Ailantha
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Life And Taxes

4/20/2021

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​
​LIFE AND TAXES

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    For me, doing taxes every year is an exercise in humility. And anxiety. 
​    It's the same every year. The Lieutenant Colonel, among whose super powers is the ability to crack the tax code, appropriates the dining room table, sets up shop,​
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...then tears through forms, schedules and work sheets by the bushel while he whips his weight in pre-taxable, taxable and non-taxable entities, gross vs. net incomes, deductions, refundable credits, non-refundable credits, and applicable percentages derived by multiplying the light of the moon by  a puppy dog's tail then dividing by your shoe size.
     I, meanwhile, sit next to him because we are allegedly  working on the taxes together, 
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​​...struggling, in spite of my spouse's patient and repetitive explanations, to  understand what he and I are doing, scribbling the same voluminous notes as I scribbled last year and all the years before, feeling that same stomach-clenching anxiety that I used to feel back in all the Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus classes I cried, hyperventilated, and  floundered my way through in school. 
     It's very non-empowering.
    "Don't worry," says Tom. "If I go first you can just hire someone to do all this."
     Squinting  down a page of inscrutable line items I reply, 
"No, I really better go first."
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     The irony, I suppose, is that the lion's share of the tax agita at our dining room table goes down because I'm self-employed, though now only a little bit self-employed since the pandemic pretty much plotzed my once-thriving piano teaching studio.
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      So it's my teaching income, such as it is, and book income, such as it is,  
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...that requires the sorting out of all sorts of business deductions, applications and rules, not to mention a finity of forms and schedules to be filled in and submitted to the Federal, State, City, and  various regional entities within  whose jurisdictions I conduct my business. Such as it is.
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      But then, the moment arrives when all the boxes are checked, the figures entered, the sums resolved, the forms and schedules collated, the anxiety deflated, and I see within the data of the finished product a sort of narrative about myself: The monetary value of the teaching I did. The miles I travelled doing it. The money I made selling my books. The money I spent trying to sell them.  In short how much, in the realm of dollars and cents, I was worth over the past year.
     It's always an exercise in humility. Having spent the past year shut down by  microbes, ten trillion of which weigh less than a raindrop, this time it was so much more so.
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Reference:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-alive-dead.html
2 Comments
Bob Coughlin
4/21/2021 04:00:40 pm

Can't you just make up the numbers? Aren't you a writer of believable fiction?

Reply
Patti Liszkay
4/21/2021 04:09:26 pm

LOL! Well, Bob, if left to my own devices that just might happen! But Tom Liszkay is never gonna let a rogue digit slip by him and make its way to Uncle Sam! ;)

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