Taxed

Although I filed my federal and state returns in January, I got to enjoy the anxieties of Tax Day by procrastinating and forgetting (and forgetting some more) to complete my city taxes. The night before the day of reckoning I dug through old mail pushed aside long ago until I found my June pay stub. And then I noticed a funny thing on it and the W-2. City taxes had been withheld for both my city of employment and city of residence.

All this time I'd been trying to wrap my brain around an amazingly confusing city form for which I thought I'd need to apply all sorts of formulas to determine how much I owed for a partial year. My employer had been withholding the additional percentage for my new place of residence all along.

With the complication removed, I whipped through my old city's form and my new city's form. This is what I'd been postponing for almost three months? Since everything had been properly withheld, I'm not sure that I would have needed to file in the new city, except that I had made a little money freelancing. This morning I cheerfully wrote a check for six dollars to the city treasurer--I had expected I would owe a couple hundred dollars if the tax wasn't getting taken out of my monthly paycheck--and quickly bought a stamp from the post office's vending machine while feeling a bit superior to the poor souls already waiting in the long morning line.

But I would be taxed another way today. Dealing with students and their problems--interpersonal issues , worries about post-college futures, basic instructional needs--can be draining, and this day presented plenty of the energy-sucking variety. No complaints from me, just this statement of being tired and desiring to knit my blanket. And so I shall.