I actually calculates the basics of my federal taxes back in January because I needed to get some numbers for a financial aid form. I found that I owed around $850-900. While I've owed that much before, this was particularly disheartening / panic-causing / traumatic / thwarting / depressing because I thought I'd finally gotten my withholding figured out at this point in grad school, when I wasn't freelancing, and so on. That was not a particularly stellar evening, to say the least. At the time I decided to take my dad's advice and just not think about it for a few months, keeping the money in the savings side of my checking account until April.
I revisited my taxes today, and, perhaps needless to say, I had to work through a lot of aversion to get there. Even when I finally sat down at my desk, I was procrastinating like mad, and I would stop every few questions to go through all the usual internet places: Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, my Not-NYU email account, Nerve (yes, alas). Since I hadn't figured out the exact tax back in January, I didn't know exactly what I was in for. And it wasn't encouraging to see that I'd made an adding error in my income that had it *under* by $100.
And then I realized that I'd missed one of the personal deductions, so that I'd calculated my income as several thousand dollars *over* what it actually was and was thus looking at the wrong tax table altogether.
I still owe a few hundred dollars (and I can't get the NYS forms to work on my computer, so I have to wait until Monday for that), but it's about $500 *less* than I thought it was going to be, than what I've been assuming and stressing out about for the last two months and change.
I can't even really describe the sense of relief, not unalloyed by sheepishness, that I'm experiencing.
2. Yesterday's Commonplace Book
"Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?
--Robert Browning, "Two in the Campagna"
In resisting idolatry, is the reluctant lover protecting himself against illusion? Or in looking for intimacy without risk, is he losing part of his soul? Because the heavy caesuras match the lover's halting heart, they contradict his boast of confronting no obstacles or barriers. Since the words that appear to lurch forward over the line endings are brought short by early-breaking caesuras they also inadvertently disclose to the attentive reader far more than the lover intends to say.
--W. David Shaw, "Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue"
Also from Shaw:
But the despair of the jilted lovers in Maud and "Locksley Hall," like the anguish of St. Simeon decaying by slow degrees on his pillar, is a mere pretense. Such speakers act out a fantasy of anguish in order to escape genuine despair.
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