Back from the Yoga Bubble... Sort of

Ah, dear readers who still check this site after weeks of silence - much love to you!  I've been a TOTAL slacker on the blog front because I've been doing another yoga teacher training that has consumed basically all the time and energy I could muster, so outside of that I had to pretty much just focus on eating and sleeping.

The training itself was really wonderful, though.  I feel so lucky to have met all of these amazing people, especially since we've just moved here and know so few people.  I was just trying to describe to Kei how teacher trainings tend to get emotional - he was wondering why he saw tears when he was a trooper and came to our graduation potluck - and it is tough to explain, but these things cut deep.  Learning to teach itself requires you to take a certain step into vulnerability (the public speaking factor alone...), and then you add in all the work you do to learn and to begin to use this incredible, rich philosophy of it (which is like shining a super bright light on all the little crevices of your personality and history that you'd rather leave in the dark...) and you have yourself a pretty overwhelming recipe.

Anyway, I still have a lot of reflecting to do on much of this and I genuinely hope to stay in the "yoga bubble" in a way but it should be less consuming from here on out, and allow for me to emerge from it enough to write more often, but for the moment, all I want is to say: hello!  I'm back!

Saga de Selene

Many apologies for leaving you hanging on the Crazy Pants saga.  For reasons you'll soon understand, I can now tell you that our beloved Crazy Pants had actually gone by the name Selene throughout our entire correspondence - which didn't match the name on her PayPal account, but we assumed it was the nickname she went by and never thought much of it.  Anyway, to address the questions I received: no, Selene did not break in that day... but never fear, your thirst for entertainment will not go totally unsatisfied: we did have more drama before finally finishing with her and moving out of the apartment.  It coalesced shortly after the last entry, when we had basically moved out, but returned to clean the apartment, and she was unexpectedly living there (before our lease was up) with her mother and two big boxers: one of which had "allergies" causing him to growl and bark viciously the entire time we were there, and the other - well, just you wait for that part of the story.

I've never actually witnessed a person act the way Selene acted while we were there; she really lived into and beyond the illustrious title of Crazy Pants.  She literally stomped around with her head shaking all over the place and talked herself in circles saying one thing one minute and then saying the exact opposite the next, all while intermittently yelling at/dealing with allergy beast, and frequently snapping at her mother and Kei (who was doing his bestest just to hash out what was going on but rarely getting to say three consecutive words without being cut off by either Selene or her mother with their matching shrill, Greek voices).  It was such a whirling mess of tempers and utter crazy-pantsness, that at one point I literally conjured the yoga teacher in me and made everyone in the room do a collective deep breath.  No, that's not figurative, we really did it.  I even employed the corresponding arm-movements I use for my students.  Still got it.  At another, I had to conjure the woulda-been-lawyer in me to sternly inform Crazy Pants that we would not tolerate her behavior and she had better pull herself together and start acting in an appropriate manner... complete with the parental pointer-finger-gesture and "don't mess with me" eyes.  It was a weird afternoon.  After probably about two hours of attempting to follow Crazy Pants Selene's scattering trains of thought and struggling to eek out whole sentences so we could figure out a way to finish up our term and handle all security deposits, we did somehow come to a workable solution, and both the woulda-been-lawyer and the yogini in me felt pretty good about how it all turned out.

Here's my favorite part of the whole story.  While allergy beast stayed "locked" in the kitchen by a clearly insufficient gate (causing me more than one pause and consideration for our physical safety), in the middle of the whole scene, Crazy Pants let the other dog out.  The dog took a liking to me, and was sort of jumping up on me looking for attention, when the mother reached out for the dog and said..."knock that off, Selene!"