Working as a yoga teacher can be a very gratifying and uplifting job; this past week I started two new sessions and for the first time in a long time, the number of students registered had increased significantly, with many brand-new students alongside my solid group of loyalists who have been with me for years. Without exception, each of the new students told me that this was their first group exercise since before Covid, and that they were both excited and nervous, as the pandemic had really taken a toll on their physical health. This confirms my unscientific belief that there is a bimodal distribution, or perhaps a U-shaped curve, with age on the x-axis, and The Toll The Pandemic Has Taken on the y-axis; it seems to me that isolation, closures, and other mitigation strategies have been the hardest on seniors and the youth, with many of said youth’s development phases being delayed or skipped over entirely.

Speaking of that, my younger son is in Exam Mode right now, and is Very Stressed about it. This is the first time ever – EVER – that he has had to take exams that are meaningful in any way; all throughout the pandemic final exams were “non-jeopardy,” meaning that they could potentially increase one’s grade, but they would simply be excluded if the exam mark was less than the overall class mark. He has never written a high school exam that “counted,” and his first one, last week, was the English Part A Written, which is kind of a bitch at the best of times, let alone for a kid whose strength is not in English, and also who has NEVER WRITTEN A MEANINGFUL EXAM. Baptism by fire, I suppose.

Circling back to my yoga classes, after a month break I was happy to be back. If someone had told me twenty-five years ago that I would not only be a yoga teacher, but one who specializes in yoga for older people, I would have looked like Shrek when he finishes watching Welcome to Duloc. I have enjoyed exercise all my adult life, and I have always connected well with older people, but never really thought I would be here. I have my master’s in economics and back then I briefly considered writing my thesis on how expenditures on movement and exercise could benefit seniors into their golden years, and how such expenditures could increase physical mobility and mental well-being, and thus help prevent premature entry into long-term care facilities. A cost-benefit analysis, if you will. I suppose you could say I’m living that thesis topic. My actual thesis was about alcohol use and its effects on earnings, causation and correlation, and it is also a bimodal distribution, if you’re interested. I will never forget my thesis supervisor and I talking about correlation, causation, and how sometimes statistics move together and thus all such studies are completely meaningless. There’s nothing like grad school to crush one’s spirit and will to live.

I did have a few Ask Me Anything questions about my wayward youth, or, more specifically, my pre-mom career. Sarah (HI SARAH) asked I’m curious about your past career and why you decided to leave. What did you do? Did you become a stay-at-home mom? while Lisa (HI LISA) asked What do you miss most from your previous career and what do you miss the least?

Back in my fiery youth I was fairly intense about my career; after grad school I went to work in natural gas trading, after a brief stint in the crude oil marketing industry. I worked on a trade floor and I loved it; I loved the energy and the work itself, which was being a quantitative analyst for the structured products and options desk. I also cried in the ladies’ room at least once a week. It was extremely stressful and the hours were long; I worked ten to twelve hour days most days, and at the end of each month I would frequently be in the office from 6:30 am to 9:00 pm. In addition to her question, Lisa asked about the trade floor culture, suggesting that Canadian traders were perhaps “nicer” than American ones, and I can tell you, after many visits to our Houston office, that this is not the case. They are the same, in that there was constant swearing and screaming, sometimes directed at me, sometimes not, but distressing all the same. If a pricing model wasn’t working, for whatever reason, I had to fix it immediately while our traders were losing their minds. If natural gas prices settled differently from what they thought they would, there would be much consternation and agitation, often directed at me, although I was not personally responsible for the North American natural gas industry and its pricing procedures.

I believe I have related this story before, but there was a marketer on our floor who, after a phone call that resulted in something he was unhappy with, repeatedly smashed his phone on his desk until it shattered. This was back in the day when receivers were attached via cord to the actual phone on each desk, and forever after when that marketer would walk through the trade floor, every single person would cover their phone protectively with their hands. Don’t touch my phone, man, I need it, someone would say Every Single Day. I think that fellow was required to go to an anger management course, but it generally became the hilarious joke on the floor that never got old. Here comes Tom! Hide your phones! Hilarity ensues.

