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The Three A.M. Waltz

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God, how I hate waking up in the wee hours of the morning! Is anything, anything more annoying and frustrating?

I’m so tired I’m almost sick, and I can. not. sleep. Part of it is worrying about losing a chunk of cash in the mail just when I have to get a new crown…that money would have about paid for the dental work. Now I’ll have to raid savings to cover it. Part of it is worrying about how I’m going to get another raft of papers graded around the mass of choir rehearsals and performances that will occupy the rest of this week. Part of it is being pissed at having to get my teeth crowned as a result of all the bruxing I do out of stress and frustration. (LOL! “Why do the heathen grind their teeth?”) Part of it is worrying whether the IRS got my tax payment, since that went out in the same mail as the lost checks. Part of it is annoyance that Fidelity’s online statements are not current and that there’s no way to figure out which of the several accounts they’ve got up there corresponds to the money fund for which I have a book of checks, one of which I used to pay my taxes. Part of it is that it’s going to rain again, so the air is a little humid and vaguely uncomfortable. Part of it is disappointment that (I think) Funny lost the current March Madness round at Free Money Finance. Part of it is hunger. And part of it is just old-lady insomnia.

Yesh. At 9:30 this morning—now only five hours away—another mountain of muzzy student papers will come to light on my desk. The day will be occupied with classes through 1:45, at which point I have to drive to Costco for gasoline. Then it’s off to rehearsal.

This week the choir had rehearsals last night and has another rehearsal tonight, a performance tomorrow night, rehearsals and performance Friday, rehearsal and performance Saturday, rehearsal and two performances Sunday. When exactly I’m going to find time to read the mountain of student papers, to say nothing of my client’s first two draft chapters, I do. not. know!

Yesterday I didn’t get to his dissertation because I spent the most of the day writing the post that will come online in about two hours and arguing with the credit union and the post office. This morning at three o’clock I was in no condition to edit copy. And still am not: I’ve killed the last hour and forty-five minutes writing posts to cover the next two days.

Let’s see… 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., that’s four hours. It’s now  almost 5 o’clock. If by some miracle I can get back to sleep until seven, maybe I could eke a full six hours out of the night before I have to go to class.

And so, to bed…

Vote now if you haven’t yet!

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FMF reports that he will name a winner of the current round tomorrow, Wednesday. If Funny makes it through this one, then we’ll be at the final, championship round! So that would give us a nice chance at winning $500 and clinch a $300 donation for the All Saints Choir.

If you haven’t voted in this round, it would be mighty lovely if you would. Just go here and, to vote for Funny, enter the word “Truth” in a Comment.

🙂

General quotidian miseries

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{grump!} It’s not like I didn’t have enough screwing around to have to do…

Apparently the Post Office lost an envelope sent to the credit union containing three checks, one for my personal account and two for the Copyeditor’s Desk account. It was a printed envelope from the credit union, so the address was correct, and I distinctly remember checking to be sure each item in the the fistful of mail I stuffed in the mailbox had a stamp on it. So I guess all those checks are just gone. Today I’ll have to call the issuers and tell them to stop payment and send me new checks.

Problem is, one of them came from Google Adsense, where it is dead impossible to reach a human being. The only way to make Google reissue a check will be to go to a particularly annoying, frustrating website and claim never to have seen the thing. Doing that will mean

a) I’ll have to lie, because I most certainly have seen and endorsed the damn thing, and
b) it will be another two months before I get another payment.

Problem with using the Google web annoyance is that if I claim not to have received the check and then it arrives at the CU and gets deposited, then it will look like I’m trying to steal from Adsense. Google is notoriously inclined to simply cut off customers it thinks aren’t dealing straight with Adsense. So, I guess the better part of valor is just to eat the $157.

Damn it. The specific reason I did this was that it is a freaking hassle to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus just to deposit a couple of checks. It consumes gas unnecessarily, and it expends pretty close to an hour of my time. The West campus stands in the middle of a down-at-the-heels bedroom community with no commerce where I might get any other errands done while I’m over there. I take that back: there’s a Costco in that general direction, but it’s an extra stretch and more wasted gasoline up the freeway, and a Lowe’s and a Home Depot at the freeway intersection. Not that I shop at either of those places much anymore.

So, to avoid hassle I’ve brought a basketful of extra hassle down on my head.

