misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

I had a certified C.P.A do my taxes this year for the first time ever.

Partly due to me being a cheap piece of shit, and partly because of Lee being a cheap piece of shit which made me even more of a cheap piece of shit, I've always insisted on doing my own taxes. In my head, this was saving me about $300 hundred dollars a year, or whatever the cost of an accountant might be. Doing my own taxes always seemed fine, as I usually only had one W-2, and didn't own stocks or houses or farming equipment or estate taxes incurred by offshore transactions or elderly medicine distribution licenses (all that weird tax shit that I never understood). I also felt qualified to do my own taxes because I got an A- in my freshman year accounting class at SCU, which is quite a bit better than the grade Kenta got, if memory serves correct.

Last year, for the first time, I discovered the hard way doing my taxes had grown beyond my skill level. My taxes included money owed on freelance income, meaning I actually had to keep track of business dinners and cell phone bills and proportional ratios of home offices and all that shit. Unfortunately, being that it was close to April 15th, it was too late to pull in real help. The best I could do was to pay about 100 bucks to use some "tax professional" via H&R Block's online service. She was one of the thousands of retired women H&R Block hires during tax season for this exact purpose, and basically knew less about taxes then I did. I think she took some sort of class at the Learning Annex for a week, and then H&R Block certified her to "check" taxes over to ensure there were no mistakes. It turns out the only mistake I had made was signing up to use her in the first place, as she said I did my taxes "without error" and then presumably went back to the quilt she was working on. I ended up having to pay about $4,000 in taxes based on my extra freelance income. It sucked, but wasn't unexpected.

This year I was determined to get real help. I had freelance money, extra taxes from 401K loan (long story), a job change, and, with my purchase of a grain silo, farming equipment. Through a referral, I set up an appointment with the accountant. Before heading over, however, I used the tax estimator on H&R Block to determine what I would owe if doing taxes myself. The estimate was similar to last year: Once again, I would owe $4,000 in taxes. I figured if the accountant could even save me $300, then it would be worth the $275 it was costing me.

Suffice to say, after a half-hour of him going through my returns and asking a few questions, he looked up and said he had bad news: He could only get me a few hundred dollars back. What? Money back? You mean i don't owe? No, he said, you don't owe. Damn. He saved me $4,000. In typical fashion, the elation over having saved $4000 was quickly eclipsed by the regret of not having had a professional do my taxes before. How much money have I lost over the past few years? Worst of all, as he explained it to me, it was all legitimate .. deductions I never knew I was allowed to take, because, well, as I said I only got an A- in accounting, not an A ... Apparently, the difference between the two is about $4,000.

So, remember that $300 dollars I've been saving all these years? Well, lesson learned. Sometimes saving money costs more than spending it. Hopefully, none of you are still making that same mistake.

I was going to blog about the big new study Jill sent me today revealing that drinking one or two alcoholic beverages a day dramatically increases the breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women, and how at this point it seems the only reason these studies come out is to try and convince people they have control over their health destiny, when in reality they pretty much don't, and that extending life seems to be more important to people than enjoying life, and all these studies do is make people increasingly despondent and joyless, and i thought wine was supposed to be good for you (?), and my mom hardly drank and ate well and still got cancer, and my dad lives on cheetos and wine and is healthy as a teenager (all things considered), and if these studies keep coming out all people will do is lock themselves inside their houses drinking lemon juice with cayenne pepper and breathing through oxygen tanks, and that is why I am not going to read one more study and try to enjoy life, since that seems more important to health than avoiding alcohol, as the French have proven, and I'll just let nature make the decisions it is going to make with or without my consent, even though I'll still do the basics like exercise and eat fruits and veggies, and I was going to write all of this, but then I was talking to Jill and she reminded me that I already blogged about all of this sometime last year, so this is all repetitive to you anyway, which I'm sorry for, as it seems working at a digital ad agency all day doesn't provide me with good blog material anymore, so then I was going to finally write my blog about Helsinki, since I stopped my winter trip blog after St. Petersburg and haven't had the time to detail, but then Jill said that trip was four months ago nobody gives a shit anymore, if they ever did in the first place, since people seem only so interested in things that don't involve them, so now i'm stressed and am going to go get a drink, which I'll enjoy since I'm neither postumenupausal nor decorated with large breasts, so I feel safe I won't get breast cancer, i'll just have to settle for the one that cancer guys get from drinking, which I'm sure some study will tell me about in next month's news, at which point I'll write another blog about depressing studies, until Jill reminds me I've already written two of them, causing me to get another drink, in a month's time, but before I get to that drink, i'll have to get to tonight's drink, i'm already stressed over next month and I haven't even gotten over today's stress, so enough for now, time to go home to drink the stuff that will give me the disease i'm drinking to forget i'll be getting.

