Light and Darkness

As far back as I can remember, there’s been a darkness inside me. Yes, I’ve hid it well. It’s the part of me that revels in my own genius, my ability to pull the wool over the eyes of those who seek to find me out. It’s the part of me that watches Criminal Minds and thinks, “yeah, I could do that.”

Perhaps you mistake me. Perhaps that last statement could be misconstrued. Let me make it clear. I’m not referring to the honorable investigators who seek out those criminals, capturing them and putting them in their place. No, I’m saying that I see myself in some of those monsters.

It’s a darkness that scares even me sometimes. Makes me wonder about split personalities and the nature of evil. It makes me realize how little we know about everyone else, even those closest to us, for we can never know what thoughts run deepest through even our most beloved’s mind.

Then I see the smile in my niece’s eyes, and her innocence, and I think that I would do anything to protect her. And I create fantasies in my mind of conversations I will one day have with my now unborn children, and the love I already have for them is so magnificent that it’s downright perplexing.

Perhaps it’s true what Mr. Black says, that we all have light and dark inside of us. Perhaps anyone is capable of anything, wonderful or horrible, and it’s just a flip of a coin which person they become. Perhaps he is right that who we really are is defined by what part we choose to act on.

I don’t know if I believe that last part. But it’s a nice thought.

I’ve Missed You

There you are. I’ve missed you.

I feared you were gone forever…gone for good. I haven’t seen you in many months, maybe even a few years. Where did you go? And why?

No, let’s not dwell on the past. You’re here now. I’m glad of it. I thought that I would forget myself when I finally saw your face again, but I find that I’m still remembering myself…in spite of your glory.

There are those eyes! So beautiful. The perfect combination of your mother’s and father’s. Dark on the outer edges, and lighter and lighter as I move inward, so that the light brown slowly fades to green and then to blue. A brilliant blue. I’d forgotten it. I’d forgotten how long you yearned for blue eyes, and then one day realized you’d had them all along.

I haven’t seen your eyes in many months. Maybe even a few years. I’ve seen bits and pieces of you, here and there. A flicker of light out of the corner of my eyes. A flash…and then you were gone again. Why did you have to go?

I searched for you. I left no rock unturned, no book unopened, no light unlit. I stood on my tiptoes and pushed myself to reach just a little higher, because maybe, just maybe, you were hiding up there. I dropped to my stomach and crawled around, desperately searching for you…searching for much longer than I care to admit. Searching for much longer than I should have. Searching for long enough that I should have found you.

But I never did. I tried. I really tried. Maybe you couldn’t see it, maybe others couldn’t see it, but I tried with all my might. I replayed the songs we used to love. I rewatched the movies we used to rewatch until we could recite the lines in our heads…the same ones I watched in other languages because I knew them so well. Because we knew them so well.

Nothing worked. You left me. And I couldn’t figure out how to get you back. I wasn’t mad at you. I’m still not mad at you. I’m mad at myself. Frustrated that I worked so long and so hard to get you back, and then out of nowhere you just came flitting up to me, like nothing had happened…like you had been here all along. Jumping out at me as though you’d just been hiding in the corner. Hiding for only a second.

But you hid for many months. Maybe even a few years. It’s been so long that I can’t remember now. But you’re here now. Let us forget the past. I’ve been remembering it enough lately for the both of us. I’m ready to be with you again.

I’m ready to be you again. I’m ready to break out of this shell that’s been blinding me to you. I’m ready to get off the floor, to rise on my two strong feet, and take you back.

Where have you been? Why couldn’t I find you? Why did you make it so difficult for me to find you?

I’m glad you’re back. I’ve missed you.

Unfinished

I love to read. I can get emotionally invested in a book three lines in, and occasionally I will spend an entire day sitting in my living room reading. Earlier this year, I read a 400 page book start to finish in one day (which, while not unheard of, was uncommon to say the least).

However, I have found that I don’t really enjoy reading short stories. I recently read Duck by Stephen Parolini on my Kindle app, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it (and highly recommend it), I finished it way too fast. I loved the main character, Thomas, and I was left wishing for a longer picture into his life.

It just felt so…unfinished.

I like to lose myself in a book. I’m currently reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and I find myself wishing I could sit and have a cup of ng-ka-py with Samuel Hamilton. I think that I like reading so much because I tend to see the characters in my books as my friends, and I enjoy going on adventures with them. In the same way that listening to “Livin’ La Vida Loca” instantly takes me back to being 11 years old and going shopping with my girlfriends for matching t-shirts, the nostalgia that I get from reading (and especially rereading) books makes me feel all warm and cozy inside.

“It’s like a long book that you never want to end. And you’re fine with that because you just never, ever want to leave it.” – Pam Halpert, The Office.

I get so invested in the characters that I never want the book to end. I just want to continue being a part of their lives for as long as possible. I want to settle in, burrow down into the covers, and live each day through and with these fictional creations.

And my writing reflects that sentiment. I spend so much time in the day-to-day lives of my characters, really fleshing them out and getting to know them, that the plot kind of falls to the way side. I have these individuals that I love and know so well, but I’ve written 50 pages about them and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. Perhaps this is why I like John Steinbeck so much? He’s rather heavy on character development and lacking on moving a story forward. I remember my favorite chapter from Grapes of Wrath was an early, very short chapter about a turtle crossing the road. Steinbeck literally spent four or five pages discussing in great detail this little reptile’s trek across the street. The detail and descriptions are so effortless and perfect.

