Anger

Doing my taxes tonight I discovered that the test-prep teaching company I was fired from almost a year ago (for being insufficiently devoted to the cause, not wanting to give up every weekend day forever, etc) is continuing to screw me over by calling me a "nonemployee" for tax purposes. That means, technically (I now know thanks to H&R Block), that I am a business owner, and that means I have to pay a big whopping tax on a very small amount of income.

Of course, looking at the tax stuff more carefully, I discovered that out of the 10 or so criteria for having a "nonemployee," the only one that my company met was that they didn't give me any benefits (everything else clearly pointed to a normal employee arrangement). But I'm pretty sure that this status was in my contract, so there's probably not much I can do. Except destroy them with my own test prep business!

Comforting myself, because, while the situation seems a little ambiguous and I really don't want to pay a big tax when I was expecting to get a refund, it's against my morals to be a tax cheat, I thought . . . at least I'm giving it to OBAMA! It really is nice to know that my taxes might not go straight to Halliburton but instead could be used to provide, say, $642 worth of picture books for adorable children. That's what I'm going to think about.