Words & NUMB3R5
I love words. I love the sounds of them, the taste of them in my mouth and the aura of them in my mind. I love to hear them from the mouths of my friends and from the mouths children and preachers and strangers. I love to let words tumble through my mind singly or joined together in ideas, even if they keep me awake at night. I love to sing them. I love to watch them string across the page in response to some untranlatable language that passes between my mind and hands. I love to watch them come together, pushing and shoving and jostling into position, all for the simple pleasure of telling me a story or making me a poem.
Numbers? Not so much. Calendar days and the numbered hours move too fast, leaving me almost no time to savor them. Numbers tally up the dead and reduce them to statistics. Numbers jumble up on one side to become a majority that believes it's right simply because it has the greater numbers. Numbers pile up--or dwindle away--in dollars and cents. Numbers take away our names. I can be haunted by words, but numbers scare me. There's a difference.
Numbers scare me, especially around April 15. At that time of year, my numbers swirl around and settle nervously onto tax forms, waiting to be judged right or wrong by the IRS, which I like to call the Infernal Revenue Service.
I wish I could use my words instead of numbers to communicate with the governmental beast. I wish I could explain the weakness of my math. I wish I could say, "Can't I write you an essay or a story or a song? I'm much better with words than with numbers." And the beast would say, "Okay, sure." Then I would no longer dread tax time.
No one will be surprised that, given till the 17th of April to file, I filed on the 17th. The postal service's outgoing telephone message said mail would be collected until 11:59 p.m. More numbers. I nervously e-filed my numbers around 6:30 p.m. and reluctantly but dutifully delivered my check to the hands of the mail collector around 10:30.
Here's a good word: "sleep." Beautiful.
Numbers? Not so much. Calendar days and the numbered hours move too fast, leaving me almost no time to savor them. Numbers tally up the dead and reduce them to statistics. Numbers jumble up on one side to become a majority that believes it's right simply because it has the greater numbers. Numbers pile up--or dwindle away--in dollars and cents. Numbers take away our names. I can be haunted by words, but numbers scare me. There's a difference.
Numbers scare me, especially around April 15. At that time of year, my numbers swirl around and settle nervously onto tax forms, waiting to be judged right or wrong by the IRS, which I like to call the Infernal Revenue Service.
I wish I could use my words instead of numbers to communicate with the governmental beast. I wish I could explain the weakness of my math. I wish I could say, "Can't I write you an essay or a story or a song? I'm much better with words than with numbers." And the beast would say, "Okay, sure." Then I would no longer dread tax time.
No one will be surprised that, given till the 17th of April to file, I filed on the 17th. The postal service's outgoing telephone message said mail would be collected until 11:59 p.m. More numbers. I nervously e-filed my numbers around 6:30 p.m. and reluctantly but dutifully delivered my check to the hands of the mail collector around 10:30.
Here's a good word: "sleep." Beautiful.
posted by mac | 9:04 PM
8 Comments:
Hi Michael,
On many occasions at Sunday school you have helped me understand words! Now the simple solution to your tax problem is to take or send your problem to some one who loves those numbers as much as you love words. There are even people in our church who would take that burden from you. Next year, spend that wasted tax preparation time writiing a song or a story.
Life is too short to do stuff you hate or drink bad beer!!!!
Dennis
After adding the numbers for our personal stuff, I had to add numbers on the biz sales tax for the quarter and then add numbers for the projected quarter. It would be so nice to write out words at this time of the year instead of numbers! You think you could write the beast and get that done for us?!
Hummm...well, you could be like me and not understand either one of them. :)
Dennis--Thanks for the advice. I guess I resist professional tax help because we had to do that in the days when we had a more public business, which was too complicated for me to handle. We always have to pay, so I think I have a hard time accepting the notion of paying a preparer and then paying the beast too.
Mark--You must be numbered out. As I said above, when a public business was involved in our lives, the preparation of taxes was beyond my poor skills with numbers. As for writing the beast, I'm afraid. I don't want to draw attention to myself. Odd that in a democracy we live in such dread and fear of the government we supposedly control.
Ruth--You've got more on the ball than you pretend! or than you allow yourself to admit.
By the way, Dennis, in class today my students and I were discussing a novel I assigned called THE PASSION. When I asked if any of them had true passions for something, they seemed somewhat lost. I used you (not by name) and your passion for good beer as a leading example!
In the middle between having a tax guy and filling the forms out yourself, is TurboTax.... I lead such a simple tax life that it can be totally included in a computer program... I have to admit, that pictures and touching works best for me - I get words and numbers bacwords regularly and when things are really bad, I write an R on my right palmn and a L on my left hand so I know which way to turn... thanks for sharing your thought on taxes and the monster called the IRS..... john
Hi Michael,
Perhaps a professional would find you more deductions and that way you would save a little of the cost and a lot of heartache. You could even drink a beer while writing that story or song I mentioned! LOL
One last comment. I have always looked at taxes as a way of judging my income. So, the more taxes I pay, the more money I am making. I love paying lots of taxes.
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