The Taxman Cometh

Well, some of you may recall my boasting smugly about having finished our taxes way back in January. I guess that irritating smugness may have deterred people from reminding me that I now have a teenage son who managed to be gainfully employed last year and who just might need to file some taxes also. Luckily, I remembered at the last minute; so Theo received a crash course yesterday on W-2's, FICA ("You mean, I don't get that back?"), and why it's best not to guess when typing in your SSN on IRS forms.

To tell you the truth, I just don't remember being that young.

I visited a local mega-church today. A friend of mine invited me to drop in on some talk she was giving, and I jumped at the chance to see one of these places. (All right, the words "free child care" did have some influence on my decision to attend, also.) Being the type of person fascinated by the logistics of efficiency and scale (in other words, being the mother of a somewhat large family), I was awestruck by the organizational skills that are evidently required to run a place like that. And, as a person who attends Catholic Mass with her husband and children, I was also shocked by how modern it all was. I mean, the average Catholic parish simply does not have 2 huge video screens projecting the words of the hymns (complete with slideshow), accompanied by piped-in professional worship music.

So, at dinner tonight, when Rachel was commencing on her 5th glass of whiiine, I had a sudden vision of how to implement mega-church tactics in my very own house. Picture, if you will a large video screen mounted up in a corner of the kitchen, with the words "Shut up and eat!" scrolling continuously over a slide show of pictures of starving 3rd-world children gratefully shoveling spoonfuls of rice and beans into their hungry mouths....I mean, talk about getting our message across to the kids in a multimedia, 21st-century sort of way. I'm still trying to decide on the soundtrack. Suggestions?

Oh, also at dinner - I boasted to Larry about how I didn't even have to pay any back fines at the library today in order to be able to borrow some books, and he said, "Oh, really? Have they started automatically charging our credit card instead?"

Now, was that nice? You'd think he could give me the benefit of the doubt, for once.