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Laura e. Crook

~ writer by day, batgirl wannabe by night

Laura e. Crook

Tag Archives: family

A clouded mind (and a clear voice)

07 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by Laura Crook in Blog

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

anxiety, depression, family

Sometimes I get a little overexcited. In the good way (which my coworker commented on earlier when I earnestly told another coworker that the law of diminishing comedic returns did, in my opinion, apply to the number of Bigfoot mentions per episode in The Newsroom), but also in a bad way. Sometimes I let my emotions (and my anxiety, and the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that lurk in the back of a depressive mind) run away with me until all I can think is “I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”

Let me back up.

At my internship I’m paid as an independent contractor, which means my employer doesn’t take out my taxes; I do it myself. I also pay both the employer and employee taxes (and because of this I get a deduction). Independent contractors have the choice to pay their income tax in small amounts four times a year (quarterly) or in one big amount on April 15th with everyone else.

This is a totally valid method of payment, especially for a temporary employee like an intern. Unfortunately it makes life a little complicated.

When I lived in Los Angeles I worked part-time as a personal assistant’s assistant (only in LA, let me tell you), where I was also paid as an independent contractor. This kind of bit me in the ass in the spring because I foolishly disregarded my mother’s advice to set aside a percentage of every paycheck to, you know, pay my taxes, so I owed the government a lot more than I was expecting. So this time around, I decided that I was going to be an adult and set aside the tax so I wouldn’t blow it all on books and soda or whatever I spend my money on (pretty much just those two things).

Here’s the thing about being an adult: it’s kind of stupid. And I don’t even have a house or a husband or a kid or anything, so God only knows how I’m going to survive the next 70 to 80 years of my life. My problem was that I a) didn’t really understand how the estimated taxes worked, no matter how often my dad tried to explain them to me and b) whenever I tried to figure it out it would trigger a panic attack. So there I was, trying to be all responsible and simultaneously annoying my parents (who know as much about quarterly taxes and 1099s as I do) and making myself sick while I was doing it.

But tonight was a Friday, and I had a pretty solid week, and I was excited about seeing some friends tomorrow and I had good news to tell my therapist, so I figured… why not tackle my taxes tonight? So I did.

The first thing I learned is that the next quarterly payment is due in 10 days. The next thing I learned is that even if you take the lines one at a time there will always be a section of weirdly worded legalese that will trip you up. There were a couple isolated crying moments, a lot of swearing when my (borrowed) internet crapped out, one full-fledged panic attack, a half-written stream-of-consciousness email to my dad (I wanted to call him, but it’s late in Massachusetts, so I treated a blank message in my mail client like my father to try to work through some confusion. It was… actually surprisingly helpful). Then came a moment of pure joy when I realized that my mother is in Oregon with my sister (and thus in a time zone where it’s 7:30 pm!) so I called her.

To her credit, she was a great help. Especially for someone who has never filed estimated or quarterly taxes. She listened to me sob and choke out my issues and then she calmly said, “Laura. It’s estimated.”

“I KNOW,” I wailed. “But is it what I’ve been paid so far or what I’m probably going to get paid by the end of the year?”

“Just do what you’ve been paid so far.”

“But they want to know my required annual payment based on last year’s tax and I looked it up online and it said it would give me step by step instructions but all it gave me was an example and there were so many numbers and it really confused me!”

At this point I stopped to take a (deep, shuddering) breath, trying to stave off another panic attack, and my mom’s calm (slightly frustrated voice) broke through everything.

“Laura, it doesn’t matter how much you pay them. Either you pay them too much now and they’ll give you a deduction or you’ll pay too little and you’ll owe some more in April.”

It sounded way too easy. After all there was the work sheet! And the forms! And line 10 subtracted from line 8 and multiplied by 92.35%! My mother calmly assured me that the worksheet was just a worksheet, and that the IRS had no use for it.

You guys, it was like a light went on in my mind. I could give them five bucks (I won’t) and they would just credit it to my tax account and then in April they would just send me a bill (so to speak) for 295 bucks (or whatever I owed based on my 1099).

The IRS didn’t want rocket science. They just wanted money. Like a deposit.

So the moral of the story is that sometimes you just need to take a step back (or five) and call your mom (which is the moral of every story) and that when you get down to it all the IRS wants is money–the paperwork is just a side bonus.

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A special note on Father’s Day

17 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by Laura Crook in Blog

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Tags

family, writing

In a recent episode of Modern Family, Phil Dunphy tried to “create a moment” with his teenaged daughter, Alex. He despaired not being as legendary as astronaut Eugene Cernan, who claimed that he wrote his daughter’s initials on the surface of the moon (thus becoming the dad all dads hate). This Father’s Day, I wanted to highlight a wonderful man known as Mr. Steve, who has the distinction of being my father.

