Editor’s note: The views expressed in I Am So Popular are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.

I sort of hated Elizabeth Gilbert for beating me to the punch in writing a memoir about how an utterly fucked up divorce led to amazing travels, much meditation, and ultimately great healing. On the other hand, I have to say that I actually enjoyed the book, my enjoyment compounded by the fact that I read it while I was in the midst of my own utterly fucked up divorce.

For the three of you who haven’t heard of or read Eat, Pray, Love, basically this really tall chick with blonde hair and a big book advance decides to spend four months in three different countries not getting laid for a very long time despite the fact that she meets a lot of hot Italian guys.

A part that really stuck with me was how her friends ragged on her for taking night classes in Italian. I think they referred to the campus as Divorced Lady College. As if we must immerse ourselves in frivolous activities to help us forget what our idiot ex-husbands did to us.

Well, okay, I’ll buy into that.

While getting divorced (I’ve done it twice now—I could probably teach a class on the topic) certainly prompted sundry class-taking for me, escaping (if only momentarily) from a nightmare hasn’t been the only catalyst for immersing myself in the world of short term studies. I’m sort of a cross between a post-preschooler and a pre-senior-citizen, eager to learn fun things that probably won’t get me very far. Like dog sweater knitting. That was an awesome class. If you count the price of materials, teacher fee, and hours spent, the dog sweater I made for Princess Bubbles probably cost me about $700. And never mind that whenever I leave the room she uses her superior Boston Terrier brain and prehensile paws to take the thing off. I’m glad I learned.

So let’s see, what other classes have I taken? There’s that red belt in Taekwondo I picked up after having the shit kicked out of me (literally) for a couple of years at a now defunct Hyde Park dojo. This was definitely one of those divorce-inspired classes since my first ex-husband was a disciple of the School of Stalking and Psychological Terrorism, undeterred by a restraining order. Seeing as he was nearly a foot taller than me, outweighed me by a good 150 pounds, and thought nothing of threatening me regularly, I decided I would learn how to kill him with my bare hands and feet. I quit about two levels before black belt because ultimately I had to face the fact that at my age, mastering the spinning double jump back kick was not in the cards.

Speaking of cards, it was in the midst of my second divorce that I signed up for Intuition Classes, urged on by my Reiki teacher, from whom I learned hands on healing techniques that at one point I contemplated practicing on dogs as a way to make a living. The intuition classes, taught in South Austin by Lois Goodman—a most colorful, art-car-driving proponent of keeping Austin weird—were awesome. I learned a whole new way to read Tarot cards, which I’d already been doing off and on for twenty years. I learned how to read the minds of pets (send me a picture of your dog and I’ll tell you why he’s pissed off at you), and I even learned how to communicate with the dead.

Best of all, I bonded with Lois. I was so keen on her that I signed up for a post-class reading, during which Lois told me that once and for all I needed to just let the fuck go of my ungrateful ex-husband and go ahead and have sex with Warren, the guy who’d recently asked me out. (When I told Lois that having sex right away—a favorite old pastime of mine—did not match my newfound Buddhist beliefs, she looked at me like, Duh, and said, Spike? Sex is holy. Have some. For the record, I took her advice and Warren and I have been together ever since. I’m telling you, Lois knows her shit.)

Lois was not the first to teach me about chatting with the deceased. Years ago, I took a class in CPR, this time to both satisfy my hungry Savior Complex and also to qualify me as an official attendant for a young friend of mine who has autism. In that class, we spent very little time learning lifesaving techniques and a whole lot of time talking about what happens after crash victims give up the ghost. This culminated in a moment on the floor where, as we hovered above the lips of our Resucit-Annie mannequins, one woman in the class (who told us she gets information from ancient Peruvian rocks) told another woman in the class (whose brother had been shot to death) that she was certain she could see the ghost of the brother just across the room. Getting CPR certified in this class led me to my own personal slogan: “I might not be able to save your life, but I sure can communicate with you after your gone.”

I’ve studied other things over the years. A friend dragged me to belly dancing classes where I struggled, futilely, to learn how to undulate and make my hands tell stories and wiggle my ass and love my body. Week after week I would show up and notice other students were missing. They were loser dropouts, I determined, until I learned that, no, they had all been promoted to the intermediate class, a promotion for which I clearly would never qualify.

I’ve also tried some self-learning, usually via audiobooks, most notably my short-lived attempt to learn Hebrew to impress my young, hot, Israeli boyfriend. I chose a Learn Before You Land audio class, which promised to teach me the entire language in 58 minutes. After discovering that counting to three in Hebrew involves two hundred and forty syllables and no small amount of inadvertent spitting, I gave up the dream.

Last summer, as I slogged through my divorce grief, I found myself unintentionally pursuing a mini-version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s exotic travels and lessons. In Astoria, Oregon, I got a job for a couple of days in a collective bakery, where I arrived before sunrise and learned the craft of making artisan bread. At a monastery outside of San Diego, I listened to lectures by Thich Nhat Hanh and other Buddhist monks who urged me to be compassionate to myself and others, even the asshole I ran into there that really pissed me off.

But I don’t just take classes, I teach them, too. Over the years I’ve given talks at countless AISD schools—until I was blacklisted when a conservative parent made a big stink when she decided I was a sexual pervert (as if I make these things secret!). I’ve taught at Lake Austin Spa (Knitting for Meditation! Journal Writing for Health!). I taught for years at the totally awesome Griffin School, an alternative college prep academy. And I’ve led any number of writing workshops.

But my most ongoing teaching engagement comes every summer, when I offer my low-rent, let’s-get-a-little-crazy-kids camps. For many years, I led a writing camp, to which I added an arts and crafts component. So it went sort of like this:

Come in. Write a poem. Work on a silly group skit (such as Invent your own product and write a goofy TV commercial for it), UNHEALTHY SNACK TIME! (HEB brand Oreos, known as 2Wisters, being an ongoing hit), invent your own magazine, and then get glitter all over the damn place.

The kids loved my somewhat hands off approach—let’s face it, a lot of camps are so structured where’s that we’re-not-in-school fun that camp is supposed to offer?

And then, last year, I started Fashion Camp, which I am continuing this year. As I’ve noted elsewhere on the Internet, my standard dress code can be defined in two words: Seventies Lesbian. I’m a big fan of the birks, the flannels, the Levis, and never any makeup. So I’m sort of the personification of oxymoron in my leading troops of (mostly but not all) little girls through a week of sewing girly clothes that culminates in a fashion show with a real runway and electronica music (we even bring in a photographer).

But it doesn’t matter that I’m a slob, at best, on any given day. I know the secret of classes, the driving force behind taking them. It’s an awesome chance to escape, to become someone you aren’t in your regular life, if only for a few hours, or a couple of weeks. I might not have a lot of class. But I know a thing or two about the subject.

The tremendously popular Spike Gillespie blogs regularly at LaunchPadCoworking, www.spikeg.com, and www.sloppyquilter.com. She is the headmistress of the Dick Monologues. And yes, she actually runs a Fashion Camp. You can reach her at spikegillespie@gmail.com.