Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Tax season is here.

Of course, for me,the tax season only lasts 24 hours and is still almost three months away, because I wait to do any of it till the last possible day each year. Today I received my tax info tuition statement (officially known as Form 109884328797864-T) from my college in the mail. I opened it 25 minutes ago. Three minutes ago, I spilled applesauce on it. Within the next nine minutes, I will have misplaced it and won't see it again till April 14th, when I will find it under my bed inside a Far Side comic book, marking some particularly funny panel that I wanted to show someone else but forgot to after I lost the book off my nightstand. Then, even though I will be in a rush to get my taxes done, I'll sit there on my floor going, "YES! I found my Form 109884328797864-T and now I can finish my-oh sweet I LOVED this panel!", and then I'll sit read the whole book and won't file till the 15th.
Speaking of the 15th reminds me of the 14th, which reminds me that upcoming day of love and romance, where millions of women get upset if their respective man failed to do something original, and where millions of men think that a box of candy (that says "made in china" on the bottom) from Wal-mart counts as something original. It's a nasty, nasty cycle. I spent last Valentine's night at a lovely restaurant, surrounded by balloons and flowers. Of course, I was the person carrying food to the tables and refilling drinks and by the end of the night I was ready to pop the balloons with a steak knife. And it wasn't really a lovely restaurant, it was Applebee's, and it was crowded, and the kitchen crashed, and I have no freaking clue what makes 573 billion couples think that by all going out for dinner on the same night, they will have a private, relaxing experience. Seriously..."Hey honey, let's have some time for just the two of us. Let's go to the standing-room-only lobby at a restaurant that doesn't take reservations and wait for 70-90 minutes for a table. It'll just be us and 340 other couples packed together". Yea, that screams romance. I won't even touch on how long it took for food to arrive, except to say that really, they could have raised and butchered out a steer in less time than it took to get a steak that night. Nights like that made me wonder why the heck I worked in a restaurant and definitely kept me motivated to stay in school.

Getting back to my taxes...I'm actually just waiting for one more thing to come in the mail before filing, which I really actually want to accomplish earlier than April 15th this year. My goal is to file by April 14th. I'm so tempted to do them by hand this year, simply for the reason that I could send my late-night-snack-food splotched forms to the IRS in Santa Fe and some government employee would have to pull a coffee stained, peanut butter crusted-together stack of papers out of the envelope and try to decipher my writing through the mess, then I'll call 3 days after I mail it and demand to know why I haven't received my return yet. And then it will be their turn to question their employment.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

What Do They Do At 1 AM?

How funny would it be....if our politicians had to have everything done by Sunday night, the same way I do each week? Maybe this only seems funny because I've been sitting at my computer for the last 5 hours working on a paper that is due tomorrow. Seriously though, the image of our *Beloved Leaders* sitting there going "crud...crud if I don't finish this up, I'll get a bad grade, and then my average for the class will go down, and then I'll risk getting a lower letter grade, and then my GPA for the semester will go down, and then my name will be Suck" is hilarious. I think it would be even funnier if their pay reflected their bad GPA. Yea, I know this is nonsensical retarded musing :O)
I wonder how similar my life and their lives really are though? How many pots of coffee do they burn through while trying to get their work done? Do they sit there crafting their Serious Works of Grave Political Significance and Importance while wearing black and red knee high argyle socks with blue pajama shorts that are covered with pink and red hearts and a vintage orange t-shirt? (If Sarah Palin does then I'd be down with it...just hope that's not the case for John McCain. He has old man knees and should avoid shorts). While he dreams up his word-vomit for the next day, could Joe Biden have a fondness for eating clementine oranges at 2 AM and a nit-picky way of peeling them (starting from the top, in five vertical sections, so that it looks like an opened flower blossom)? Does Janet Napolitano rock out to "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" while writing the death plans for all the Ron Paul supporters? Nah...I bet Janet blasts Blondie's "One Way Or Another".
Anyway, I finally finished writing the health care paper and let me tell you, I think I rewrote that paper about 3 times when it was all said and done. However, it is simply waiting for a peer review tomorrow morning before I upload it to my prof. There is nothing as horrible as the thought of walking into a classroom with an incomplete assignment...unless it's the thought that (seriously, do I seriously have to list his name in a blog about "our politicians"?)Al Franken might possibly also get up from his chair to get his blood circulating by dancing to "Funky Town" or "Play That Funky Music". For the record, my dancing skills are way funkier than his could ever be. I mean, really, I'm the one with the awesome socks.

Conquering Health Science Writing and Demon Insects of the South

This weekend I've been working on an extremely interesting paper titled "Health Care Financing". Yea, I know...contain your jealousy and envy. Interestingly, I found myself quite drawn into it once I started writing and now have a 450 word affair that I somehow have to cut 100 words out of in order to meet my prof's specifications. (For the record, I'm officially at that point of tired where I have to sit here thinking "Is it speficifations or specifications?").
Said paper is an assignment from my "Writing for Health Science Careers" class. The only problem I'm having is that my teacher wants this to be an OPINION paper, which would be okay except that I am incapable of stating only my own opinion and nothing but my opinion on the given subject. I have this insatiable need to argue against every single other opinion out there, which I'm pretty sure is what caused the current too-many-words thing I have going on. The horrible part is I'm not even close to being finished with it. All I know is, if Liberals would stop trying to force universal free health coverage on us, I wouldn't have to tell the world why their plans won't work, and my paper would fit within 350 words!(At last, I've learned how to blame everything on the government). Seriously though, how many times does socialism have to fail before we finally realize that it doesn't work?
Moving on. I have been presented with the opportunity to visit a very old, very dear friend of mine in FL on Memorial Day weekend. He's stationed at an AFB right by the ocean. Oh my cow I would get to see the water! We're talking about going to Disney World while I'm there, as well as dressing up in 50's fashion for an evening out, simply for the fun of it because we both love the glamor of that era. I think it will be a wonderful weekend, with the only exceptions being the 340% humidity and prehistoric-sized insects (and here you thought those were alligators in the swamps)that come with visiting the South
Airport security should let me board while carrying a shotgun loaded with buckshot when I say "I'm going to the South. This is insect repellent." If they've been there, they'll understand and wave me on through without a second thought. If they haven't, I'll henceforth be writing a blog titled "The Prison-Issue-Canvas-Slipper Wearing Conservative".