Monday arrived like other days off, but with none of the incidental clutter that would tip you off to my being employed. 

My computer-and-bento-toting backpack no longer waits patiently in the living room for me to take it for its next walk to and from work, but sits forlornly in a dark corner. 

Do I need to thaw or cook anything for tomorrow? The artifacts of routine utility are non-sequiturs, ballast to be cast over the side.

I got more of that when I started ramping up to get my taxes done.

For years, I’d been going to the local tax office, where I input numbers into a computer at the direction of one the extraordinarily kind and helpful people that are the norm for Japan’s tax agency. Last year, I was instructed how to do it on my phone and told I could do it from home.

“Gee, that would save me the 30-minute walk,” I thought, until I started digging through the endless procedures for getting electronic links to insurance deductions and the byzantine explanation of applying for the mortgage-balance deduction, that I still don’t understand, when I’ve already got the forms written out and ready to take with me.