Faced with 500+ posts in my blog reader after a few weeks of neglect, I skimmed 200 or so before deciding to choose one blog to actually catch up on before marking the whole lot “As Read.” My choice? Okay, so I cheated and picked two: the Baby Name Wizard blog and Penelope Trunk’s blog. What does this say about me?

And you can just stop your tippy-typing fingers right there, because it emphatically does not say that I’m pregnant. Babies are for later; I just like reading about names is all. It also doesn’t say that I hate my job—I’m still unemployed, more or less—though that’s closer to the mark.

Three, actually. The Daily Puppy, duh.

Remember the Phoebe Prince case from last year? Since the story broke, Slate’s Emily Bazelon has been reporting on Phoebe’s suicide and its aftermath, including the criminal cases against the “South Hadley Six.” I heartily recommend the whole series; better for you to read it yourself than for me to summarize it, but in short, the truth is way more complicated than the pat “bullied to death” story that much of the media reported.

Bullying is trendy these days; I guess the “mean girls” narrative everyone expected to see was too engaging to pass up, even when the facts didn’t quite fit.

Today Slate posted portions of Emily’s interview with Flannery Mullins and her mother, the first public interview with any of the students charged in connection with Phoebe’s death. When I first saw the headline, I felt simultaneously fascinated and uncomfortable, as if I would be invading Flannery’s privacy somehow if I listened to it.

But that makes no sense, and curiosity got the better of me anyway. I hope Emily gets to talk to more of these kids, as much as I’m sure they’re all sick of talking about and dealing with this story by now. Here’s the interview—a podcast, really, with supplemental commentary by Emily and Jesse Baker.

Let’s go meta: Now that Emily has reported away the distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” among the students, a new “bad guy” has emerged: the district attorney who charged these kids with crimes so disproportionate to their actions. I wonder who will unravel *her* complicated story.

I’m sitting in my Tax Accounting class. The professors (there are two) explain things. Some of the students ask questions. The professors respond. They are speaking in sentences. They seem to be having a meaningful exchange of information, but I can’t follow it for the life of me.

I don’t know if it’s because they’re speaking in jargony jarglejarg, or if the underlying concepts are actually difficult. A little of both? Sometimes the “relation words” they use imply that the connections between these concepts are straightforward, but what on earth are they talking about?

I can’t visualize this stuff easily. If you tell me somebody buys a company, and the seller indemnifies the buyer, I already have to stop and draw a diagram to remember who is who. This doesn’t happen to me often, but . . . I don’t understand, and I don’t understand how other people understand. Trying to parse just one sentence the professor says would take me a minute or two—it’s not long before I’m completely lost.

I did take the basic Federal Income Tax class last semester, but I’ve never taken any kind of Accounting class. And of course I’ve never been involved in any complex financial transaction or made enough money to have an interesting tax return. Maybe that has something to do with it? But I am smart. I pick things up quickly. Not everything, I guess.

The frustrating thing is that I can’t tell if I’m anywhere close to understanding, or if I’m hopeless. I wish someone who (1) understood this stuff, (2) comprehended how dumb I am about finance, and (3) had a math brain could explain this to me.

Here, I’ll transcribe for a while, so you can get a sense of the language. If this makes perfect sense to you, then maybe you are my magic 1+2+3 explainer person.

Concurrent with the $500k that’s royalty income, you get to claim a percentage depletion, and that gives you a tax percentage rate on the tax coming in. So we need to find you a deduction on the tax you paid in the earlier year so that your give-back is exactly the same, or you’ve been over-compensated.

And so the Court looks to the policy arguments and says, “If we don’t do this, you’re going to get a double deduction.” Now the dissent makes much of the fact that 1341 was Congress’s reply to these kinds of questions, and they didn’t choose to deal with tax preference items in 1341. But the court blows through that and says that 1341 isn’t the only place we deal with transactional parity, it’s just one example. And the dissent has great fun with that, but the majority says no, we are not going to believe that Congress intended to create something that says no, you have no net benefit.

So even though this isn’t covered by 1341, we’re going to say that $500k needs to be a deduction at 72% of the $500k. Why? Because we need to grind down the percentage depletion deduction. And the policy reason for that is on p. 517, that the Court simply does not want a double deduction situation to occur.

See what I mean? If you went through and replaced all the nouns, these paragraphs would make plenty of sense. But as they are, to me, they’re gobbledygook. Comprehensibility feels so close, but so far away.

When I signed up for my first tax class, I thought it would be fun because tax is all about math and lots of fiddly rules. I like math, and I like fiddly rules: slam dunk. Not so. It’s about words, and not in the way that I like words. It feels like a bunch of English majors trying to rederive freshman physics, but without equations. And then they have to use it to build an aircraft carrier. And the damn thing floats, but fuck if I can figure out how. You know?

A chat conversation with the husband (a physicist turned seismic data analyst):

John: I’ve just been reading about pulsars.

Me: Haha, drilling for oil is way more complicated than I thought.

John: Totally. How can you possibly measure depths without an accurate stellar clock?

Me: Or forget about this dumb fossil fuel stuff, just mine hydrogen.

John: Sigh, it’s a good thing you went into law. Pulsars are neutron stars.

