Warning: this post will ramble and, let's face it, suck.
Item 1! It turns out my tax issues have to do with garden-variety not-enough-going-to-the-feds from each paycheck, not a sinister bureaucratic conspiracy to make me cry like a little girl. As a student, even one employed by the university to teach, I do not pay in to social security, so that wasn't the issue.
The whole debacle found B and I sort of floundering and getting a bit testy. I've always hated the kind of simplistic knee-jerk libertarianism of the American right (particularly its would-be cowboy wing), but when something like this happens it's hard not to get indignant. After all, B and I didn't "do anything wrong" - we weren't trying to commit tax fraud, nor did we make some egregious error on our W4s when we started working here. But we still got stung in our collective financial ass to the tune of over a grand.
That said, the important thing is to keep it in perspective. Now we know more about tax withholding and its discontents. Yay for us.
Item 2! Does anyone else feel pretty much the same emotionally as they did when they were, say, 20? I'm 30 and change now and I still find it really easy to relate to my undergrad students, I still find the notion of networking and careerism makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit, and I still eat PBJs for lunch about 4/7 days a week.
Item 3! My dissertation is now 107 pages of single-spaced ugly draft. I was hoping the final version would be about 250 double-spaced, max, but there's no way that's going to happen now. Sorry, committee.
Item 4! I don't really give a shit about St. Paddy's here in California, but it sure makes me nostalgic for the Blitzhaus, the Rude House, Fort Awesome, and the other places my core gang of nerd-punks used to do it up back in the day. The weight - beer ratio of that elite cadre was nuts. Take a pack of scrawny dorks, add PBR and Guinness, and laissez les bons temps rouler.
Thanks for listening. I'm all done now.
3.17.2009
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6 comments:
Are you planning on filing your dissertation in the Fall?
I think anyone who claims to being any more mature / adult at 30 than they were at 20 also has a Kenny G playlist programed into their iPod.
Now into my 30's I find that, while my interests and hopes and goals have changed quite a bit, I am still just as confused about relationships as I was then, and still find it incredibly difficult to deal with "The Man" in all of his various incarnations. I suspect it's a side effect of the graying hair and the urge to carry my belongings in cloth grocery bags.
I went to a show the other day where there were a fair number of 20-somethings hanging around with us 30-somethings, and I noticed that our conversations were not that much different. In fact, it was sort of uncanny.
Well, mine conversation was one-sidedly less drunk, but you get the idea.
C: probably in the winter.
AR: yeah, with smart kids older than 20 or so, it doesn't seem to matter much.
I find that it wasn't the birthday that left me feeling older, but the job change. It's not really the attitude, ideals or conversations that have changed but the hours I keep.
Since I now have to get up at stupidly and un-fucking-reasonable hour in the morning, my evenings end quite a bit sooner than I'd like. I find that even on Fridays, I'm desperately trying to cling to consciousness and participate in conversations at barely 10pm.
Dude, PBJs are the staple of my diet as well. I switch out the bread type and crunchy for smooth every now and then, but damned if it still isn't the best tasting, best filling quick meal I regularly eat.
Does emotional maturity affect what you eat and vice versa? If so, I think I'm a big girl now, since I enjoy a PBJ (what Dave calls his "dessert sandwich") only on the desperate days that I'm too lazy to go grocery shopping.
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