Hoarders and Hotels and Hogs: Two Weeks to Teacher Training!

Hoarder Me vs. Practical Me

So once again I find myself going through everything I own and selling what I can, giving away what I can’t, and (most frequently) tossing whatever is junk.  Somehow my roommates managed to find a replacement me(!), so I need to whittle all my junk down to what I’m bringing to training + what I can fit in two big boxes that will sit in my friend’s basement for the next two months.

Getting rid of stuff is simultaneously freeing and really, really hard.  I seem to attach emotional significance to things – so that ugly little stuffed mouse from the dollar store that sits in a box in my closet isn’t just an ugly little stuffed mouse from the dollar store, it was in a play! That I wrote!  That won a competition!  NINE YEARS AGO.  Oof.

I’m glad I’ve started this process two weeks in advance and not the night before the drive to LA.  There’s the hoarder side of me and the practical side, and they have to argue over everything and it takes forever.  Sample conversation:

Hoarder Me: I love this shirt!  It says "I <3 Nerds" in sparkly letters!  It stays.

Practical Me: It says "I <3 Nerds" in sparkly letters…you will be 30 years old in three days.  You are a grown ass woman.  It goes.

Hoarder Me: But remember?  How my friend had the matching shirt that says “Talk Nerdy to Me” in sparkly letters and we wore them together that one time and –

Practical Me: She probably got rid of her matching shirt years ago.  Before she GOT MARRIED and BOUGHT A HOUSE because she is a GROWN ASS WOMAN.  It goes.

Hoarder Me: …but it won’t take up that much room…

So yesterday I was determined to at least finish sorting clothing, and I ended up with three boxes – two Goodwill boxes, and one “maybe Buffalo Exchange will buy it” box.   

I know the Buffalo Exchange buyers aren’t really judging you as they sort through all the clothes you’ve thought maybe, just maybe, are cool enough for Buffalo Exchange, but it sure feels like it.  I always feel the urge to break the stone-faced buyer silence as they decline to purchase everything you thought might be worth something by singing the praises of various items of clothing (i.e. Me: “That’s from Spain!” Stone-faced buyer: “I know.”)  It doesn't work.  I learned a valuable lesson yesterday; I’m now only $32 in store credit worth of cool.  Four years ago I was almost $50 worth of cool.  I need to stop buying clothes at Forever 21.

“Getting yourself fed is one of the challenges of BYTT!”

Another reason I need to get rid of everything is that I won’t be living in a sublet, or an apartment, or anything normal like that for the nine weeks of training – I’ll be living in a tiny hotel room with very limited space.

 

The quote above was said by a teacher on the Teacher Training Facebook page recently - sure, the hotel is going to provide a “vegan buffet” of goodness and other ready-to-eat options, but I can only imagine how much they’ll charge, and most of us have already spent all our hard earned pennies on the actual training.  So I’ve splurged on a nice tea kettle and started taste testing all the instant lentil and bean soups Rainbow Grocery has to offer (verdict?: BORING, but a good source of protein).  It’s definitely going to be a challenge, especially with the elevated level of calorie-burning I can expect!  If anyone has any ideas, let me know...

Presumably for that reason, I have been eating like a PIG these past few weeks.  One of my new favorite fellow teacher trainee bloggers wrote about this too (oh, and if you click that link the f-word in big pink letters will be on your screen, in case your boss is hanging around or whatever), and Kelly and I have commiserated on our newly piggish tendencies, so at least I know I’m not alone.  It would be nice to think that, like a pregnant lady, my body is craving the nutrients it knows it’ll need for nine weeks of yoga, but I don’t think there’s much nutritional value in white bread with butter or Cheetos cheese puffs.  I think I’m more like a bear on the brink of hibernation trying to build a nice layer of fat for the long winter...

I haven’t talked much about yoga in this post…I promise to post again soon with something more relevant than my hoarder tendencies.  Suffice to say that I finally found a way to practice dialogue that works (yay!), and in Ryan’s class the other day I got closer than ever before to getting my forehead to my toes in Paschimotthanasana (yay!!) (okay, so not that close comparatively, but still…it was exciting!).