My favorite book of all-time, in case it wasn’t obvious, is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In fact, my pen name is partly derived from the heroine of To Kill a Mockingbird and one of my all-time favorite literary females, Scout Finch. One of my favorite parts of the book are Lee’s descriptions of the fictional town of Maycomb:

“In rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then…Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

Isn’t that just beautiful? It makes me wish that Harper Lee had written more novels after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her imagery is just so spot on, and her characters are unforgettable. There have been a lot of great dads throughout the history of literature, but Atticus Finch takes the cake. I’ve literally read this book more than twenty times, and it just keeps getting better.

The thing is, I’m realizing that if I’m ever going to FINISH a story, it’s almost going to have to be a short story, because I can’t seem to get it up enough to properly flesh out all the characters and story lines bouncing around in my head. I have a few stories that I’m currently working on, and I’m excited about them. I know I don’t get on here much and that it’s hard to keep current with me, since I can be so hit or miss in terms of consistency. But I feel like something great is around the bend. And if you love literature the way I love it, I think you’ll be excited about what’s coming, too.

Rest in Peace

I can’t say that I’ve ever attempted suicide, or that I’ve ever even come close. The abstract idea of it has briefly flitted through my mind during a few especially low points in my life, but it has never legitimately been a consideration for me.

However, I have thought about suicide on a more frequent basis than seems normal, especially for someone who has never come remotely close to choosing that path. I feel as though I’ve been trying to understand suicide for nearly my whole life, and I haven’t really gotten any closer to figuring it out.

When I was in the sixth grade, I had to create a brochure for a class assignment. I can’t remember what the instructions of the project were, but I’m thinking that it was mostly about teaching us how to use templates in Microsoft Word, and not so much about creating a well-written and informative piece of literature. I’m guessing that most of the other kids in my class turned in lighthearted brochures about camping or gymnastics or how to ride a bicycle. I, on the other hand, made a brochure about suicide.

And really, looking back, that should have raised some eyebrows.

Sixth grade is the first time I vividly remember being unhappy with my life. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I was in sixth grade, but more so that my older sister was a freshman in high school and was starting to get noticed for the first time. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I spent a lot of my childhood trying to outshine my older sister. Well, most of that came to a head when she entered high school and people outside our family began to realize how talented she was.

The moment my sister entered high school, I felt taken down a notch. While she played varsity in three sports, I struggled to get a hit on the softball diamond. While she became interesting to boys, I was on numerous occasions told by my peers that I “looked a lot like my sister, except not as pretty.” (Yes, boys actually said that to me.) I was awkward and dealing with puberty and middle school and new classmates, and she was killing it at high school.

So when I began creating my brochure, I guess I had a lot of pent up frustration about my situation in life. I remember writing about the reasons people commit suicide (or the reasons that I believed they did) and I talked about how hard life can be for some people. And then I put a picture of a pill bottle open on the ground (with pills spilling out) as the cover of my brochure.

Again, I feel like that should have raised some eyebrows. Maybe the teacher should have called my parents about that. If I came across that brochure today, I would at least be mildly concerned that the author might have some deeper things going on there.

I think that I’ve been dwelling on death/suicide recently because of what happened with Robin Williams. And I realize I’m kind of late here, but I didn’t feel up to talking about his tragic death before now. I’ve been subconsciously reflecting on it for the last month or so, trying again to make sense of something that I’m finding impossible to comprehend.

After learning of Williams’ suicide, my brother posted that it was the first time he had cried about a celebrity death since Chris Farley. Later that day, I came across this fantastic Cracked article about why funny people kill themselves (whether through suicide or overdoses), and after that I read this inspiring post by The Bloggess (one of my writing heroes). And they made me realize that I’ve only scratched the surface in my understanding of suicide, and that from my tiny little bubble of world experiences, I cannot even begin to fathom the complexities of making the decision to take one’s life.

I usually try to have some semblance of a purpose with my writing and I’m not sure I’ve accomplished that with this post. I think I’m emotionally raw today because I’ve spent the last week packing up the apartment for our big move out west. And because a good friend of mine from college lost his brother this morning. And because another friend from college lost his brother a few weeks ago. And because I still might not have fully processed my grandmother’s passing back in March. And because it’s after 3am and I’m still here writing.

I’ve never really been afraid of dying. I’ve always felt that being dead was the easy part; you die and it’s over and that’s the end of your time on this earth. It’s the living that are affected the most by death, because they are the ones left to deal with all the sorrow and grieving that follows. And I think that’s why suicide has always captivated me, because it is so incredibly tragic and exponentially more difficult for the living to deal with.

The Bloggess has done such an amazing job covering the complexities of depression/suicide in her writings that I think I will end this post with a message from her. She has already said it so much better than I ever could:

“You aren’t alone.  You are wanted.  You are good.  And you will get through this.  I promise.  And when you doubt your worth, imagine your younger sister or your best friend or your child having these same doubts and realize that that same sense of angry disbelief that the world would ever be better without them is the exact same disbelief that your friends and family would feel if they lost you.  You are as special and irreplaceable as the people you love most.  Your differentness makes you unique.  It makes you who you are.” – The Bloggess, “Strange and beautiful”

 

Military Travel

I’m being forced to move to Arizona. There, I said it.

As I mentioned in this post, my husband is in the U.S. Air Force…and I haven’t always been super excited about it.

