, they can’t wait to make you their friend. You must be cool if you have friends in New York, I guess.

My brother’s name is Rob Purfield?he’s into self-promotion so he won’t mind me sharing that with you. One of our cousins, who splatters her whole life on Facebook but who probably would mind if I told you her name, decided that she’d like to add my brother as a friend. So she searched for his name on Facebook and got about 15 results, one of whom is my brother. She then requested friendship with all of them. She now has every Rob Purfield in the world as a friend. Except my brother. He has a Facebook page, but apparently he’s very fussy about who his friends are. He hasn’t accepted my plea to be his friend either. He obviously still has outstanding issues about me sitting on him and pulling his hair when he was seven.

When I was a kid, if you were nosy about someone’s life you surreptitiously rifled through their desk at school, or you took a little peek at their well-hidden diary before rushing out into the schoolyard to tell all. Now, you openly browse their Facebook pages and they kindly lay it all out for you so as to save you the bother of looking or?heaven forbid?phoning and asking how their life is. Who has time for that these days?

I’ve actually found it quite fascinating how we’re all eager to share every minute detail about our lives with virtual friends, not to mention virtual strangers. It’s no wonder that humorists have picked up on social networking as working fodder:

The phone rings. ?Hi, Twitter was down this morning. Could you just tell me what you had for breakfast? Thanks!?

Or someone arriving at the pearly gates: ?What have you done with your life?? ?What? Haven’t you been following me on Facebook??

And my personal favourite: ?Got nothing to say? Say it on Twitter!?

The really amusing thing about social networking sites in general, and Facebook in particular, is how people manage to trip themselves up without thinking. There are stories in the media about how insurance companies check Facebook pages to see what claimants are up to. Why would you claim a debilitating injury after a fender bender and then post a picture of yourself two days later doing the samba with a glass of wine in one hand and waving a piece of underwear in the other?

How about the woman who phoned in sick and then immediately went on Facebook to exclaim how dense she thought her boss was, because he didn’t figure out that she was faking . . . again? She’d forgotten that she’d added him as one of her three thousand friends. Oops.

One of the benefits of having a friend on Facebook is that they can be ?unfriended? in a nanosecond. And the word ?unfriend? was the word of 2009 for the New Oxford American Dictionary. doesn’t that tell us something?

He ran kayak trips to the Broken Islands, Queen Charlottes, and Baja, Mexico. But his real love was cycling. For many years he organized trips in Baja, Spain, France, Hawaii, and right here on Vancouver Island.

In 2004, Leslie (a.k.a. The Man) and I ventured on the Spain cycling trip. This was the first cycling trip to Spain that Peter had organized. We were to fly to Madrid and Peter, being the helpful bloke that he was, would organize us from there. We were to cycle the Camino de Santiago trail from Burgos to Santiago de Compostela.

This was the first organized cycling trip that The Man and I had been on and the fact that it was in Europe and we were taking our own bikes was a special challenge to us. We had decided to take the car and the bikes to The Man’s daughter in Surrey on the mainland, and she would drive us to the airport the next day. We would pack our bikes in boxes, as per Peter’s instructions, and we’d fly out to sunny Spain.

We had a series of adventures getting to Vancouver Airport. It rained. The car battery died. The bike boxes got wet. The check-in lady was unsympathetic. We arrived in Madrid and couldn’t find a taxi able to take us and two bike boxes. We finally got to the small hotel and they wouldn’t let us in. No, we don’t take bikes, they said. But Peter told us, we said. Oh, Peter, they said. Okay. We were in.

Once we arrived in Madrid, Peter had told us, he would help us and our bikes find a way to the bus or train to Burgos. In reality, we found the bus and Peter took care of the bikes. He had booked delightful rooms in Burgos. The next morning, he helped put the bikes together. We were off.

We spent ten days bicycling from Burgos to Santiago de Compostela. Each day we would have breakfast with the group?and a diverse group we were: doctors, lawyers, accountants, retired people, lesbians, singles, couples, Australians. You name them, we had them.