For some reason – and who can say, really – I developed extremely high blood pressure while pregnant. These days at the doctor’s office, my blood pressure is so low that the nurse always looks at me, alarmed, and asks if I feel faint. But then, I was working a ton and also eating a ton, and so I ended up on bedrest with preeclampsia. Maternity leaves are a year long in Canada, and by the time I was due to go back to work I was already three months pregnant with my second baby, and so back to work I did not go. I could have, and I could have collected another year of benefits from six months of work, but honestly, I did not see how I could possibly swing the hours and the stress with a one-year-old and another pregnancy to boot.

So I don’t miss that part of my previous career, which is pretty much 180 degrees from my current “career,” in which, among other things, I guide people to “let go of their tension.” I will tell you, though, that when I was at home with a one-year-old and a colicky newborn, I thought of my stressful, crying-in-the-bathroom, possibly-going-to-have-a-stroke-while-pregnant job with longing. It seemed like the height of luxury to leave the house, eat lunch on an expense account – albeit at my desk amongst screaming, but it wouldn’t be infant-or-toddler screaming – all while wearing beautiful clothes. Wow, did I long for my clothes while at home in spit-up covered sweaters and jeans. High heels! Pantyhose! Chanel Number 5 perfume! This is one of those Grass Is Always Greener scenarios, and I do not at all miss such things today. I once again wear beautiful – although, not office-appropriate – clothes, and no one spits up on me or screams at me in any capacity. I can leave the house anytime I want; Rex does look at me with reproach when I do, but he is easily appeased with a treat. So even the fun things about the job, I don’t miss anymore, almost nineteen years after leaving. I do, however, miss the paycheque.

Weekly Reading

Happy Go Lucky. We all know how much I love David Sedaris, and I did love this book of essays. However, it has a very different tone than most of his books; there were some parts that I laughed out loud, but for the most part, this is very dark. If you have read anything by him, you could have probably gleaned that he did not have a great relationship with his father, particularly in his childhood and formative years. But this book, which deals primarily with his father’s demise and death at age 98, really delves into that relationship and it is quite shocking. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to figure out that a man of a certain era might have had a problem with his son being gay, but this is something else again. Again: I really did love this book but it is very, very dark. There are also quite a few essays dealing with the pandemic, and the aftermath of lockdown, which I found interesting to read.

Our Missing Hearts. I love Celeste Ng’s writing and I was so excited that she had a new book, after many years of no new books. Her writing is gorgeous and compelling, as always, but this book is quite different from her others: it is what I would call dystopian-adjacent. I do not, as a rule, enjoy dystopian books BUT this is different; I call it “adjacent” because it kind of felt like the world that she created, one in which children are separated from their parents for the greater good and national security, one in which people look with suspicion at people who don’t look like them, one in which people toe the line and report on their neighbours, well, that world feels like it exists. All we have to do is remember residential schools, children separated at the US border, and the foster care system in general. In this book, in order to get to a place of “peace and stability,” the government created a common enemy, and that enemy is China. Again, this didn’t feel far from the mark; let’s remember Soviet-era fears of communism, the House Un-American Activities, etc., not to mention internment camps for Japanese people. In the author’s note, she mentioned the rise of anti-Asian sentiment at the beginning of the pandemic, and while that is not something I, a privileged suburban white woman, personally experienced, I believe it. After all, I remember very clearly the post-9/11 days and the massive anti-Muslim sentiment. I remember there being a backlash against such things as Afghan dogs or Afghan BLANKETS. I remember the anger at France for not jumping on the bandwagon. Remember “Freedom fries?” So while this world in Our Missing Hearts was a created one, it did not feel all that fictional. It was a great read and very thought-provoking as well.

We have been having the most gorgeous January around here! It looks like it’s shaping up to be another beautiful week. Have a wonderful week, friends! I hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane to the trade floor! xo