When we got married almost two years ago, I moved from the Midwest to the South to join him (he had already been living down here for a year before we got married). At that time, he had less than 3 years left of his active duty commitment. We had agreed before we got engaged that he did not want to stay active duty long-term, because we didn’t want to be moving our kids around every couple of years (although he does plan to stay in the reserve or guard).

I wasn’t very excited to move to the South. I love where I grew up. There was a period during college when I thought I wanted to move to the northeast, somewhere in New England, or along the east coast around Delaware. Then I did a summer semester abroad in Spain and realized just how much I loved my home state (not that I didn’t love Spain, because I did, I just realized I didn’t want to be living so far away from my family, especially since my grandfather passed away while I was over there).

Everything I knew about the South at that point came from one family vacation to Myrtle Beach, a few short trips to different areas of Florida (mostly Orlando), and movies. I was expecting palm trees everywhere, Confederate-loving rednecks, unbearable heat, and accents galore. So the first time I came to visit my husband down here, I was surprised at all the pine trees (no palms in sight). And while it was August, I didn’t feel all that hot. And considering we live in a city full of military families and college kids, I quickly realized that most of the people I came into contact with had little to no accent (I wasn’t too far off about the rednecks, but that’s another story for another time).

I flew down 4-5 more times before the wedding and each trip made me less anxious about moving. I began to find things that reminded me of where I had grown up, and I quickly came to realize that most of my prior stereotypes were wrong. I started to understand that you can’t make sweeping brush strokes across an entire subset of the country, and that you can find similar personalities and life experiences just about everywhere you go.

You would think this would have made my current move easier to stomach.

My husband was put on the vulnerable-to-move list in January. We were actually really excited about this. Although we’ve come to love living in the South (and there are many aspects that we’re going to miss), we were both kind of over our current jobs and ready for something new. Plus, his contract was due to end in June 2015, so we knew that anywhere we moved, we would only be there for a year or so. We could look at it as just a fun adventure and really soak up the new culture. Hell, I can live anywhere for a year.

I was hoping he would get assigned to Langley AFB, which would’ve been closer to our families and somewhat close to D.C. Plus, we already knew people who were stationed there. Or even one of the small bases in Illinois. Or Wright-Patterson in Ohio. There were so many great choices that were CLOSER to where we grew up. He came home with a list of bases that had openings, and we were asked to highlight all the ones we would be interested in. This was so that our choices could be taken into consideration before an assignment was made. Almost as if the Air Force actually cared where we wanted to go…

Around March 15th, my husband called me at work. He rarely does this, so I was already expecting some kind of news. He said, “what do you think of Arizona?” And I replied, “does it matter what I think?” I knew from his question that we had been reassigned (note: of all the places I had highlighted, Arizona was more than a thousand miles from the closest base on my list), and while I wasn’t at all interested in living on the west coast (and being in a different time zone! Ugh!), I figured, “hey, it’s only a year.” In fact, we weren’t even scheduled to move until the end of September, so it would actually be closer to 9 months. Great, we’ll have our little adventure, and be back in our home state within the year.

It wasn’t until I got home that I got the WHOLE truth from my husband. Yes, we were being reassigned to Arizona, but he was also having his contract extended another 15 months. The job he had been assigned required a two-year commitment. So instead of being out June 2015, this effectively moved our separation date to September 2016.

I immediately broke into tears. I already wasn’t thrilled about Arizona and I felt like that only thing keeping me together was the knowledge that we wouldn’t be there for very long. And while I realize that the difference between 9 months and 24 months isn’t HUGE and that a lot of military families endure much worse assignments than Arizona, in that moment, the extra 15 months seemed like a lifetime.

It was going to be almost impossible for us to visit family as often as we had living in the South, where a drive could be made in just 9 hours and a direct flight could be bought for under $300. We were now moving ACROSS THE COUNTRY. We were moving across two time zones (and since Arizona doesn’t recognize daylight savings, sometimes three time zones), across nearly 2,000 miles into a completely different atmosphere. If the South was foreign to me, then Arizona was the moon.

Plus, we’re planning to start a family soon! So now I’m going to be pregnant and all alone out in middle-of-nowhere Arizona?! Where my closest relative, outside my husband, will be more than 24 hours away? I mean, I like living in the South NOW, but my first couple of months were brutal as I tried to find a job and meet new people. I spent most days alone in the apartment while my husband was at work. It was the loneliest I had ever felt, even including Spain, because at least in Spain, I was surrounded by 30 others students who were in the same situation as myself. And now I’m going to navigate that with a pregnant belly in tow?

The next month or so was difficult for me. Two weeks after we got the news about Arizona, my grandmother passed away. Two weeks after that, April 15th and the end of busy season hit, culminating in seven-day work weeks and boatloads of stress.

But it has gotten easier. My husband and I are flying out to Arizona next week to look for places to live and to familiarize ourselves with our soon-to-be home. And while I didn’t handle the news all that well initially, it is becoming easier to accept. When we got married, I told myself that this was my time with my husband. My family had me for 24 years, now it’s my husband’s turn. And even though we’ve almost been married for two years, I still sometimes find myself prioritizing the bond with my parents and siblings and cousins over the bond with my husband. One thing I’ve learned from marriage (one of many things) is that you really need to let your past go. I get so caught up in worrying about my high school friends that I’m growing distant with or my cousin’s new baby that I haven’t even met yet, that I forget about my relationship in the here and now with my husband. I remember what it was like living close to my family and apart from him, and it was miserable. So while I don’t necessarily like that I HAVE to choose one or the other, I know that, since I do, my husband is going to take precedence. Every. Single. Time.