I've been running.

This doesn't mean I was just running now and then sat down to write this blog. I mean i've been running, on a treadmill on the third-floor of the Equinox down the street from my apartment. I've been running for the past four months. Not continuously, mind you. But about three days or so a week. I'm up to four miles each run, at a pace of eight minutes a mile.

As an addendum to the aforementioned information (just because I'm writing in an online publishing system doesn't mean I can't make addendums .. Yes, rewriting the above paragraph would've been an easier tactic than writing this sentence as an addendum, but I prefer the parchment and quill method of writing .. anyway, where was I? Oh yes ...) I hate running. I've always hated it. This includes the stint I spent on the cross-country team in the 8th grade at Meadowbrook Middle School, on the outskirts of Poway, California. I had joined the team partly because i was tall and had a long stride, which gave me the mistaken belief I'd be a good runner, but mostly because joining the cross-country team didn't require "try-outs" like the basketball team, which my burgeoning self-confidence wasn't quite yet prepared to handle. All you had to do was show-up for the first cross-country practice, and you were on the team. There was a reason for this, which I learned quickly enough: running sucks. Or, to be more flattering, running, as a sport, isn't quite as entertaining as baseball or football or even marbles. Running consists of putting one leg in front of the other at the fastest pace possible for the longest period possible. Which is why only seven other 8th-graders came out for the team.

After three months of running through the rattlesnake-strewn canyons of Poway, I was sent to the North County "All-Stars" cross-country race. Before you go congratulating me, let me reveal that every runner on my team was sent. I was an all-star simply because I managed to stay on the team for three months.

At around mile three of this "All-Star" race, with me positioned in the back of the pack (which had become the norm), the "course monitors" (the referees of cross-country running) discovered every runner ahead of me had taken the wrong turn at a fork on the course. The course monitors realized the mistake at the moment I reached the fork, allowing me to take the right turn, and hence putting me briefly in the lead. There was only a mile left in the race.

I still finished in 8th place.

Now, back to it: I hate running. Which is exactly why I've been doing it so diligently. I want to do something I hate. I want to test my sense of discipline. I've grown bored with only doing things I like. It's made me soft and spoiled and unchallenged and unchanged. As I grew older, I zeroed in on the things I liked, and only started to do those things. I created a bubble of pleasure, and my goal was to maximize this pleasure, and avoid all uncomfortable situations. I didn't know where I stood or what I was even capable of. The more I only did things I liked, the less I was able to handle those things I hated. If I got into a staring contest with my own hatred, how long could I go without blinking? Did I have any discipline left? How long could I handle hating something?

The answer is 32 minutes. That's as far as I go now before the hate overwhelms me. The good news? When I started four months ago, I could only handle hatred for 15 minutes. I've doubled my hatred capacity in only four months. By June, I hope to be able to handle my hatred for 10 kilometers worth, running with others who have mastered their hate (mind you, nobody actually likes running. They just like the sense of power you get putting hate in its proper place). The more I've done the things I hated, the less I needed the things I liked. Balance has been restored. If you can't face down your hate, you can't appreciate what you like. Or, as that drunk guy from work said a few weeks ago in his bad impression of Confucius, which seemed smart at the time but now I'm not so sure: You must master your hate, or it will master you.