04.14.09

Confessional **Updated**

Posted in Drunken Jeci! at 8:58 pm by jeci

Three glasses of wine brings you:

  1. I have never once done my own taxes. Ever. I’ve tried on numerous occasions in the past and, despite being exactly the type of person who typically receives a tax credit (student and/or well below the poverty line) every time, I had myself owing thousands of dollars. In decades past, my long-suffering roommate did my taxes. Yes. It’s incredible to me now that we were so open with each other about our finances, but then I suppose there’s no secret to how poor you are when you’re living in the ghetto together and often eating plain, boiled noodles for several meals in a row. Anyway, then I paid someone to do my taxes for a few years, which is an ironic waste of money. Now I have a husband who happens to work for the Ministry advising people on their taxes. Lucky me.
  2. I am not, however, one of Those Women, who doesn’t know how to take care of her own finances and leaves it all to her husband. Apparently, these people still exist. But no, not me. What, on account of the 12 years of autonomy pre-marriage and, also, no. If anything, I am ever so slightly in charge of the books. There are spreadsheets. And graphs—pie charts, area charts. The area chart is my favourite. I can balance the books; I just can’t do taxes.
  3. I hate cell phones. HATE. It is an irrational, deep-seated loathing that has not lifted in the slightest since their initial rise to prominence in the 90s. I hate listening to people talking on the phone everywhere I go. I hate the person having the self-conscious overly loud phone call on the bus. I hate people wandering in front of me on the sidewalk and cutting me off because they’re on the phone and not paying attention. I hate even more the innumerable times I’ve almost been run down in the street because someone is on the phone while they’re driving. I hate perhaps most of all the Grocery Store Talker who monopolizes an aisle because they’re having a conversation and have stopped dead in front of the teas and are oblivious to the fact that they are still, in fact, functioning members of society, a society in which someone else wants to pick out some tea and go home. Stop it. STOP TALKING ON YOUR PHONE ALL THE TIME. (See? Deep-seated loathing.) (I know I’m alone in this. I know.)
  4. Guess what. I don’t own a cell. I can’t. I won’t. Many people find this reprehensible. But, let’s be real, people. I have a land line. I have a work number. There’s a 20 minute window period wherein I walk to work, not talking on the phone, not cutting people off or shutting people out, not oblivious to the world around me, simply taking the world in…and then I’m reachable by phone again. And you know what? No one ever calls me. There’s no editing emergency that necessitates my constant availability (”We’ve got a comma splice bleeding out here! Quickly—bring semi-colons!”). And I have tons of friends, but, again, it turns out that no one anywhere, ever, not even my husband, needs or even wants to have constant contact with me. It’s mutual.
  5. For all the same reasons—the obliviousness, the shutting out—I hate iPods. (For the record, this peeve goes back to the days of Walkmans.) And it goes both ways too, this peeve, where I can’t stand listening to an iPod. When I listen to an iPod, I spend the entire time freaked out and stressed out that I can’t hear what’s going on around me. Did someone just call my name? Is there someone behind me? What’s happening? What did that guy say? Again, an unpopular, losing, fruitless position, hating iPods.
  6. I will never tire of Law & Order. Did you know that there’s a Law & Order UK now? With Jamie Bamber? You’re welcome.

iPod Update: I’ve been working on a rather tedious project at work (putting the “Technical” in “Technical Writer/Editor”), a project that involves not so much my brain as my ability to cut and paste and categorize (the fancy term is “Information Architecture”) and really just…staying power more than anything. And so it came to pass that I borrowed Kieran’s iPod and swiftly revised my stance on both iPods and Kanye West, because it turns out that what makes tagging a bearable activity is listening to the catchy rythyms of a fame whore megalomaniac. But I will maintain that trying to listen to an iPod outside of the confines of my office still freaks me the hell out.