After breakfast Peter would give us a map showing how to get to the next place and the next hotel. Some of the group hot-pedalled it and made the trip in a couple of hours. Some dawdled and checked out churches and other places of interest along the way.

Me and The Man? Well, we were always last to arrive. We were slow cyclists anyway, but we’d stop at coffee shops, stores, villages, and just to chat. The best thing about arriving last was that at the hotel the clerk would know our name: ?Buenos dias, Les and Christine!? they would say. I was impressed until I realized that we were the last of the group to arrive, so who else could we be?

When we cycled into a town, always late, generally the first person we would see would be Ana, Peter’s wife. She’d be out looking for us. Everyone else was in the bar. But she’d be concerned that we were missing. After a cheery wave, she’d disappear to her family and the group, and we’d be off for a shower.

One of the amazing sights that the Spanish villagers saw was Peter on his bike with his seven-year-old daughter, Camila?she was cycling on one of those kids? bikes that attaches to the adult’s bike. I would guess that this sight was new to the Spaniards. The old women in the villages along the way would come out to stare at the man chatting and singing away with his young daughter as they cycled along. They’d wave and laugh?Peter, Camila, and the villagers.

It was a great trip. There was not a dull moment. We met people from all over the world walking the Camino, horseback riding the Camino, cycling, and just plain enjoying life. It was amazing. It spurred The Man and me to take a cycling trip, just the two of us, to Portugal the next year. Thanks to Peter, we had the confidence to pack, travel, and cycle a new country by ourselves. Thanks to Peter, we’ve bought a fifth wheel, packed the bikes on the back, and we’re off all over North America and Mexico.

Peter died last month. He was 52. He was fit, healthy, trained as a special education teacher, a kayaker, a cyclist, a delightful man, friend, husband, and father to Camila. He will be sadly missed. If there is one thing I learned from Peter it was that things don’t count. People count. Family counts. And above all, experiences and life count.

Think of Peter: enjoy university. It’s not the end. It’s the beginning.

I read an interesting take on resolutions by Tim Cestnick in the Globe and Mail on the weekend. Mr. Cestnick is an accountant who writes a column with ideas on how to avoid paying income tax, none of which ever appear to work for my particular situation, but nonetheless he does generally start the column with an interesting tidbit. This week the tidbit related to New Year’s resolutions.

Apparently, for 2006 Mr. Cestnick resolved to lose 10 per cent of his body fat?an admirable, if unattainable, plan. For 2007, he pledged to lose five per cent of his body fat. Again, admirable and could have been attainable had he not neglected to take the steps to actually achieve it. So, for 2008 Mr. Cestnick has promised himself that he will drive by at least one gym on his daily commute in his car. Presumably, he will then inhale the fitness as he passes.

On the surface, New Year’s resolutions appear to be the antithesis of procrastination. Except that most (if not all) of my resolutions end up encouraging procrastination, not replacing it. Hence my approval of Mr. Cestnick’s approach. If only it would work for my own resolutions as they relate to my courses. Perhaps I could just drive by Athabasca and inhale knowledge? I think not. (It’s too far, for one thing.)

On eventually unpacking the aforementioned box, I immediately set about creating folders on my computer for assignments, reading the student manuals (80 per cent of which contain the same information as the last courses), throwing away all the forms (they’re all available for download and I have no space to store them in my cubbyhole shed of an office) and carefully reading and agreeing with the suggested study schedule.

I dutifully transfer said suggested study schedule to my AUSU planner and my Outlook task list, and feel raring to go and in control. There’s just one slight problem: there are three other courses lurking on the task list and in the planner.

I’m feeling pretty smug about COMP 200; all the assignments are done and the exam booked. ENG 353 doesn’t look too bad until I realize that there’s a research paper due on who knows what in addition to two, four-page essays and a plan for the research paper?by the end of January. I’ve been lulled into complacency with this course because there’s no exam requirement to spur me on.

I console myself with the knowledge that I have until the end of March to finish FREN 201. Then I remember It’s January. And I’ve submitted one assignment so far. And the new courses start in February. So much for my 2007 resolution to finish eight courses by the end of the year (four are done, three in progress, and one is barely out of the box).

