I Knew Nothing, It Turns Out

September nineteenth. I would like to state, for the record, that I walked into that room with a reasonable level of confidence. Not arrogance. Just the quiet, untested assumption that I would know something, a related thing, a tangential thing, anything, that would give me a foothold in the first twenty minutes. I did not have a foothold. I did not have a toehold. I had a chair and a blank notebook and eleven other people who all seemed to have studied before arrival, which I had not thought to do because I did not know there was anything to study.

The class is a money and budgeting basics course. Six Monday evenings, community center, the same building where I do yoga on Wednesdays, which gave me false confidence because I know where the bathrooms are. The instructor writes fast and expects questions, which is good in theory. In practice I spent the first fifteen minutes transcribing faster than I was comprehending, and by the time I caught up I had missed two definitions I now need to look up separately. I wrote them in the margin with a small star so I would not forget to be embarrassed about them later.

Another moment

Here is the thing, though: I signed up for this because of the supervisor role. Not because anyone told me to, not because it was a condition of the job, just because saying yes to that email in August made me aware, in a quiet but insistent way, that I have been approximate about money for a long time and I would like to be less approximate. The paper number I wrote out that summer has done its job, but it is one number, not a system. I want a system. Or at least I want to understand what a system would look like before I decide whether I need one. So I registered, and I showed up, and I took notes I could not entirely follow, and I drank the bad community center coffee anyway because the cup gave my hands something to do.

Another moment

I have five more Mondays. I am already less confident than I was this morning, which my instructor would probably say is exactly the right place to start.