But the big concern about this is that when I drove over to the nearby post office and dropped that envelope in the mailbox, I also mailed my tax returns. Yesh. Both the personal and the corporate returns. For both the state and the feds. And I sent Tax Lady her payment in the same outgoing mail drop.

It looks like TL cashed at least one of her checks, the one I wrote on the corporate checking account; the second was written on a Fidelity money market account, along with the check to cover the federal tax. So if she got her envelope, presumably the Post Office didn’t lose everything I tried to send that day. I’ll have to get into the Fidelity account online—another fine little hassle—to see if the feds have cashed the check for their pound of flesh.

Where the PO is concerned, I’m afraid I can’t call any kettles black. I add my own extravagant incompetence to everyone else’s. It’s a wonder the human race gets anywhere at all.

Yesterday in my senility I utterly FORGOT that the 101 students were supposed to be at the library hearing a talk from our most accomplished and lively librarian! We blew away an hour and a half chatting about research methods in the classroom, and none of  us, not a one, remembered that we were supposed to be elsewhere. That was because…

a) I had totally spaced any memory of this appointment; and
b) When I posted an announcement to the young things in BlackBoard, I forgot to hit “e-mail to all recipients,” and, as usual, none of them checked the class announcements board.

So, this truly wonderful librarian showed up in the computer classroom and stood around for half an hour wondering where the hell we were.

Arghhhh!

Yesterday, too, I had such a blinding headache I began to wonder if I was having a stroke. It actually made me dizzy…felt like I was listing to the right as I was trying to drive and walk. Wasn’t, though; it just felt that way.

And of course in this general state of misery I had a meeting before classes and then had to drive from North Phoenix to South Scottsdale after spending four hours in front of classrooms full of late-stage adolescents. There Poisoned Pen Press gratefully accepted the novel I’d just finished editing but had no new work for me.

Fortunately I have some paying work to do today…though I will say, I don’t feel like doing any work, much less of the paying variety.

Driving from pillar to post yesterday, I was regaled by Tony Judt’s unholy tale of his trials with ALS on NPR’s Fresh Air. It’s a gut-wrenching story. You’d like to say you can’t even imagine what it would be like to live through such a horror and then die of it. But you can: Judt describes it with vivid clarity.

It’s one of those moments that brings to mind one’s own mortality. Please, God, let me drive my car off a cliff, let me die in a plane crash, let me drop dead of a heart attack. I think if I received a diagnosis like that, the first thing I’d do is pick up my father’s pistol and blow my brains out. Judt at least has his family around him and apparently has the resources to hire in-home nursing care. I have no one but my son, who has to work and could not devote three to ten years to caring for a dying woman. He would have to leave me to waste away alone in a nursing home.

Having chosen not to exit pursued by a bear, Judt—an eminent historian—has written a new book addressed largely to young people, Ill Fares the Land. The NPR site features an interesting out-take from its introduction. Says he:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

Just so.

The news of the day continued with reports of crazed right-wingers planning to murder police officers and foment a rebellion against the federal government. That, to my mind, is far scarier than anything our enemies among the fundamentalist Moslems can do. IMHO, unless something is done about the growing schism in this country, within 20 to 50 years we will be looking at civil war.

To top it all off, I got a truly nasty e-mail from someone on the choir informing me she doesn’t know who I am and does not care to hear anything from me. F*** you very much.

Sometimes I get out of patience with life.

w00t! We’re at the FINAL FOUR round!

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Wow! Thanks to the kindness of Funny’s readers, a great raft of choir members, and every friend new and old I can pester, we’ve reached the “Final Four” round of Free Money Finance’s March Madness contest!

This means that Funny is getting very close to winning $300 or $500 for All Saints’ wonderful choir! I wish you could all be here to enjoy the amazing music that has graced the Lenten and holy week season. This church’s music program is one of the city’s most radiant cultural gems. And the church itself engages in a wide span of good works that care for people from childhood through old age.

So, please be sure to go to the current FMF March Madness round and vote for Funny’s post, “Truth, the Highest Thing that Man May Keep.” Every vote for “Truth” is a vote to keep music a vibrant part of our cultural lives.

Here’s a video of Karl Jenkins speaking about his Stabat Mater, which we’ll will be singing for Easter. You can get a flavor here of this amazing vocal tour de force.

Vote!

Odorless, stingless sunscreen

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Yesterday while I was rummaging through one of the drawers that needs to be cleaned out, I came across a small tube of sunscreen that I’d bought at the Mayo Clinic’s pharmacy several years ago. Shortly after I’d bought it, I’d “put it away” (read “tossed it in the drawer where it got lost”) and forgotten about it.