In the spirit of finding help?not procrastination, you understand?I Googled ?education and New Year’s resolutions? and got 5,070,000 hits. Yes, you read it right: five million and seventy thousand. One site, specifically for college students in the U.S., suggested that I resolve to party more, think about a different major, and make new friends. The best parties start way after my bedtime, the only major I worry about these days is a major weather system that knocks the power out, and I live on an island with a limited selection of ?new friends.? (Dogs don’t count or I’d be fine.)

According to the Edmonton Journal, people have been making New Year’s resolutions for about four thousand years. In 2000 BC the Babylonians apparently began celebrating New Year by making pledges for the following year. The most popular resolution? To return borrowed farm equipment. Probably the equivalent of today’s ?find that library book and take it back.?

Resolved: this New Year I’m making just one resolution?I’m going to open the box, set up the folders, throw away the forms, carefully read and agree with the suggested study plan, and transfer said plan to my AUSU planner (which hopefully will have arrived by then) and my Outlook task list.

Then I’m going to have a glass of Shiraz and toast Mr. Cestnick. Here’s to achievable resolutions. I may even open the box as soon as it arrives next time. But no promises.

After enroling in the Introduction to Human Health course (I’m a humanities major in desperate need of science credits), I started to wonder: what is ?aging authentically,? anyway? I know what aging is, but how do I know if I’m doing it right?

Enticingly, the course material promises to reveal all to me, although I rather suspect the textbook is written from the point of view of students for whom aging is some far and distant possibility, as opposed to those of us who deal with its realities on a daily basis.

I decided to take my curiosity to the Internet. Now, this is always dangerous and good for at least an afternoon of assignment procrastination as I get waylaid by sites that have nothing to do with what I’m supposedly looking for. However, I thought I’d start with how the brain ages and its effect on memory.

I was heartened to read an article on the BBC website saying new research shows we do not necessarily lose massive amounts of the little white cells as our brains age. In fact, the current thinking is that our neurons replace themselves as we get older. they’re just slower, like everything else old.

The only disconcerting fact is that scientists still aren’t sure why some of us are all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed well into our 90s, and others of us look and feel like we’ve been round the block a few times by our 60s?diet, exercise, and drinking habits notwithstanding.

As I suspected, my surfing got out of hand and I came across an article written in 2000 by Heather M. Ritenburg for the University of Regina Teaching Development Centre Newsletter. What caught my eye was her opening question: ?What options are there for university teachers when faced with mature students in an undergraduate program?? Ms. Ritenburg goes on to elaborate about her experiences as a mature student and what types of courses and professors kept her fire for learning ?kindled.?

The article got me thinking about my old brain and its memory and how it fits into a university environment; an environment that, by its very nature, needs to be focused on the young and the career oriented.

I realize that when universities talk about mature students they’re not referring to maturity at all, just the fact that the student did not come straight from high school or college, but it is a bit disconcerting to find that at Concordia University, for example, mature students are serviced by the same department that services at-risk and failed students!

Anyway, back to my afternoon of surfing: does the old memory have to let us down as we age? We all know that children can pick up a second language with ease, while I’m ready to yell profanities after studying and ?memorizing? the future perfect conditional endings in French for the hundredth time, completely confident that I won’t remember them for the exam anyway. But does it have to be that way?

My former stepson-in-law (don’t you love extended families?) who had a PhD in some exotic subject like Environmental Engineering (he designed sewer and waste systems) once used a computer analogy to explain to my husband why, in his 70s, he can’t remember things that he knows he knows (shades of Donald Rumsfeld).

?It’s no mystery, Dad,? Terry said, ?you have a 286 brain in a Pentium world. It’s all there. It just takes forever to locate the information and print it out!?

Apparently our memory starts to deteriorate, ever so slowly, around age 25. And the old saying ?use it or lose it? is truest when used in relation to the brain. Activities such as reading, puzzles, crosswords, word games, and (are you listening?) learning all contribute to a healthier, more attentive brain.

