dithering?

I’m still leaning towards the haircut, and I still haven’t gotten a call from the therapist’s office.

Last night I had a talk with BF about yoga teaching certification. The studio where I’m going for Anodea Judith (in two days! ee!) also has teacher training, and the way it seems to work is you do one or two weekends a month for most of the year. 2008’s session started in April and ends in December. It costs $2600, and the weekends are fully immersive – all day both days.

I will be free from paralegal classes in May 2009, so if I start the program next year there will be a couple of months of overlap. The thought of this stresses me out, but I also think it’ll be far better than waiting a whole nother year. Have I decided to do this? Well, not exactly, but there are a few reasons why I’m very seriously considering it – I will probably be able to save enough money to do it, since I’m less than a year away from paying off my car; I will probably be ready for it after doing yoga as regularly as I do it now for another almost-year; and, most importantly, I really want to.

What FPL said, and what I read about the training program online, and also some general stuff that’s happened to me in the last 16 months or so, really made me turn my attitude around about it. The description of the training program says that it’s for students who want to become teachers OR students who want to deepen their practices. That made me think that it was probably okay for me. Plus the prereq is 50 hours of public classes, which I will probably have attained after this weekend. I’ve already talked about what FPL said, and I really did think about it and decided she was probably right in most things. 

Also, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but part of this decision rests upon something my mother told me in college which took several years to sink in, and when it finally did, it vastly affected the way that I think about my time. I don’t remember what the circumstance was, but I was trying to decide if I was going to do something that required a committment over a period of time. She said that whether I did it or not, that period of time was still going to pass, so why should I waste it by not doing? I didn’t really get it, or I was too young, or I wanted to be lazy, or something, but it sunk in sometime in 2007 and that’s when I decided to get the paralegal certificate. That 18 months it would take me to achieve the certificate was going to pass, as time does, regardless of what I did with it, and I could either be using it wisely, or not. This is not to say that had I chosen to spend that time with BF, or watching movies, or doing something else fun and not-school, that I would have been wasting my time. Most of what I gathered from this lesson is that dithering over whether or not to invest time in a program that will keep you occupied for some extended period is really a waste, because that dithering time could have been spent jumping in and doing whatever it is. It was for this reason that I decided to go ahead with school in the spring of 2008 instead of waiting until the fall as I had thought I’d do. Why wait? I wasn’t going to be any more financially ready, I wasn’t going to be any smarter or better-prepared in any way, and what was I going to do with that time that would make a difference? JUMP IN. This was exactly the right thing to do, as it turned out. If I’d waited I might not have done it at all, and after July 10 I will be halfway done, credits-wise, as opposed to not yet having begun.

It is for this reason that I think I’m going to apply to start teacher training whenever the program begins in 2009. Why wait? I’ll have been doing yoga (this time around) for just exactly a year in April 2009, and the more I think about how far I’ve come already, the more excited I am to see my progress at that time. It will overlap with paralegal training, but so what, I only have two classes that semester and the yoga will be once a month.

BF said he was glad that I wasn’t able to start right away, because it meant that I’d have almost a year to keep progressing and to decide if this was really what I wanted. He didn’t say this, but if the interest wanes, I will have the time to see that, and in that case I won’t have to do the program. “Worst that happens, you’re up the $2600 that you’ve saved,” he said. Also true.

The problem with this, and I tried to talk about it with BF, is that I’m not eager to make it public to some of the people in my life that I’m planning to do this, or, during next year, that I am doing it. I am imagining that my dad especially will have some pretty hurtful things to say. I don’t care about his disapproval per se, but some offhand comments I can imagine coming out of his mouth would hurt. I also don’t really want to inform MP about it, because they’ll find some way to meddle in it, I know, and I don’t want that. And what will strangers think if I tell them I teach yoga? That I’m a Wiccan tree-hugging vegetarian libertarian with eight cats? Secretly I want people to be impressed, and look forward to an introduction that involves people being impressed, but I’m also imagining the kinds of idiotic questions I sometimes get about film, knitting, and philosophy when I make it known I’m interested in those things.

(Likely this will never come up because I will keep working as a legal assistant, and may not ever teach, at least as long as I have such substantial debt. More on that down the page, btw.)

As a footnote to this whole discussion, the way I’m sort of refusing to have conversations with MP is a weird development. Whenever MD corners me at work, as he did last week during the CD-burning thing, and asks me questions about my life, I give him answers that are as brief as possible. In part this is because I want to keep doing my work, rather than sitting there talking to him all day; in part this is because I don’t want to accidentally say something that will trigger a yearslong discussion of something that he thinks of that he wants to tell me; in part this is because I know that anything I say will be filed away and used later when he sees an article in any publication that even remotely relates to it; in part this is because I don’t really feel the need to share ALL aspects of my life with him; and I think that’s enough parts. For instance, last week he asked me about school. I said I was done with the semester. He said “I presume you did well.” I could have told him that I got a 4.0, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to hear his pride, I didn’t want to think about the idea that he might want to “celebrate” by having me over for dinner or something, I didn’t want to deal with any of it. So I nodded and said “Well enough.” Whenever MM asks me about some mundane aspect of my life, I always fear it will result in a conversation that makes me feel awkward or insecure, so I put her off, or answer briefly. Unless we’re at dinner, in which case of course we have all the time in the world. I don’t particularly like doing this, because it makes me feel antisocial and strange, but I keep doing it anyway. I just don’t like talking to them anymore. That’s part of why I’m not too keen on telling them about the instructor thing.

Of course, I realize that a big reason I don’t want to talk to them is that I feel they’re already involved enough in our lives, thank you, and any more distance between us is good distance. A little guilty about this.

–

Today at work has been PRODUCTIVE. This morning I forced myself to do a bunch of work that I have so far failed or forgotten to do. Sorted! I also think I am catching up pretty handily on the first couple of weeks of work for my classes, thanks to a 3.5 hour session last night. Double sorted!

I’ve given some thought to my financial situation over the past week or so, in part to figure out whether I can afford to drop $2600 on something on which I don’t know if I’ll get a ROI. I am spending way too much money on non-essentials, I have realized, and I should really cut down my spending and jump up my saving, so I can pay off bills earlier and have more money to do what I want with. I have five years left of paying $250 a month on my student loan. Yuck. Plus the additional $6,000(?) that I’m spending on the paralegal cert. (I hope it’s less than that.) But I’ve only got about $2500 left on my car, which means if I keep paying $300 on it it will be gone in about eight months, and I am thrilled to think about an extra $300 every month for debt or savings. If I find a way to shave my budget of junk and pay $400 a month instead, it will be gone in about six months. I’m considering this. I wanted to try and save more per month, but so far that’s just leading to near-overdrawing, so it seems like it’d be better to just squirrel that money to a better source and make do with less. What I need to do is stop buying stuff. I just don’t feel like I really buy that much. It can’t just be gas eating up my budget, because I don’t really use that much gas. I guess I’m just spending more than I think.

Luckily there are bonuses on the horizon. In theory there is a bonus in June (although last year’s June bonus was in October), and I’m already thinking that at least half of my Christmas bonus should go right into the teacher training account. I’d like to donate the other half to BF to help him pay off his credit card debt, which sort of ballooned into ridiculousness without him noticing. The June bonus I was intending to use for the new sink, if I get the bonus at all on time, but now I’m thinking I should put it towards my car, to have more disposable income sooner.

If I had a strict budget I think I could do better at all of this, but I just haven’t done it yet. It might be time at last.

If you’re still reading, God bless you. And fare-thee-well.