BazooKa.
Don't worry you'll get plenty of information here
You might even end up more confused. Fortunately the beauty of this place is that you can keep coming back and asking as many questions as you like until you you feel comfortable and unconfused. That way going back to that shop you'll have a good idea of what you're needing. BTW what was the shop that you visited?
You'll find basically two groups of people offering suggestions here, Dobbers and Non-dobbers. You'll find those with Dobs to be the best bunch of friendly visual observers to be found anywhere. Unfortunately they tend to be a bit biased
Probably rightly so but biased anyway.
Then there are us Non-dobbers or more correctly known as GO TOers and trackers (which strangely enough contains some Dobbers as well (I think they all secretly want tracking shhh) who are never biased, just modest and just as friendly. BTW Dob stand for Dobsonian, like frogmans photo above.
For $1000 the Dobbies have got you pinned. A good aperture scope, 8" to 10", with some decent eyepieces will certainly see you on your way to exploring the wonders of the night skies. If you want GO TO then a small (about 4") good quality GO TO will cost you around $900 and then rapidly increase in price. You can get cheaper ones but the quality will disappoint you more often than not. Unfortunately $900 doesn't leave you much to get eyepieces with.
Think about what you would like to do. Whether you want to be able to find objects in the sky by tracking them down off a star chart, or whether you want to just press a couple of buttons to find that object. Both ways can help you learn the night sky. Dobsonians and other non goto scopes basically make you learn your way around and you tend to pick up a lot of additional astronomical info in learning that way. Goto I've found tends to let you just soak up names and numbers and if you find you're really interested, then you will go looking for that other info anyway. But if you're not interested you can still enjoy scooting around the sky looking at "stuff". Have a think about what you would like to do, contact SAS and see when they are having a viewing night. Have a look at, and try some different scopes.
You'll find it said somewhere on this site that the best scope for you is the one you use. If you get one you don't enjoy using then you've really missed out on a great hobby.
Good luck