Life And Taxes

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​LIFE AND TAXES

    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,​

...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, 

​​...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."

     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.

      So it's my teaching income, such as it is, and book income, such as it is,  

...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.

      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.

Reference:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-alive-dead.html