Me: This “Physics degree” on my resume becomes more and more of a lie every day.

All heard on a lunch panel today, from three different attorneys. All spoken with no apparent irony.

“You can totally balance your work and family life—you just have to manage your time. For example, my son plays Little League, and I really enjoy going out to his games. What I do is focus on being as productive as I can from eight to six. Then I can go to the game and pick back up with work at nine or ten.”

“I tell you, these Blackberries are the best thing ever. If you’re on a family trip to the Grand Canyon, and you’re talking on your cell phone the whole time, that kinda puts a damper on things. But with the Blackberry, I just asked my wife to drive while I sat in the back seat typing away.”

“I have a two-year-old, so what I like to do is log on and work for an hour or two after we put her to bed.”

Eff that noise.

How lucky I am that the top-tier firms these attorneys work for would never hire a middle-of-the-road student like me.

If I ran the world, I would decree that each additional year of education would qualify a person to work LESS, not more. Money is nice and all, but you can’t buy back your time.

1. Subscribing to the Daily Puppy
2. Loving the eff out of Ke$ha, Miley Cyrus, and pop-country music
3. Wearing leggings as pants (sometimes)
4. Hating the idea of having a full-time job
5. Not writing a single blog post for four months straight

I’m cutting back on my anxiety meds, from the already-low “trial dose” I’ve been on for the last year or two to half that. I’m pretty sure they don’t even make pills in the size I’m now taking. It’s weird that I need that tiny bit of medication every day to feel normal, but thems the breaks.

And I’m sticking to it this time. I’m in therapy now (the free kind the school offers, but still) and an anxiety-and-stress group (also at school). I don’t feel like I’m making much progress in either of them so far: I’m not sure my therapist understands why I’m there, and none of the people in my group are like me (i.e., physical symptoms for no apparent reason).

I’ve been keeping a chart of my moods and all that, as my therapist recommended, and that’s going okay. It’s given me an excuse to track my weight, which is something I’ve been planning to do for a year but had never gotten around to doing. The goal of the chart is to help me figure out why I get sick, so I can make it stop without meds. But because I’ve been on the meds the whole time, I haven’t been getting sick, so the chart hasn’t produced any great insights so far. The only times I’ve felt sick are in the couple of days leading up to getting on a plane, and when Sam woke me up in the middle of the night to go poop and I was all disoriented. No surprises there.

And that’s why I’m cutting my dosage, to induce the sick feeling so I can try to figure out what triggers it. The dosage changes are supposed to take a week or to to take effect, but I’ve only been cutting back for two days, and I first noticed an hour ago that I was feeling a little unsettled. Finally, some data for my chart! A change in the dependent variable!

I am also reminded that the sick feeling sucks. When I’m not sick, it’s easy to visualize myself handling it with grace. When I am, it’s a different story. Anyway, it’s manageable so far. Let’s see if I still think so in a week, when the levels of whatever-chemicals-this-regulates in my brain have dropped to their new normal.

Skip a day here, three days there . . . at this point, I’m in it for the participation ribbon. Way to make it to the starting line, champ.

What with all the wedding planning, taiko, mediating, writing a seminar paper, and getting ready for the holidays, I hardly have time to nap for three hours a day. But I MAKE time, goddammit, because I apparently have some kind of sleep disorder. It’s called “being lazy.”

The wedding planning, by the way, is getting serious. When are you supposed to send out invitations, again? Eight weeks out? Ten? Six? Because we’re coming up on nine weeks tomorrow, so I should probably look into ordering some. Same with a photographer—gotta get us one of those. We’ve tried two so far and been disappointed both times.

We have a big meeting coming up on Tuesday with our wedding coordinator (where by “our” I mean “the venue’s”) to talk about flowers, food, cake, ceremony, decorations, and twenty other things I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m excited to nail down so many big details in one fell swoop, but I also have a lot to prepare before the meeting. Most of my inspiration photos and other vague hints of ideas are in a folder in my computer. I should probably print out the good ones and put them in a binder or something.

Nine weeks!

You know what I love? Surplus baked goods from the grocery store. Today I discovered a rack hiding behind the doughnut case that was chock-full of day-old cinnamon rolls, loaves of bread, and pie halves, all deeply discounted.

I returned my full-price frosted cookie and sprung for a discount-rack black cherry pie and half-dozen cinnamon . . . somethings. Because let’s face it, grocery store baked goods aren’t the finest delicacies, so an extra day won’t hurt them much, and I’m a sucker for a discount.

I mean, I didn’t really need the five hundred calories’ worth of cherry pie I just downed, and it tasted pretty much like cold canned cherries and frozen pie crust, but it was only eighty-nine cents! How could I pass up a deal like that?

And I’ve missed three more days of posting. Not gonna lie—hanging out and drumming with taiko players from around the world was more awesome even than NaBlo, so no regrets here.

I found the experience of watching the other groups (San Fransisco Taiko Dojo, their Rising Stars, Sacramento Taiko Dan, and Osuwa Daiko) perform to be deeply inspirational. I’m proud of Kaminari for the spirit we brought to the show, and I hope we can keep our enthusiasm high and incorporate this experience into our future practices and performances. Now I sound like I’m writing a speech. Whatever, it’s all true. TAIKO 4 EVAR!!1!