Did you know that sweating makes you smart? Now, I really got excited about this one. Do you remember another old saying, ?horses sweat, ladies glow, and gentlemen perspire?? Well personally, I should be living in a barn. Unfortunately for me, the statement relates to the body-brain connection. An article in the May/June 2004 Psychology Today magazine reported that a ?good workout may be as good for your mind as it is for your muscles.?

So there you have it: if you want to keep your brain active and healthy and your memory worth having well into your senior years, study and sweat. Not necessarily at the same time.

Maybe I should give Diane Keaton a call?

I studied by correspondence while taking my accounting designation. Living on a Gulf island, correspondence and distance education make sense. It relieves one of the pain of getting in the ferry lineup, going over to the Big Island (Vancouver Island) and driving up to the local university college.

That whole experience could take at least seven hours from start to finish, counting the three hours in class if you took just one course that day. This is mainly because you can’t rely on the ferry being on time, hence the necessity to take a ferry earlier than you actually need and, depending on the time of day you need to go in, not always getting on the ferry you want. So studying part-time at a bricks and mortar school is a huge time waster.

The difference between taking my accounting designation and my Athabasca studies is that, being accountants, we’re rather anal retentive, and the accounting association insisted that I submit assignments weekly. And I could only take one course at a time. And I could only register three times a year. And I had to take the exam on a specified date in a specified place. And on and on the requirements went. So, all this newfound freedom of registering when I want, for what I want, and sending in assignments in my own sweet time, while picking a favourite day on the calendar for an exam, is rather giddying.

Naturally, like everybody else, I can justify procrastination. Well, I’m busy aren’t I? I have contract work to complete. I volunteer. There’s the house to take care of. A demanding husband. The cat needs feeding. And It’s snowing.

It all started to fall apart when my husband noted that the only thing he demands of me is that I manage to get myself to the table to eat the meals he cooks; that he feeds the cat; that a woman comes by every second week to clean the house; and that, yes, It’s snowing outside but I’m not going anywhere am I? I confess. It’s all true.

So why am I only on assignment 2 of my French course when I carefully planned I’d be finished all five assignments and both essays by this date? Why am I still struggling with the contemplative essay for English, when the final research paper should be in progress? (Why I’m still on project 1 for COMP 200 is easier to answer: I have no idea what I’m doing!)

If you Google the word ?procrastination,? the search returns 819,000 entries. Most of these entries tell us why we procrastinate: we find more enjoyable things to do. What PhD figured that one out, I wonder?

One entry suggests that as soon as I receive a big assignment, I should plan to spend ten to 15 minutes a day working on it and then, golly, by the end of a week I will have spent an hour on it. It neglects to tell me by the end of which week.

My favourite professional development course put on by our accounting association is Time Management. I’ve been to so many that I can sleep through it. I know all about making lists. I’m familiar with the A, B, C rule: prioritize all your tasks using A, B, and C. The C tasks get done if you have time; the A tasks need to be done now.

The problem I’ve always found is that the C tasks tend to be more fun and/or easier to accomplish. So, my personal list always has me searching the Internet for the next kayak trip (a dubious C task) before designing a relational database (a recognized A task).

I like the idea that I procrastinate because I’m a perfectionist, as one Internet source suggests. It’s not true, but I like the idea. I’m particularly partial to the blogger who says I shouldn’t fight procrastination; I should just procrastinate well. I’m not quite sure what procrastinating well entails, but I’m sure I’m up to the task.

What I do know is that I have managed to spend a Sunday afternoon writing this article as opposed to finishing the essay and preparing for a French oral assignment that I should have done two weeks ago.

Never mind; there’s always tomorrow.

Dad had been a mechanical engineer in his younger days and his way of becoming familiar with computers was to buy an old 286 model, take it to bits, figure out how it worked, and then put it back together. He went on to add more memory, a CD drive, and he figured out how to work it so that he could play his favourite musical LP records (remember those?), upload them to the computer, and copy them to a CD.