Well, the AlphaHydrox I ordered from Amazon.com after the RoC fiasco arrived in the mail. It’s working exactly the same as it did when I first used it: it seems to smooth the wrinkles a little bit, helps with the surface-of-Mars effect, and doesn’t irritate unduly. But as with the retinoids, you really should wear a sunscreen when you’re using alpha-hydroxy acids on your skin, because they can predispose you to sunburn.

I’ve been using Neutrogena’s Ultra-Sheer Dry Touch sunblock, because it’s less obnoxious than most drugstore sunscreens and doesn’t contain PABA, which irritates my skin. Even though its scent is not too strong, it still does stink. I really dislike stuff that’s full of industrial perfume, and of all the industrial perfumes out there, the ones that make you smell like a beach bunny annoy me more than any. This is not something I want to smear on my face and arms every day of my life.

When I spotted the Mayo’s SPF 35 sunscreen, I thought, “I’ll bet this doesn’t stink.” Dab it on and yup! That’s so. Hallelujah! It not only doesn’t make you smell like you just came from the pool or the beach, it doesn’t make your skin sting, either. The stuff is called Vanicream Sensitive Skin Sunscreen, and it contains 8% zinc oxide and 7.5% octinoxate. Unlike other zinc oxide products I’ve used, the “circus clown white” effect rubs in quickly and easily.

Normally I don’t wear much sunscreen, relying instead on clothing, makeup, and a hat to provide sun protection. During the summer, I usually restrict swimming to early morning and after dark. This is partly because PABA, which is no longer used, was quite irritating to my skin and partly because there is some controversy over the use of any sunscreens.

In the first place, humans produce vitamin D through their skin when exposed to sunlight. This is our major source of vitamin D, which is needed to metabolize calcium. Without adequate vitamin D, your bones weaken and voilà! Ostopenia, osteoporosis! Sunblocks (such as zinc oxide) inhibit your body’s ability to make vitamin D, because (obviously) they block your skin’s access to sunlight.

And in the second place, far from preventing skin cancer, sunscreen use has been associated with an increase in malignant melanoma. The products apparently don’t protect against the development of skin cancer as well as people imagine, but because we think we’re protected, we spend more time in the noonday sun than any Englishman or mad dog should.

Thus as you can see, the trick is not to smear chemicals on your skin, but simply to stay out of the sun, except for a few minutes each day specifically for the purpose of metabolizing vitamin D. You need less than 30 minutes of exposure to sunlight twice a week to produce adequate levels. It’s also possible to take vitamin D orally, to good effect in most circumstances.

IMHO, you’re better off to limit sun exposure to just enough to produce a decent amount of vitamin D (which depends on your ethnicity and skin color), to consume vitamin D-fortified dairy products, and to enjoy some salmon now and then. Here in Arizona, I generally wear a wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves even in 110-degree heat (make that especially in 100-degree heat—lightweight cotton or linen actually makes you feel cooler by shading your skin from the sun’s direct blast) and confine my outdoor activities to times when the sun is close to the horizon or below it. I carry a straw hat in the car, so there’ll always be one at hand, and I also leave a big sombrero hanging in the garage for gardening.

Vanicream is not cheap—$14 for four ounces, pretty bracing when you learn that if you’re running around in a bathing suit you should smear a whole ounce of it on yourself. But I figure as long as you’re using a product that could your make skin sun-sensitive, it’s worth it for the face and the age-spot-prone hands and forearms.

Taxpayer confusion

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Damn, but I wish Congress and the IRS wouldn’t let corporate lobbyists make hash out of the tax code so the rich folks can get out of paying. If you have several different kinds of income, it is just flicking impossible to understand tax forms and what you’re supposed to do to pay fairly. What excuse is there for this mess?

This spring, for the first time since I started paying my own taxes (as opposed to the ex-husband doing it), I owe money: $770 to the IRS! This happened because, when ASU started jacking us around with furloughs, I added two allowances to my W-4 so as to minimize damage from the $480/month cut in pay. After six months, the furloughs went away but I didn’t change the withholding.

Meanwhile, I taught two classes in the fall, hustled a lot of freelance business, began to make money on FaM, and also withdrew $800 a month from an IRA to cover my share of the mortgage on the downtown house, yielding a pretty plump gross income. As a result, not enough was withheld to cover federal taxes. On the other hand, the state of Arizona owes me $1004.