And ya know what? I’ve NEVER EVEN BEEN to the west coast. I have these ideas built up in my head of cactuses (according to Oxford dictionary, that’s an appropriate pluralization, and I think it sounds better than cacti, so I’m using it…even if WordPress is giving me a red squiggly) and brown dirt as far as the eye can see; of temperatures so hot you can cook an egg on the sidewalk; of Mexican restaurants on every corner (although I might actually be looking forward to that). It’s the same kinds of stereotypes I had about the South before I lived here. And while I’m still nervous about this move, I’m starting to get more excited about it. I’m past the self-victimization stage where woe was me and my life was so much worse than everyone else’s because I had to move to Arizona. I’m past the fear of continuing to distance myself from my childhood friends. And now I’m just starting to fantasize about finally using my Spanish minor, seeing the Grand Canyon and California, hiking beautiful mountains with stunning sunsets, and even playing the slots in Las Vegas. There’s so much to the west that I haven’t experienced. I said I wanted adventure, so here it is!

Plus, I mean, I can live anywhere for 2 years…right?

Don’t Marry a Youngest Child

I wanted to write about my grandmother’s advice on not marrying a youngest child. I wanted to talk about how, even though she was happily married for over 50 years to a youngest child, she still understood the difficulty of putting up with the baby of the family. I wanted to mirror that with my own marriage where both my husband and I are youngest children, and talk about how I now understand what she had been telling me for all those years.

I started this post over four months ago. It’s something I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time and I just can’t seem to figure out how to get it out. I decided to revisit it again this week, but it just ended up seeming too forced and I came off way too self-important (which, funnily enough, is a result of my being a youngest child).

So forget what I wanted to say. Here’s what I’m going to say:

I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here and here) that I am a youngest child. I think that nearly all of my personality traits stem from this fact and, for the most part, I’m okay with that. It’s true that I am selfish, but that selfishness has led me to stand up for myself in situations where I wasn’t being treated fairly. Because I am often thinking about myself and my own well-being, I very rarely get taken advantage of or used by others. It’s also true that, as a result of being a youngest child, I’m stubborn…and impertinent…and constantly feel like I have to prove myself. And those traits occasionally antagonize others.

I’m painfully aware of all of this.

But at the same time, I’m a big believer that there’s no such thing as a true virtue or flaw. There is good and bad in both virtues and flaws alike. As mentioned above, while being selfish isn’t exactly a good quality or something to be proud of, good things have stemmed from it nonetheless. Another trait of mine that has resulted from being a youngest child is that I’m very driven. Growing up, I always felt that I didn’t get enough credit for my accomplishments, and so I worked extra hard to receive accolades. Being driven is usually considered a virtue and I won’t deny that it has benefitted me many times over, in both my career and my relationships. However, being driven has also led me to create competition where there shouldn’t have been any; it has led me to resent those that I can’t beat; it has propelled me into depression and apathy when I couldn’t meet the expectations I set for myself; and it has caused me to go after things that I didn’t really want just to prove that I could get them.

My husband and I fought a lot our first year of marriage. Like, a WHOLE lot. And the overarching theme of almost all our fights boiled down to one thing: we are both youngest children and want to be acknowledged. We were both overshadowed by an older sibling for most of our existence and the effects of that are still prevalent more than a decade after living in the same household as said sibling. We’re both bull-headed and self-interested and just want to be heard and considered. And once we figured that out, our fights significantly decreased. While the fights haven’t and likely never will fully cease, they have become more tolerable, which is really all I can ask for in terms of marital squabbles.

In my grandfather’s case, being a youngest child meant that he always expected to get his way. There was a relatively large gap between him and his closest sibling and as such, he was very much the baby of the family in every respect. In the 20 years that he and I shared this planet, while I loved and adored him, I saw this side of him all too often. And maybe this is why I was the closest with him of all my grandparents, because I saw myself in his actions. Because I recognized his youngest child syndrome in myself.

My grandmother passed away on March 31st this year. It was smack dab in the middle of busy season and added yet another burden to my already overloaded shoulders. In the days that followed, amidst the last-minute travel arrangements and the harrowing reminiscences of her life, I kept wondering what advice she still had yet to give me. Coupled with that were the flashbacks to my grandfather’s passing, in which I missed his funeral because I was studying abroad in Spain and couldn’t afford to make it back in time. And it is because of these memories that I wanted to get my grandmother’s advice out into the world, even if the advice was mostly in jest on her part.

My grandmother showed me that it is possible to love someone even when there are things about them that drive you nuts. That is the biggest lesson I have taken into my marriage and I will be forever grateful to her for teaching me such an important truth. I continue to miss her, but I know that her guidance will endure throughout my marriage, and whenever my husband is on my last nerve, I can think back on my grandparents and remember how happy they were, even when they annoyed the hell out of each other.

 

 

 

 

What I’ve Learned About Tax

Yesterday I was working on a tax return where I had to allocate rental income across two states and couldn’t figure out how to get the correct amount to show up on the return. After doing some research, I finally figured it out. I showed my partner and she was so happy we had solved the problem. Then she looks at me and says, “does this mean we’ve been doing it wrong all the other years?”

And this is when I realized that nobody, not even CPAs (certified public accountants), actually knows what they’re doing when it comes to taxes.

