In Which the Government Gets My Money, Even Though I Don't Feel Like They're Doing a Particularly Good Job Representing Me

Here is what it's like to do taxes in high school:

Collect W2 from employer. Give it to Dad. Dad says, "Cool, I'll take care of that." Several months later, receive check in mail. Rejoice.

Here is what it's like to do taxes in college: 

Collect W2 from employer. Lose it in stack of papers. Two months later, panic and turn desk inside out looking for it. Succeed. Give it to Dad. Several months later, receive check in mail. Rejoice.

Here is what it's like to do taxes as a newlywed:

Collect W2s from employers. Add up the two numbers. Write numbers on forms and send forms to government. Several months later, receive check in mail. Rejoice.

Here is what it's like to do taxes when you have one job but that job involves the occasional speaking engagement and you have one W2 but about eight miscellaneous income forms from the different groups you spoke to and your husband is a graduate student and he was a non-resident for the first term of the year and he has a lot of receipts for school-related expenses like books and protractors and and you also moved across the country and have about a thousand receipts documenting the move:

Collect every piece of paper you have touched in the past year. Have a glass of wine. Regard papers. Wonder what would happen if you wrote a letter to the IRS saying "How about we just call it even this year?" Have a cookie. Compose letter. Show letter to husband. Giggle manically while husband deletes letter. Call H&R Block and try not to sound too hysterical on the phone. Resolve to become a hermit next year.

We know what would be easier? We could make taxes proportional to how well we feel the government's done. I'm happy to pay my state and local taxes this year, for example. The roads aren't too pothole-y and the trash is always picked up on time. The state parks are well maintained and they're always careful to post warnings when someone has been mauled by a bear recently. Congress, however, reached an unprecedented level of incompetence this year, and I just don't trust them with my money. 

If you need me at any point in the next week, I can be found on my couch amidst a pile of papers and file folders and ballpoint pens and paper clips and post-it notes, wishing that we were still on the feudal system and I could satisfy my debt to the government (or benevolent overlord) with a few sheaves of wheat and my daughter's hand in marriage. Wish me luck. 

In Which the Planet Goes All Rumble-y

Slow news day today. I was driving home from work, listening to the dulcet tones of Robert Siegel on All Things Considered and frowning over the impending doom of Europe, and then the station broke away to do the local news.

The local NPR station sucks. This is a source of constant frustration to me. The announcers are always stumbling over words and giggling when they mess up and they're just so boring to listen to. When they're not stuttering and giggling they sound like they're welcoming people to a funeral parlor. The one exception is the Token British Dude, Kristian Foden-Vencil, who has the oddest name I've ever come across. He's not a particularly good speaker--not bad, just average--and I think they hired him to confuse listeners and make them think they're listening to the BBC.

Anyway. Slow news day. The biggest stories coming out of Oregon today are the following:

1. Students at Oregon public schools aren't getting any stupider, but they're not getting any smarter, either. Test scores stayed flat this year. They milked this story for about three minutes, interviewing people with official-sounding titles who all said "Well, we're glad the kids aren't stupider, and we'll work hard to make them smarter next year."

2. There was an earthquake at Mount St. Helen today. Which got my attention, believe me. They were about a minute into the story when they mentioned that it registered 2.0 on the Richter scale, and scientists then revised that number down to 0.8. This is not a very impressive number, and I decided not to have a minor freak-out about it. In fact, said a scientist, this was a fairly normal earthquake. They record rumblings of this type every single day. I think this was supposed to be reassuring, but it had me gripping the steering wheel with the Clutches o' Death. Mount St. Helen is constantly being shaken by small earthquakes? And I'm supposed to feel better? 


Apparently earthquakes are a slow-news item around here, and I guess I was the only listener hyperventilating, because Kristian quickly moved on to...

3. The grape harvest looks to be better than expected for local vineyards.

Whoa. Wait. Dude. Earthquake. Daily earthquakes. And I know for a fact that people are still hiking all over it. Don't these people have any sense of self-preservation? And who gives a crap about Greece imploding when Mount St. Helen is making ominous rumbling noises? So I got home and decided to do some research on West Coast earthquakes.

You know how sometimes you'll get a weird rash on your foot and you Google it and then you end up convincing yourself that it's fatal and at the very least they're going to have to amputate? Or you have a sore throat so you plug your symptoms into WebMD and up comes "throat cancer" and you spend the rest of the night in a cold sweat about it? This is why you should never, ever Google things that scare you and have the potential to be blown out of proportion. I should have remembered that. And I never should have looked at this article. "The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable..."

We're doomed. We're all doomed. But I'm determined to look on the bright side: maybe, thousands of years from now, Oregon will be sort of a modern-day Pompeii and archeologists will find our apartment and use it to learn all sorts of things about life in the twenty-first century. Chief among their findings, I imagine, will be the discovery that twenty-first century humanoids didn't keep up with the laundry.

I should go work on that, probably. For posterity's sake.