That's good, because I've recently started doing yoga and I have no desire to move to Southern California. Not that there's anything wrong with Southern Cal. I just like it here.
Yoga is awesome. You can do it anywhere in the country. Even hick states like North Carolina -- as long as you're in a moderate-sized city and don't mind sharing a class with the occasional big-haired, buxom yogini in too-tight spandex.
I'm once again considering getting certified to teach yoga. I actually talked to my yoga teacher about it last week. The yoga studio I attend has a respected teacher-training program -- and there is a distinct possibility that I could do it on a part-time basis. I want to teach yoga to special-needs kids, and my yoga teacher actually taught a movement class to a group of autistic middle-schoolers last year. It was part of a contract with the public school system. (She also has an MA in Dance, so technically it was a dance class but she used lots of yoga too.) She says there's no special certification but you could cobble together the required information from a series of weekend workshops, and she'd be thrilled to help me. I'd have to start out teaching regular classes to get my bearings before I started doing something so specialized, but it's possible that I could have my certification and be teaching half-time by the time Hero goes to preschool.
But the problem with this plan is that it doesn't have any relationship to the thing I have spent the last six years studying, which is history, and I would sort of like to keep my foot in the door in that respect so that I can resume my career as an historian once the kids are older. There are a couple of ways to do this, one of which is to continue researching and writing on my own and submitting short papers to peer-reviewed journals for publication. If I can get half a dozen articles published over the next ten years it will at least prove that I have worked to keep my skills current even though I've not been officially working in the field, and I might actually be able to get a job. The other thing I could do is apply to teach an evening class at the local technical college. Most require a Master's but no teaching experience. Both these thingswould help me get into a PhD program later if I decide that's what I want to do, but which one I choose now will determine what my options are aferwards. Also, I don't know if I want to get my PhD or if I want to go in a different direction entirely.
The last option is to just do nothing for five years or so and then get involved in local politics, work my way up, and hopefully end up doing some state-level lobbying job for an organization I believe in. Which wouldn't be bad either, but it's not exactly a lifelong dream. The most appealing thing about this option is that it doesn't require anything of me any time soon. I am so burned out on school that the idea of ever doing anything school related again, ever, is sort of a turnoff.
So, I guess this is my way of saying that linnea and V aren't the only people with identity crises around here. You would think once you've got a husband and 1 1/2 kids you don't have to make these kinds of tough decisions, but really, the spouse and kids only serve to further complicate things in the long run.
Speaking of which, one of my complications is trying to sit on my lap while I type this, so I need to move my laptop. I don't have enough lap left to accommodate both any more!
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Topic: Emigrating (Read 14096 times)