Ok, maybe that’s a little harsh. It’s not necessarily that these supposed accounting specialists don’t know what they’re doing. It’s more that tax is a fluid subject, meaning that it is open for interpretation. Also, there are a lot of rules that would be impossible to memorize, and there are also a lot of software issues that have to be overcome in order to make the final return agree to all the rules. It’s so bad that I have often felt like even my superiors have no idea what’s going on and are just doing things by the seat of their pants.

And we’re the people that you all trust to do it right! That makes you feel good, huh?

I just finished up my fourth busy season and in that time, I have learned a thing or two about preparing tax returns. For your reading pleasure, I am going to share this knowledge with you, in hopes that it will help you better understand what your accountant goes through while preparing your return. Get excited.

1. The people who do your taxes don’t have all the answers

This is an important one and something that I touched on in the above paragraphs. As I mentioned, there are a lot of rules in the tax world, and each of these rules has its own subset of rules that apply to most every specific case you can think of. So while I may have gone to school for five years, have two degrees in accounting and have four years experience in the field, I haven’t even scratched the surface. So when you call me about that house you just bought and sold in New Mexico and ask me how this is going to affect your tax return, don’t expect me to be able to answer immediately. Don’t even expect me to be able to answer within 24 hours. I’m going to have to research the shit out of a whole lot of really boring material in order to even have an idea of how New Mexico’s taxes work. And on top of that, I’m going to need way more information from you before I can figure out how this will affect your return.

First, I would need to understand how you’re doing income-wise as compared to the prior year. Did you get a pay raise? Have your interest and dividends from investments gone up? Have you taken out a second mortgage? And since you’re probably calling me about this in August and your next tax return will cover the period from January to December, I’ll also need an estimate from you of how you think the rest of the year will go.

On top of that, I’ll need the nitty gritty specifics, such as dollar amounts involved in both the purchase of this house and the price it was sold at, in addition to all the expenses incurred on your part. Then I’ll need to know how much in taxes you’ve had withheld from your paycheck so far this year, to get an idea of what your overall withholdings for the calendar year will be. I will run a projection and after all of that, I’ll come up with a VERY rough tax return, based on estimates and incomplete information that you have given me, and I’ll use that to guess what your eventual tax due will be. Basically, I’m creating an estimate based on estimated data. If I’m even remotely close by the time I actually prepare your taxes, then I consider that a win.

2. You are not my only client

I get it, in your mind, the world revolves around you. But here’s the thing: during busy season, I work on anywhere from one to fifteen returns every day. Even if I prepared your return three days ago, I’ve likely touched 20+ returns since then. I don’t even remember the return I worked on three hours ago; you really think I’m going to remember the specifics of a return I worked on three days ago?

Another thing to consider is that I’m not the only person working on your return. After I’m finished, the return goes to my partner for review, and she’s reviewing returns from me and two of my colleagues, so she has three times the clients that I work on. So even though I may have finished your return three days ago, she likely hasn’t even had a chance to look at it yet. Once she gets a chance to look at it, she’ll inevitably have review notes for me (because hey, I’m not perfect and I don’t know everything), and I’ll get the return back and make changes. Then the return goes back to her, where she STILL might find more changes that need made. We may end up going back and forth three or four more times before this return is signed off.

So when you call me randomly and ask the status of your return, I have no fucking idea. Even if I DO remember working on your return (which, let’s face it, I probably don’t), I haven’t a clue of whether or not my partner has looked at it yet. I may have finished my first run through with your return two weeks ago, but it might still be sitting untouched on my partner’s desk for all I know. I’m not too concerned about it, because I have about forty more returns piled on and around my desk that I’m working on getting a first run or second run or fifth run through. The deadline isn’t for another month. Stop calling me.

Also, I’m charging you for this phone call.

3. I’m charging you for everything

I live and breathe billable hours. Seriously. I have a quota that I have to meet each week and each year. Any time of mine that is not directly billable to clients is deemed worthless by my employer. So if I have to sit on the phone for 20 minutes answering your relentless questions, you bet your ass I’m charging you for it. Even if I didn’t touch your return at all during that time, even if most of the conversation consisted of you droning on about your kid’s upcoming graduation or your recent divorce, I’m charging you for it. Any minute of my time that you take up, I’m charging you for it.

In addition, any extra work I have to do because of your laziness or disorganization, I’m charging you for it. You just handed me a shoe box filled with receipts with no explanation that I now have to go through piece by piece? You chose not to fill out our handy tax organizer and just stacked your documents willy-nilly inside an envelope? You’ve lost your property tax receipts and now I have to go to the county auditor’s website and search for you by name and parcel number to see what you paid? I’m charging you for ALL OF THAT.

Here’s a tip: do as much work as you can yourself. If you’re worried about my fee, then shoulder some of the labor. You run a small side business? Keep track of income and expenses in excel and print me a summary. You gave donations to thirty organizations and have forty-five pieces of supporting documentation? Make me a summary. You had medical bills from three different hospitals and eight doctors throughout the year? MAKE. ME. A. SUMMARY. You should still give me all those documents and receipts, but all of the time it takes you to summarize them is time that I don’t have to spend doing it. And my time likely costs a lot more than yours does.

4. I’m totally judging you

I often wonder if people ever think about how their accountant judges them. For about 90% of the returns I work on, I’ve never actually met the person (my partner has met them all, but as I’m just a minion, I don’t sit in on too many client meetings). So my whole view of you comes from the documents laying on my desk.

