If you are wondering why I didn't post anything last weekend, it's because I was in Stamford, CT helping to administer the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. You can read about it here, if you so desire. It was a whirlwind weekend, in which I arrived at the hotel at which the event was hosted at 3:30 pm Friday afternoon, left on Sunday at 2:00 pm, and did not set foot outside in between. It's a bit like entering a portal into a different, much nerdier world. It's fun.
But it doesn't last long, and before you know it, you're back in your real life, dealing not with witty word games and cool puzzles, but with real-life things like taxes. S and I filed ours this week, and we got hammered this year. Now, I know that complaining about how much you pay in taxes is the second most annoying form of humblebragging,* but it's not so much that the total amount was high. It's that it was way over what we were projecting. Expectations, see. What happened is, S changed her retirement account, and although it will save us money in the long run, it costs us money now, and we weren't prepared for exactly how much. It caused us some serious Turbo Tax sticker shock.
*The most annoying form is the guy who talks about how much better and more attractive his wife is than him: Can you believe this super hot, successful woman picked a schlub like me? Really outkicked my coverage, huh, dude?
Every time we do our taxes, I get instantly irritated about what a racket it is and how confusing it all is. If it was up to me, taxes would be a simple step function. Like, on your first $30,000 you pay 0%, on income between $30,000 and $60,000 you pay 10%, between $60,000 and $100,000 it's 20%, and so on. If you get high enough, like above $1 million, you're paying 50%, and if you get super-duper high, like $1 billion, you're paying 75%. If you only make $250 million on your second billion, I'm okay with that. In my world there would be no deductions or shelters or anything like that -- everybody could figure out what they owe in under five minutes with nothing other than a calculator -- and the money that would be saved on filing administration could be redirected to policing high-level fraud.
As a small example of the ridiculousness consider that this year we weren't able to e-file our DC taxes -- we actually had to print them out and mail a hard-copy. The reason: We installed an electric car charger on our house last year and claimed it as a deduction. Why would that prohibit us from e-filing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess the DC government is like, You did something that ostensibly helps the environment, so we need to balance that out by wasting a bunch of paper. I say "ostensibly" because it's actually kinda difficult to figure out how one's individual actions affect the environment. There are usually too many variables to account for. You can read this article, for instance, on single-use coffee pods (K-Cups). It talks about how their wastefulness of material is counteracted by their efficiency of energy, and it's not totally obvious how that tradeoff works. I was thinking about something similar the other day when S ordered a bunch of products marketed as environmentally-friendly from Amazon. Assuming that they even are better for the environment than other products, are they still better if they are delivered to us by a gas-guzzling Amazon truck? I legit have no idea.
That's why I don't use eco-friendliness per se as a criterion for my consumer habits anymore. I'm much more focused on waste. We subscribe to a composting service, in which once a week somebody comes around and collects our table scraps. Is it good for the environment? I don't know, but it feels better than dumping food down the disposal. Same thing with bottled water and plastic grocery bags. Avoiding these things might have downstream effects I'm not considering,* but at least I won't have a bunch of empty plastic bottles and bags to dispose of.
*For example, with plastic grocery bags, a lot of people use them as trash liners, and so once supermarkets made them less available, people started buying actual trash liners which are thicker and use more plastic.
Anyway, happy Easter, everybody. I actually forgot it was Easter until my bro texted me. It's one of those Christian holidays we celebrated when I was growing up, even though we were an areligious family. I have fond memories of Easter, but it doesn't mean anything to S, so we rarely do anything for it now. Well, this year we had some people over, but that was just by chance. One of S's friends was in town with her husband and kids, and so they came over for breakfast before their flight home. I did up an egg scramble with peppers and onions, and S made potatoes and muffins, and I gotta say, it came out quite well. S also hand-squeezed orange juice for the kids, which I object to, but I usually keep such objections to myself. Again, it's a waste thing. (Just eat the fruit as is!) It takes like a dozen oranges to get a small carafe of juice, and you end up throwing away (or composting) 75% of the fruit. With food prices what they are these days, it's also a waste of money. S knows this and has cut down on her juicing significantly, but she still busts it sometimes, and I just live with it, because you gotta pick your battles and orange juice is pretty low on my list of things I'm willing to disturb my marriage over.
We also went out to a movie last night sans kids, which is a rarity. We saw Air, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It's not, like, amazing cinema. It's probably not going to win any Academy Awards or anything that, but that's part of its charm. It reminded me of the type of movie you'd see on a Saturday night thirty years ago -- just a solid, entertaining film. It has a decent script, a few stars, and the entire thing is over within two hours. There are no super heroes or CGI, and it doesn't try to teach us anything meaningful. It seems like so few movies like that get made anymore, and if they do, they don't get released in the theater.
Alright, that's all for now. Until next time...
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