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.
On the plus side, I think, combing through business expenses for tax deductions became more about spotting dead weight that went noticed when income was arriving on the 15th of every month.
It’s been a decade since the first years after my divorce coincided with the crash of Japan’s news paper business. Since then the monthly credit-card bill had been just an occasionally annoying figure. Now it looks like a a potential rogue wave.
There are monthly and bimonthly payments for indecipherable services, whose companies offer no obvious way to back out of my donations.
I don’t want to make it sound like the day was a complete downer. I did learn how to log into Japan’s “MyNumber Card” app, which learning how to do your taxes online requires you to do endless times.
I also got in a long workout, because, well it was a day off, so I had all the time I needed to make a public spectacle of myself doing my weight training in the park.
Before Teruyo got home, I was seriously looking for jobs by dedicating a few hours to filling out a gimcrack of an application, only to end up with the jim jams when I found the position had been filled.
I’ll be quicker tomorrow.
Jim, you sound depressed. Don’t be. You just got me, a new subscriber….that’s worth something! Want to hang out and grab a beer? Baseball is right around the corner! College baseball starts the weekend of the 14th and I have youtube tv so we can watch .