One for You, Nineteen for Me

Confession: I am not a real life adult.

This fact was made all the more clear by my display of utter childishness and grown-ass woman faceplant-level failure tonight. What was the special occasion you ask? Oh, quite simple. For the first time in my life, I ventured to file my taxes alone.

Hint: it did not go well. I'm not proud of the events that unfolded. Only now, as I write this, shoveling brownies into my face, can I look back and fake a semblance of a laugh at this awful awful process of patriotic torture.

You see, all year, Uncle Sam borrows your money. Your hard earned cash frickin' money. And every spring, you go through a mound of paperwork and online filing madness (or pay more of your hard earned money to have someone else do it for you) in order to tell Uncle Sam exactly what he owes you back. He already knows what that number is, but like a middle-school math teacher, he wants you to come up with that number yourself.* And then, the funny part, is you celebrate it. The tax refund splurge: time to go on vacation and buy a new car! WHAT? That's your money. It could've been yours all along. Instead, it was being used by the government, and whatever you manage to argue back via a series of complicated forms, that's your prize!

And if you don't fill out those forms, then guess what, it's tax evasion... and that's what gangsters and bootleggers go to jail for. That's how they got Al Capone. Do you want to be in jail with frickin' Al Capone?? No. Not really, even if you think gangster hats are neat. So you comply, and go through the process.

I'm not embarassed to say that up til this point, my mama has helped file my taxes. She does payroll for a living. I trust her with my money numbers and she's a trained professional, so, why wouldn't I want her help? But, in an effort to "prove my adultness" or whatever, I decided to e-file alone. My mom and I had gone through the paper form over the weekend and calculated my returns. I had all the details, I was set. I figured online filing would just be popping in those same numbers, no big deal.

Ignorance was bliss. Filing my taxes online... was not.

If the forms were so important, they wouldn't be so easy to lose in the mail. 

So I put on Patsy Cline's greatest hits album. And Patsy sang me through my hysteria. There were all these questions that I didn't have answers for. (Apparently I have an HSA account that I didn't know about - who knows where that money is hiding.) "Crazy" carried me through the income portion of my federal, as I frantically threw papers about, grasping for numbers (can't I just write "income = not enough"?). The beau, who of course filed weeks ago (because he's a mature human and has done his own taxes since before he needed to shave), looked on empathetically and offered help. I stubbornly hulked out (total grownup move) and rejected all offers and instead called my mom. "I fall to pieces" appropriately came on, as I sobbed on the phone with my poor mother (bless her heart) while the e-filing site I was using proceeded to tell me that this filing was not free after all,** logged me out, and erased my entire form.

Freeze frame me, at the table, tax form papers strewn about, catching my tears. Beau hiding out in the kitchen (baking the Thin Mint brownies that I'm now eating, that wonderful man) while Patsy Cline blared out "Leaving on your Mind" and I seriously hoped he wasn't listening to the lyrics too closely and thinking about leaving me - since I'm clearly a crazy person incapable of completing adult tasks. A newly blanked out e-form pulled up on the laptop. My pride, no where to be seen.

So, how does this story end? Well. I put my boss-lady pants on and redid the form. And now my federal taxes have officially been submitted.*** The state ones? Listen, point blank, that shit ain't gonna happen today. They can wait til tomorrow. If they can't, well, then call me Capone and take me away. There's only so much energy a gal can muster at the end of what was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. In fact, the ridiculousness of my ambition, in deciding to do my taxes tonight, that's where this went wrong. Sometimes, one should just settle for phoning it in and picking up the receiver again later.

What a mighty good man. All the "brownie" points!

Overall note: to be fair, not only did I go into this after an awful day, but I also watched an episode of "This is Us" which just opened the floodgates for emotions, as always.  * Only this middle school math teacher is drunk and instead throws calculus worksheets in front of 12 year olds - sure, maybe they can figure out what numbers to put where but they probably don't understand why or what the hell the final number means. I'm the 12 year old in this scenario.
** It was free, if you lived in a certain state and made below a certain income - which I did and I do. BUT if you haven't clicked through to file from the IRS website, you do NOT get a free filing. If you go to the website any other way, they screw you over and charge you. Dirtbags. Total dirtbags. 
*** And they sure as shit better not get rejected come tomorrow, or this gal will be out looking for a higher place to jump.