Case in point: I worked on a client this past year who ran a small side business buying high end fashion items (clothes, purses, etc) in New York and reselling them at markets. She was one of the clients that always complained about her fee and she even fired us this year, only to rehire us a month later when she realized no one else would do her work for our price. Preparing her return consisted of going through her monthly credit card statements and organizing them in a spreadsheet to come up with total purchases, sales, expenses, etc. As you can imagine, it took some time to create this spreadsheet (she could have saved money by shouldering this work herself, but she refused to, and then couldn’t understand why we charged so much). While going through her statements, I noticed that she had a cumulative bill on one card of over $6,000, yet each month she was only making the minimum payment on the card, which was maybe $150 or so. As I made her spreadsheet, I had a column for “interest expense paid” and I quickly realized that she was spending anywhere from $100-$300 a month on interest alone, due to this large bill that she was only making the minimum payment toward. Now, our total fee for preparing her return was MAYBE $500, and it was likely less because of how much she complained. Yet she willingly paid over $2,000 last year in INTEREST.

I’ve never met this woman, but I have judged the hell out of her.

Another case in point: this year I prepared returns for two brothers whose mother recently passed away and left them with a very large inheritance. They each had gross income of over $1 million. One of the brothers had charitable contributions of over $600,000 for the year, and the other brother didn’t even have charitable contributions. He grossed over $1 million and didn’t give a dime to charity. Now, this might be specific to just me, but if I see that you made that much money and didn’t give anything to charity, I judge you, harshly. My gross income was only five digits last year and I still gave a couple hundred dollars to charity. What made it more interesting is that the brother who was charitable was still married, while the other brother was going through a nasty divorce. Who says that a tax return can’t tell you anything about a person?

5. A large tax refund does not necessarily mean your accountant did a good job

This is the most important one to me and the one that aggravates me the most. While it might feel good to get a large refund, that really isn’t a great thing. It just means that you overpaid your taxes during the year. That refund that you get is money you have already paid; it’s not just free extra money coming to you. Your large refund is merely an interest-free loan that you gave to the government.

I had a tax professor in grad school who always stressed this point. He told us that the best position to be in on your tax return was to owe just a little bit (like $100 or so). That way, you knew that you hadn’t given any extra money to the government. I get frustrated when I see car commercials around tax time saying “bring in your tax refund and we’ll give you a car.” First off, the size of your tax refund says NOTHING about your ability to finance a car. Second, it’s ads like these that make people believe it’s good to get a large refund.

As an extension of that, owing money on your taxes isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either (and it also doesn’t necessarily mean your accountant did a bad job). If you owe money on your return, then one of three things has happened: (1) You made more money, which is great and means you’re still netting more money in the end even after taxes than you had last year. (2) You had fewer deductions, namely medical expenses, mortgage interest, and property taxes, which is great for you and means you actually saved money throughout the year. (3) You had less taxes withdrawn from your paychecks. The first two items are both good things. Making a larger income and/or paying fewer medical expenses means that overall financially your year was better than it had been in the past. The third item is good for you in a sense because it means that your paychecks were likely comparatively larger than in prior years. So the money that was hitting your bank account each month was larger than it had been the year before.

Basically, if you owe money on your tax return, then congratulations on doing better than you had the year before! Go you!

The most important thing that this past year has taught me is this: I don’t want to be in public accounting anymore. I’m not sure where I want to be exactly, but I’m sure as hell this isn’t it.

 

Not My Place

A conversation at work the other day took me back to my senior year of high school.

See, the guy that worked my job before me was a lazy piece of shit. He took the easiest way out in everything he did and, as such, all his work was complete crap. Trying to understand what the hell he did last year takes me twice as long as the actual work itself, and I am constantly telling my co-workers that I hate him, even though I have never met him.

One of the girls I work with always tells story about what this guy was like when he worked there. In addition to his crap work, he apparently played games on his computer at work all the time. I asked her if she ever told our boss about that, and she said she didn’t feel like it was “her place” to rat him out. FLASHBACK.

It was March 14, 2006, a Tuesday; the day my world shattered.

I was sitting in sixth period in the yearbook teacher’s room with two of my best friends (who also happened to be co-editors of the yearbook with me). We were reading through articles that had been submitted for the yearbook and going over our English homework. And on one of the desks, there sat a stack of poems written by my friend, Will (not his real name). Even as early as high school, Will had a knack for poetry, and especially senior year of high school, he was writing a lot.

I was finished with my homework, so I started sifting through his poems and I found one that caught my eye. It was about witnessing another person’s infidelity and it sounded eerily similar to stories I had heard about a party a few weeks earlier. I questioned him about it and I was right, it was about that party (not that he had attended, just that he knew people who had been there and witnessed what happened), but I was wrong about the subject of the poem. I had thought it was referencing a girl I knew, and it turned out to be about my boyfriend of four and a half years. Will didn’t tell me that upfront, but when I goaded him about it, he reluctantly said “you need to talk to your boyfriend.”

I drove home fighting back tears. My cousin was in the car with me and I didn’t want to explode on her. I was home for barely 15 minutes (I had to go back to school for track pictures), but it was enough time to tell my dad in a cracking voice that I was going to my boyfriend’s house after track practice. It was also enough time to remove the necklace that had ours names engraved on it, a Christmas present from a year earlier. Amidst all the chaos that was going on inside my head in that moment, I was rational enough to realize that I did not want to be wearing that necklace in this picture for all of eternity, a constant reminder of the relationship that had gone astray. Even before I had talked to him, I knew how it would end.

