This month’s topic is In the Gym, but I don’t really think we’ll actually be spending much time In the Gym because this is a mommy blog, and although perhaps we should be, mommys don’t often get to spend a lot of time In the Gym unless is it followed by “‘boree” or going Through the Gym is the only way to get to the swimming lessons at the Y.

But some of us do allow ourselves the occasional trip to the yoga studio.  I do from time to time and let me tell you about my favorite studio in Albuquerque.  It’s like the flow starts even before the Vinyasa begins.  There’s the totally paperless check-in (an iPad with an aura-proximity device I think), they provide towels and fancy yoga mats that won’t absorb your sweat, the automatic water bottle-filling water fountain, the pretty, pastel lockers, showers and hair dryers and even a bamboo basket filled with feminine products, just in case Vinyasa encourages yet another kind of flow.

But I don’t go there anymore.

My good friend goes there regularly.

But I still don’t go there.

Because it’s on the other side of town and I’d have to drive.

And because of this guy that lives in Don’tAskMe, Colorado, Mr. Money Mustache.  He’s a dude that quit his job at 30 after pretty much shacking the frugal, simple, happy life many of us dream about.

Here’s what he says about middle-class wastefulness:

The latte is just the foamy figurehead of an entire spectrum of sloppy “I deserve it” luxury spending that consumes most of our gross domestic product these days. Among my favorite targets: commuting to an office job in an F-150 pickup truck, anything involving a drive-through, paying $100 per month for the privilege of wasting four hours a night watching cable TV and the whole yoga industry [bold mine]. There are better, and free, ways to meet these needs, but everyone always chooses the expensive ones and then complains that life is hard these days.  -find original interview here

Oh boy.  So sorry to another, dear friend, the yoga instructor.

But he’s got a point.

Driving across town to drop a yuppie-food stamp on luxury yoga is wasteful.  It wastes natural resources, it wastes my financial resources and also wastes my temporal resources.  I have very little time to myself.  And of that time, I want to spend less on exercise than I do, say, reading, or blogging, or eating a box girl scout cookies (they’re comin’ folks).  So if I’m going to do yoga, I now choose to do it at home, or at the lower-scale joint down the street.