Learning CSS

I seem to be stalling on the CSS portion of web building. I find it the most fascinating. The application of words, letters, symbols, and numbers to make colours and shapes and styles appear. The internet as we know it seems to have taken on a fairly uniform approach; navigation bar across the top, thin header, with a title, content and a sidebar. So many beautiful ways to style things and this is what we're stuck with? It's not all that appealing to the eye, if everything looks similar. My list of CSS skills and tricks keeps growing,  every time I code a page. For example, the if all content is listed in uniform chunks (windows 8 UI style), there's a badass plugin you can use to jQuery to line this stuff up. It's called Masonry. But it's jQuery. I found a neat example that sort of (barely, but quite a lot in principle) imitates this with strictly CSS, and allows your content to sort of think for itself. It involves a little bit of Tetris, and a little bit of nth child.  Using only CSS, you can have "smart" content, where it fills in the gaps and expands to fit in the spaces. #CSStrickoftheday