I went to his house after practice and there was so much tension between us that I could barely breathe. He had no idea that I knew, and honestly I had no idea if it was even true. But I was angry nonetheless and I wanted to do something about it.

I asked him if I could have a glass of water and I followed him to the kitchen to get it. Once he handed it to me, I threw it in his face. It was the most incredible feeling in the world. All I said was “did you think I wouldn’t find out?” and amidst his sputtering and surprise, those words were enough for him to know that I knew. And he was such a coward about it! He told me that he had been drunk and didn’t know what he was doing and just hoped it would all go away. And I knew then that he had never planned to tell me, never would have if I hadn’t found out on my own.

I was so furious that I packed up every gift I had ever given him, only to drop everything at his door as I walked out, realizing that I didn’t want any of those reminders hanging around. He followed me to my car, but mostly out of guilt. And because he probably felt like he should at least attempt to save our relationship. But he was so apathetic about it that I knew it would never be saved.

That’s not to say I didn’t try. I was so afraid of not being with him that I was still willing to take him back, even after he cheated. I had one condition: he had to stop drinking. I obviously couldn’t trust him when he drank and I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him to cheat again. But he refused. He told me that I was “saying he couldn’t have fun anymore.” How had he been having fun with me for the previous four years?! It was a horrible thing for him to think, much less say, and it hit me in that moment how truly different we had become. And I left him then and there for good.

Over the next couple of days, I discovered that many of my friends had known about his cheating. In fact, the incident had happened nearly two weeks before I found out, which was enough time for half the school, including my closest friends, to know about it. But nobody told me. Because it “wasn’t their place.” And I hated them for that. I think I still hold some of them accountable for it. I remember driving straight to my best friend’s house after our breakup, only to find out that she was still at softball practice. When she called me back that night (after her mom undoubtedly told her how distressed I had looked), the first thing I said to her was, “did you know?” Because I didn’t even know who to trust anymore. To her benefit, she hadn’t known, and I do believe she would’ve told me if she did.

My friend Will got crap from a lot of people for being the one to spill the beans to me. People gossiped that he actually had a thing for me and wanted us to break up so he could worm his way in. Others couldn’t believe he had betrayed my boyfriend, even though Will and I were much closer friends than they had ever been.

I don’t understand how we came up with this idea of where loyalties should lie. Why are so many people complacent with sitting on the sidelines and watching the bomb explode? Do we want to avoid confrontation? Are we merely cowards? Do we prefer the safety of our own little bubbles, the only area that we really consider “our place”? It’s like we just want to sit there and watch it happen, without taking any part in it; without taking any responsibility. And more often than not, our loyalty goes to the party that was in the wrong, merely because we are too self-involved to follow the party in the right.

Shouldn’t “our place” be telling the truth, especially in situations where we love the person that needs to hear it? Shouldn’t our love for them be forefront to this imaginary idea that it isn’t “our place” to articulate others’ wrongdoings?

That’s something that I have never understood. Why did my co-worker feel more loyalty to this lazy guy that she hated than to her own company? Why did my friends feel more loyalty to this drunken cheater than to me? Why was Will the pariah for being loyal to ME, and the rest of them were in the right for being loyal to my boyfriend, when he had been in the wrong?

I think that we do ourselves and those we care about a disservice by thinking it’s not our place. If my coworker had spoken up, maybe she and I wouldn’t currently be in this wormhole of trying to decipher an idiot’s work. Maybe our company’s reputation wouldn’t have been hurt by our client’s realization that we had employed an idiot.

If my friends had spoken up, maybe I wouldn’t have almost lost my virginity to a boy who didn’t deserve it. Maybe I wouldn’t have had trouble eating for a week. Maybe I wouldn’t still hold all this bitterness in my heart toward him and toward them, as well. Maybe every little incident in my present-day life wouldn’t make me relive a past I would rather forget.

Maybe I wouldn’t have been broken for so long. I struggled with jealousy for too many years following this incident, and I had trouble trusting even the most faithful boyfriends, especially where alcohol was involved. I guess I just wish that more people would believe it was their place to do the right thing. This whole “not my place” business is a cop out at best, and a really shitty one at that.

The Funniest Paralegal

It’s weeks like this past week (and this upcoming week, and the 12 weeks following until April 15) that I regret being an accountant. Busy season is in full swing (as proven by my posting hiatus) and I find myself hating work.

These kind of days make me think of Mindy.

I love Mindy. That phrase is uttered in my household on a weekly basis. It’s such a frequent occurrence that my husband no longer has to follow it up with “who the hell is Mindy?”

See, I don’t have a single family member named Mindy. I also don’t have any friends (in real life) named Mindy. No, the Mindy I’m referring to is none other than Mindy Kaling, who is basically my Indian other half.

I first fell in love with Mindy Kaling when I read “Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real.” Before that, I knew her as Kelly from the Office, but after reading some of her work, I fell in love with her as a writer. When her book, “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns),” came out, it was the first item on my Christmas list and I read it in less than three days.

In that book, Mindy talks about how grateful she was for going to Dartmouth, because if she had instead gone to NYU, right now she’d be “the funniest paralegal in a law firm in Boston.” And that’s all she would have been. Just some no-name paralegal in some no-name firm in Boston.

I understand that sentiment.