If he emailed my brother and me and we didn’t respond within 24 hours, he was annoyed. He downloaded games and software at three in the morning (?I’m old, I sleep during the day.?)

He was devastated when he failed a year-end exam on computer-aided graphics at the local adult education centre. (Wouldn’t you think they’d have passed him just for turning up at age 74?) When he died in 2002, he knew more about computers than his two ?kids? and most of his grandkids did.

That’s the great thing about learning; it has no age limit. There’s no governmental rule (at least, not yet) that says you can’t learn after a certain age.

I first went to university in 1975 when I was 21. (Okay, so you can do the math; don’t look so smug.) I felt old. I was in a class where the average age was 19, but I’d worked in the finance industry for five years before getting there. These folks came straight from high school. However, there was a woman in my German class who was easily in her 60s and she was taking an undergraduate degree, majoring in German with a minor in Chinese. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she was studying Urdu in her 90s.

The challenge for many mature students is to keep an interest in a course that has obviously been designed for a younger age group. My French courses are a prime example; there are questions for the assignments such as: ?How would you dress if you wanted to impress someone??; ?What characteristics do you look for in a new boy/girl friend??; and, my favourite, ?Do you clean your room regularly??

Trying to explain to the tutor in French that I can’t remember the last time I had to, let alone tried to, impress someone, that my last ?new? boyfriend was about 25 years ago, and that if I didn’t clean my room no one else would, is a challenge.

There are advantages to being an older student however. When I’m expected to write a contemplative essay for English 353, I’ve got a much longer time horizon to contemplate on. If I need to do an expository essay, I reflect back on the 18-year-old woman I hired as a summer worker one year and how I had to teach her the step-by-step wonder of office filing. A very bright and articulate teenager, the importance of following the alphabet was sometimes lost on her. She has since told me that although she struggles from time to time with her studies to be a doctor, she can at least put all the medical terms in alphabetical order in a nanosecond.

And it never ceases to amaze me how much-younger students are so patient with the daft questions I have to post on the computer science forums. (Where’s my Dad when I need him?) It’s like there’s a notation next to my name that says ?Old fogie alert; be kind.? And I’m very glad they are.

Being a mature student is almost as difficult as being a maturing student. The former has lots of time to reflect and draw on; the latter has lots of time to get it right.

A lifelong accountant and finance person, madness took hold of me and I was convinced that salvation lay in a university degree with a double major in English and French.

Quoi?, you ask. Exactly, I say. The blurb on the university website sounded innocuous enough; I just needed to apply and send money. What could be easier? Within two weeks the books arrived. Lots of books. My brain hurt just looking at them.

Going back to university as an old fogey is exciting but daunting. We have the benefit of not being under the stress that youngsters are under. Failed the French exam? Er, how does that affect the pension? didn’t get the English essay in on time? So fire me!

However, we have decades of built-in pride and self-esteem that extract their toll. I find myself up at four a.m. to revise for the French exam because my old brain can’t retain those bloody tenses. I’m terrified that I’ll be the last person in the room to finish the exam at the invigilation centre. Never mind that the rest of them are high school dropouts doing multiple choice assessment tests. That’s not the point; who wants to look slow? My brain hurts just anticipating it.

I religiously log onto the student peer websites as instructed in the course material. In French, I find there’s no one else there. Does no one care that poor Audrey spends her time recording questions to stimulate discussion, but no one bothers to discuss?

In the general course discussion forum I find people with questions like ?What’s the easiest course??; ?Who’s the easiest tutor??; ?How do you switch to an easier tutor??

I find myself ready to rip lips (Hello? Easy doesn’t cut it in the real world, you know!) until I remember that these folks are probably too young to know what the real world is like. They need the degree to get a job, make money, and have a life. The real learning comes later. When you no longer need it. And it becomes fun. And your brain hurts just because, not because it has to.

My father always thought that life happened the wrong way round. We should be born at 80, he asserted, and we’d know everything. Then we should go backward and die in the womb, all warm and cozy like. Given his logic, we’d do the university thing in our 60s. And die knowing nothing. Works for me. And the brain might not hurt anymore.