The thing that no one mentions when you sign your first book contract, are jumping up and down, and shouting happy and incoherent things, is that at some point you’re going to have to deal with a hard, unpleasant fact of life: taxes.

O, for the days when I made so little money I didn’t even have to file for taxes!

O, for the days when I grumbled about having to pay taxes on scholarship money, but still earned so little in the year that I only owed the government a manageable fee!

Ok, I don’t really long for those days. I’m much happier not worrying if I can afford to buy pizza. I’m much happier having a real job (two, actually, since I teach and write). But, still, my taxes have gotten a whole lot more complicated.

I don’t object to paying them. Sure, it sucks that some of my money goes to things I think are dysfunctional, like the No Child Left Behind program (just you talk to my high school teaching sister. It’ll make you want to tear your hair out in frustration at the system). But whatever. I understand that the point of taxes is that you can’t pick and choose what you pay for. I always thought, though, that it wasn’t fair that students have to pay taxes on scholarships. Isn’t paying for/getting a secondary education difficult enough in this country? If the government really cared about making certain that young people could go to college, it would consider whether it really makes sense to give hedge funds tax breaks but make students fork over a substantial portion of their hard-earned grant money.

Anyway, I feel all right about paying taxes on my income now, but the process has become a big ol mess. Thankfully, I have a great tax attorney. I love paying someone else to do my taxes. It’s a big perk of moving slowly but surely toward middle-aged life. But also, my tax attorney loves books and the Renaissance! So when I go over to her apartment, she shows me her original Renaissance prints. And when we talk on the phone, she’ll bring up Franz Fanon, Junot Diaz, and a biography about a librarian who worked for J.P. Morgan. That makes the pain and suffering of tax-paying much more bearable.