Accounting isn’t exactly an exciting job. As a beau of mine in college so tactfully put it, “nobody grows up wanting to be an accountant.” He was a pilot, and his arrogance proved that tenfold, but he was right nonetheless. No five-year old’s dream job is accountant. It’s just not.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to come to terms with the fact that all I am is an accountant. In fact, I think part of the reason I’m avoiding taking the CPA exam again is because, if I become a CPA, it will be like admitting that this is actually what I do for a living. I had dreams as a kid of being a famous actress, traveling the world, giving interviews, being held in esteem by all the people who matter. You know, regular kid-type dreams.

Overall, I like my life right now and I’m happy where I am. And I know if hadn’t gone into accounting, then my life would be drastically different, so in a sense I’m grateful for the decisions I’ve made. I just sometimes feel like I’ve taken the safest possible route on every step of my journey through life. I haven’t really taken any risks, and the few I have taken have been overtly calculated. I feel like Lily in the first season of “How I Met Your Mother.”

“I’ve made no mistakes! I’ve done all of this; my life, my relationship, my career, mistake-free.”

To quote Lily again: “there are certain things in life where you know it’s a mistake but you don’t really know it’s a mistake because the only way to really know it’s a mistake is to make the mistake and look back and say ‘yep, that was a mistake.’ So really, the bigger mistake would be to not make the mistake, because then you’d go your whole life not knowing if something is a mistake or not.”

I’m not saying I want to start making mistakes. I’m just saying maybe I’m due for some more risks.

What are you thoughts on mistake-free/risk-free lives? What are some mistakes you’ve made that you’re grateful for having made? What are the mistakes you’re not so grateful for? Do you have any good ideas of risks I should take in the impending future? All suggestions welcome…and encouraged. Seriously, give me something to work with here.

I don’t want to just be the funniest paralegal anymore.

Old Photos and New Memories

Today I was trying to move some music files from my husband’s computer to mine over our shared network. I’m not very technological, so I was having difficulties. And as he had to be at work at 3am this morning, he’s already in bed and couldn’t help me out. So I searched through pretty much all of his files trying to figure out where the music was, and I came upon his pictures.

Most of his picture albums have good descriptions, including the location and often the date. I’m in a lot of these albums, so I had fun browsing through them, reminiscing to myself about how thin we both were while we were dating and the fun times we’ve had on our various trips together.

After perusing through a good number of albums, I opened his Miscellaneous folder. And I saw a video of me. That I had completely forgotten we had taken (side note: this is not anything R-rated, I promise, so don’t get your hopes up).

Not very many people know this, but my husband and I talked about postponing our wedding approximately three months before it was planned to happen. We had been living apart for over a year and I had come down to visit him. We were apartment hunting for after the wedding, so I had taken the whole week off work to fly down South and hang out with my soon-to-be-husband. It was the longest amount of time we had spent together since he moved down here.

I will admit that he and I got engaged too quickly. We had barely been dating a year, which at that time made for the third longest relationship I’d had (that’s right, I had dated two other guys longer than I had dated my now fiance). But living apart made us hasty and while I’m glad that we did rush into things, it was still a bit scary at the time. I felt like we didn’t know each other that well, and after a few months of living apart, I was starting to forget what we liked about each other in the first place.

On the day before I headed back to the Midwest, I was exhausted. We had spent most of the week squabbling over nothing in particular and we were both kind of wore out from each other. We had become so used to living alone and only seeing each other once a month or so, and we didn’t really know how to be around each other 24/7 anymore. We were both worried that we were rushing into things and that we weren’t ready to get married.

And then for some reason, after the dust had cleared a little (although not completely), we decided to take a video on his phone of his apartment. It was the place where he had proposed to me and where he had spent his first year living in the South, and it had a special place in both our hearts. We joked that we could show it to our kids one day, an idea which, after just talking about potentially not getting married at all, made me almost burst into tears. I was the one on camera and I just put on a happy face, fighting back the water works, and I remember being so afraid that (a) we would never have kids to even see this video or (b) if our kids did see this video, they would be able to tell how upset I was.

I rewatched the video tonight and I am happy to say that I’m a good faker. Even though I knew what had been going on in my head during the filming, from a viewer’s perspective, I genuinely seemed happy. My then-fiance and I joked through the apartment tour and poked fun at each other and pointed out all the important spots and we seemed really in love. And it hit me that we really were in love there, even if in that actual moment we weren’t quite sure.

After that week, I never questioned again whether or not we should get married. And 15+ months into our marriage, I still have never questioned it, even during our first few months when I was unemployed and all we did was fight about money and home decor. I feel like nobody ever talks honestly about how difficult the first year of marriage is, so I’m here to tell you that it is HARD. On top of that, being engaged is also hard if you are actually rational enough to consider the enormity of your decision (and nobody ever told me how tough being engaged was, either). I personally believe that if your engagement is all hearts and rainbows, then you are not legitimately ready to get married. Although I’m also someone that doesn’t believe in soulmates or destiny or falling in love with someone the moment you see them. I’m far too rational for all those things and to me, agreeing to be someone’s partner in marriage is a choice that needs to be thought on long and hard.

Anyway, the point of this post and its title is this: it’s amazing how different the present appears when its viewed as the past. In other words, our perceptions about certain times in our lives change as we move past them. In the present, the filming of that video was filled with turmoil. But now that it’s in the past, I view it merely as a speed bump in the greater road that is our relationship. It’s things like this that give me hope that even the most daunting mountains in my life may be viewed in hindsight as merely molehills.