It remains to be seen whether the state will issue refunds. Tax Lawyer says her understanding is that they will, but others have heard that we’ll be getting refunds in the form of useless IOUs. Meanwhile, TL charged me $476 to do my personal return and $442 for the corporate return.

Holy mackerel! She’s never charged more than about $350 before. I realize lawyers have to eat, too, but still… The state refund will not cover the federal income tax bill plus TL’s bills.

I can’t even begin to do my personal returns. With income from investments, freelance sources, jobs, Social Security, and limited partnerships offset by itemizing and mortgage interest deductions, the job is just too complicated, because the law is just too complex for me to follow. But I’m pretty sure I can manage the corporate return using Turbotax’s business edition. It’s $150, an amount that has to be ponied up every flickin’ year, but that’s a far cry from $442.

This year my income will drop to about $33,000. TL tells me I should be able to figure out what percentage I’ll owe at the IRS website. Problem is, although Social Security is taxed, it’s not considered earned income. If you add it in to the “earned income” line, the tool calculates an incorrect figure. But it’s not dividend income. It’s taxed in a bizarre way that’s linked to how much you make elsewhere. The complexity of that transaction renders the tool at the IRS site useless.

I think that if I teach only five classes this year (rather than the previously planned six), I may not owe any taxes on Social Security. The clinker is, though, that the RASL payments (sick-leave payout), even though they’re not considered 2010 income (they were earned while I was working at ASU), may push me above the threshhold. I just don’t know, and I don’t know how to prove to the IRS and Social Security that RASL is not 2010 earned or dividend income.

Meanwhile, I still have two allowances on my community college W-4, something I installed at TL’s advice last fall. So…is the District withholding enough? Who knows? It’s impossible to make an accurate guess.

There’s a tool at Money Chimp that sort of explains tax brackets (as best as one can: your tax is xx% but it’s really not; it’s really probably yy%… Yeah! makes sense).

So, if my teaching income is $12,000 and Social Security is $15,084 and the enforced drawdown from the 403(b) is $6,000, and I can keep the “salary” from The Copyeditor’s Desk down to $500 or $1,000 and I don’t withdraw dividends from CE Desk this year, then my total 2010 gross should come to something between $33,584 and $34,084. That will put me in the 15 percent bracket, with an actual tax of 13.73 percent. If I have to draw $1,000 from CE Desk (an S-corporation), then I’ll be in the 25 percent bracket, BUT my actual tax as percentage of income will still be only 13.8 percent.

Huh?

But then, if only half my Social Security is taxed (that’s one possible scenario), do I enter $26,042 into the calculator? If I’m lucky and none of it is taxed, then should I enter $18,500? And what about the RASL? How do I know? How do I find out?

See what I mean? It just doesn’t make any sense at all. And you can NOT arrive at a credible answer without hiring a tax professional (to the tune of $400+) to figure it out.

At any rate, I need the cash flow from my paychecks and am loath to get rid of the allowances. The fact is, with two allowances the community college district is withholding 15 percent. The feds are withholding 20 percent from Social Security. And Fidelity is withholding 23 percent from the $500 distribution the state is forcing me to take.

If the Money Chimp tool is correct, then I shouldn’t have to change my withholding, even though the college is not extracting enough to cover both federal and state taxes. If the calculator is wrong, I do have some money to pay taxes. Really, I’d prefer not to overpay, partly because of the need to buy groceries, but partly because, if the state is going to start issuing IOUs, I certainly don’t want those SOBs getting any more of my money in advance than I can avoid.

Social Security doesn’t issue anything that looks like a pay statement, so you can’t tell whether they’re sending money to the state. At 20 percent, they probably are, since I asked to have 15 percent withheld. The state gloms a percentage of your federal tax.

I’m thinking I should drop or maybe even eliminate the drawdown from Fidelity. Now that the General Accounting Office has approved my RASL payout, I may not need to keep taking that drawdown. However, RASL is paid out over three years. I don’t know whether the RASL Czar checks each year to be sure you’re still drawing down a so-called “pension” or whether once she’s approved it she just cuts a new check for each year. What would make sense would be to roll the ASU drawdown into my big IRA, which just now is cranking money. If I had, say, $250 paid out to me and then rolled the rest, I’d still have a little pocket change, my taxable income would drop by $3,000, and that would put me solidly in the 15 percent bracket.

The question is…can I get by on $3,000 less?