Happy tax day! I filed ours so long ago that I forgot about it and had a terrifying moment where I thought I still needed to do it. When I remembered that, no, I’d actually already taken care of it, it was a very happy surprise because I almost never finish anything that far ahead of a deadline.
Fun fact, I also almost never get much of a tax refund. I’ve managed it so we just about break even every year. This is actually something that a long-ago not-quite-boyfriend used to act smug about, like he was some kind of libertarian genius for figuring out tax withholding. It sucks for me that I’ve now essentially admitted he was right. Anyway, refunds are great if you get them! I just prefer for me and the United States of Nonsense to be even Stephens.
This weekend we are hosting my family for Easter dinner. Accordingly, I ordered a leg of lamb from our CSA a couple of weeks ago. I hope everyone is very hungry for lamb because it is enormous, which I can say with authority having carried it home half a mile in an old work swag backpack.
Trudging home in my puffer coat, backpack weighing me down, I heard some middle school kids walking home a ways behind me and felt a mild frisson of PTSD-lite. I remembered walking home one day during the fourth grade, wearing a new burgundy puffer jacket and matching tam. The jacket had Fair Isle-style reindeer leaping across it and so did the hat. I loved that jacket and hat, until some neighborhood boys ran up behind me and snatched the hat off my head. I was startled more than anything and started to cry, at which point one of the boys, alarmed, handed the hat back to me. “Here,” he said, wide-eyed. “Here’s your hat! Here it is!”
I don’t think, at my big age, that I would become tearful if confronted by middle school boys again. I would simply brandish my gigantic leg of lamb and be on my way.
This is just me reacting to some stuff I saw on the internet recently.
In actuality, a large portion of the population would be totally okay with this. And while I personally would find it intensely irritating, it would still be preferable to what we have now, which is a shitshow being run by the two most emotionally immature people on the planet.
The list of things David Brooks is obtuse about is too long to provide a good answer to this question.
They are! In both senses of the word, but mostly the one not intended here.
Please stop boiling things down to these weak gotchas that don’t add anything to the dialogue, solve any problems, or move anything forward. It’s not that it isn’t true; it’s just that this isn’t going to make some red-hat death cult ghoul suddenly smack their forehead and go OH I GET IT NOW. Also plenty of people batted an eye!
WENT HERE AND THEY SAID YOU’RE IN CHARGE