I got my W-2s in the mail a few days ago. Normally, I put things off until I’m in a huge amount of trouble, but I’ve been trying to buck that trend, so I turned in my taxes last night.
A lot of people bitch about taxes. They don’t want the government taking all of their hard earned money and spending it however they see fit.
First of all, these people piss me off. I don’t like taxes either, but I do enjoy parks, police, roads and public education (now that I think about it, you bitches pay my wages. Thanks, suckers!). There are things that my money gets spent on sometimes that I don’t approve of, but I feel like that’s one of the consequences of voting someone into office who makes the decisions for me while I’m at work.
It’s like brushing your teeth. It sucks to have to do it twice a day, floss and use Listerine, but the alternative is to have a mouth full of rot and a life of solitude because nobody wants to listen to you bitch about how “No god damned doctor is going to tell ME to spend my hard-earned money on a toothbrush!”
I get it. Taxes suck. A lot. I agree. Now man up, pay them and get over it.
That being said, I’ve found a loophole in the system that has kept my hard earned money out of the government’s hands. When it was all said and done, the taxes I owed added up to less than a night at a strip club (Especially if you put a price on my time, discomfort and shame!)
How did I evade Uncle Sam? Here’s the trick:
I made almost no money in 2008.
An artist's depiction of my bathroom in April.
I was startled when I looked at my W-2s and realized just how small my annual gross income was. I managed to make it back below the poverty line again this year. At first, I wasn’t really sure how I had lived as comfortably as I did with the wages that I pulled in – my expenses are low, but I didn’t think I kept them low enough to survive on the income that I earned in ’08. As I thought about it, it started to make more sense, though. Follow these three simple rules and you too can enjoy a great tax season!
1. Have lots and lots of unpaid vacation time. I have summers off. If you throw in Christmas, Thanksgiving, Spring Break and other various vacations, I think I get more than four months off every year. All of that time sitting in my underwear and relaxing leads to lots of free time, low, low wages and big time savings when taxes are due!
2.Have the choice to not work on days when school IS in session, and take advantage of this frequently. If you take all of my vacation time and add in the days that I refuse to work, I probably spend less than six months out of the year gainfully employed, a number that I’m sure I can improve on this year! With hard work, discipline and a waterproof cardboard box, I’m confident that I can cut the amount of work that I do in a year in half!
3. Get paid next to nothing. Even though the government now trusts me enough to put me in charge of a room full of 12 year olds, I make about ten cents more per hour now than I did when I was cooking pot roast and listening to death metal while the my meth’d up coworker was showing everyone his penis whenever they walked by the kitchen. (Yes. That really happened.) Bargain basement wages like that guarantee that my bank account stays profitably empty!
"Plan B".
Learn these three guidelines. Love them. Respect them. NEVER turn your back on them, and in no time flat, you’ll be using hundred dollar bills to wipe your ass, at least for one month of the year! Most of the year, you’re probably feeling pretty good about your income, but come tax season, you’re sweating your meager return or even worse, the amount that you owe the government while I’m using my big-time return on a gold chamber pot so I don’t have to leave my cardboard box and tend to my night soil in the middle of the night. Sure, it’s a little… exciting to pay for basic necessities during most of the year, and trying to eat towards the end of summer when you haven’t received a paycheck in over three months is truly fucking intense, but I’m laughing all the way to the bank at the government’s expense right now!
Unfortunately, I’m trying to quit the game. I have submitted an application to the local college to acquire certification to teach secondary econ. If things go according to plan, I will be bringing in marginally less shitty wages, but I’ll be getting them during summer and Christmas as well. Of course, this is all assuming that the economy hasn’t completely and utterly collapsed by the time I’m certified. If that has happened, I will more than likely be hiding in my house with a shotgun and trading beaver pelts for a living.
—
I just finished a two day stint doing language arts at a local middle school. You know. That job I work instead of flipping burgers that’s worth and extra dime an hour. Anyway, I spent two days trying to explain figurative language to 6th graders. They handled Metaphors, Similes, Onomatopoeia and Hyperbole with relative ease (although they had a lot of trouble pronouncing them.)
Then we got to Personification, which stopped them dead in their tracks.
Well, not exactly. They were able to understand that personification is giving human qualities to things that aren’t human, but at the point where those human qualities had to make sense, they started to struggle. In every class, I would start out by giving them the definition and two examples (“The Snowflake kissed my cheek” and “The icy wind slapped me in the face” ). Then I would ask if someone could give me an example of personification, which is when things always ended up flying off the tracks. Here’s a rough blow by blow of how it went:
—
Me: “The snowflake kissed my cheek”. Can snowflakes really kiss someone? (The murmer of 30 kids saying “no” while shaking their heads) Right! Very good! We’re giving human traits to a non-human object! Would someone like to try making up their own example of personification? Dalton. Give it a shot.
Dalton: The Cu-Cu Clock took a dump in my mailbox.
Me:…Okay. You’re on the right track. Technically, you ARE giving human traits to an inanimate object, but it’s key that those traits are similar to traits that the object actually has. Have you ever seen a cold glass sweat during a hot day? (Everyone nods) Is it actually sweating? (Everyone shakes their head) Right. It just looks like it is. We’re giving a human quality to an object. Someone else give it a shot. Taylor.
Taylor: “Woah! That shit is speedy!” The cinderblock exclaimed after snorting a line of cocaine off of a stripper’s ass.
Me: Okay, again you DID give human properties to an object, but again, I think we’re missing that they have to be properties that are similar to ones the object has. Let’s try again. Yes, Karl.
Karl: The pork chop couldn’t have an orgasm unless its partner was wearing a Richard Nixon mask.
Me: … You know what? Good work. The next type of figurative language we need to learn is Alliteration.
—
I’m changing the story a little bit – The kid’s responses were less vulgar, and I tried a lot harder to help them understand, but other than that, it’s more or less what happened. I’m still not sure that some of them get what personification is. Hopefully, their actual teacher can help them figure it out in a way that I couldn’t.
Finally, I’ll set up the video that none of you will watch with a story:
Last weekend I was at the bar with a friend. “Send me an Angel” by Real Life came on. A table of about 12 people that appeared to be at a family gathering of some sort started cheering and clapping along to the beat. Then they took turns dancing to the song while everyone else at the table would cheer them on. They maintained their enthusiasm for the duration of the song. Before that night, I think that the last time I heard that song was sometime in the late 80′s when I watched “Rad”. I THINK that it plays when the main character and his love interest are in a club dancing on their BMX bikes. (I just checked and I was right. I have no idea why my brain deemed that information useful enough to save for the past 20 years. Also, I guess his love interest is Uncle Jessie’s girlfriend on Full House).
Anyway, watching the family dance off got me thinking about that song. It’s hard not to get excited about something that another group of people find that entertaining, and there’s a recently tenderized soft spot in my heart for 80′s music, even though I never really liked any of it in the 80′s.
The bottom line is, I’ve listened to that song seven or eight hundred times in the four days since I heard it at the bar.
Now I want you to enjoy it.
Now, imagine trying to explain what you’re doing to people when they hear you singing the female part under your breath all day.
Have a good day.