My dad tapped the maple tree on our backyard and made homemade maple syrup with me and my sister.

My dad was an honorary Girl Scout and a “Camp Dawg” who accompanied me and my sister’s troops on countless camp outs and field trips.

My dad can quote every single line from The Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Every. Single. Line.

My dad volunteers as a ham radio operative for the Head of the Charles Regatta, the Walk for Hunger and the Boston Marathon. He helps people who can’t finish the races and radios response teams to pick them up when they’re too tired, hot or sick to finish.

My dad has never once felt the need to apologize for his eccentric personality, and by his example he taught me that I never need to apologize for my personality either.

My dad wore Funny Nose Glasses and Dread Pirate Roberts masks to make us laugh. He knew that even when we rolled our eyes, it was our special teenage way of saying “I love you.”

My dad took my sister and I to the Museum of Science to exercise our brains and to the Museum of Fine Arts to exercise our imaginations. He waxes poetic about both the Vermeers stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the mysteries of physics and biology.

My dad has helped rebuild slums in Brazil, Mississippi towns after Katrina, and Habitat for Humanity houses in New Jersey.

He shovels snow for our neighbors, sands the church driveway and once threatened to put ice in my friend’s baptismal water.

My dad read out loud to me and my sister and filled our minds with stories of the Big Woods, Bag End, Rivendell and Indian Territory.

 

My dad has always supported his strange daughters, even though we’d rather be writers and readers than engineers like himself.

My dad enters an annual Fantasy Iditarod League, thus outstriping every other fantasy league ever created on the scale of awesomeness.

My dad raised me on a steady diet of Pink Floyd, Godspell and Don McLean. To repay him I introduced him to Mumford and Sons, Adele and Flogging Molly.

My dad drove across the country with both of his daughters. He took one to Idaho and the other to California. We traveled down Route 66 together, eating in themed diners and absorbing the rich history middle- and south-western America had to offer us.

I hate to say it, but… sorry Eugene Cernan; you’ve got nothin’ on my dad.

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A special note on Mother’s Day

13 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Laura Crook in Blog

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Tags

family, writing

Today is Mother’s Day! Hopefully by now everyone has called/texted/hugged/sent flowers to your mothers. If you haven’t, you should probably rectify that. I’ll wait here. Ready? Okay.

Here’s the thing about my mom: she’s unbelievably amazing. I’m gonna level with you all… I can be kind of a difficult daughter. I get really excited about random things, I love to talk about these random things, and it can be kind of hard to get me to shut up. I also have a penchant for calling my mother, crying, three time zones away.

I talk a lot about the “quietly feminist” media that my mother raised my sister and I on. I remember very distinctly one evening when I was in college and I started waxing on and on about the representation of women in… something. (Like I said, it can be hard to get me to shut up). My mom turned to my best friend, Elspeth, and said “I don’t know where she gets this.” Elspeth responded, “Kathi, she gets it from you.”

You see, my mother didn’t raise me to be a feminist. She raised me to be a human being. She raised me to be a woman who deserves respect, admiration, and equality. I don’t think the word “feminist” was ever expressly uttered in my household until I was in high school, but by then the seeds had been planted. It’s not that my mother thinks of “feminism” as a “dirty word” (as in “I’m not a feminist, but I believe in gender equality!”). See, my mother didn’t need to tell my sister and I to be feminists, because she lead the way through her example.

My mother loves to tell the story of the time some family friends came over for dinner. They arrived while my mom was in the kitchen and the TV was on a Patriots game. Our friend (a man), called out “Hey, Steve, what’s the score?” My mom appeared and said “oh, Steve doesn’t watch football. That’d be me.” My mother never sat me down and said “Laura, lots of people think that football is a ‘man’s sport,’ but they’re wrong because women can enjoy football too.” She just enjoyed the crap out of football.

My mother is the woman who encouraged both her daughters to become pastors (until she realized that neither of us were remotely called to be pastors), who watched Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and Star Trek: Voyager, who lead my sister’s Girl Scout Troop for over ten years. My mother always supports my sister and I–even though we’re writers, even though I went to art school, even though I moved to Chicago when I was 18 and Los Angeles when I was 23 and changed my mind eight months later.

I know everyone thinks that their mothers are the best mothers ever… but in my case it’s totally true.

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Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop: Surprising Grandparents

18 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by Laura Crook in Blog

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Tags

family

Mama’s Losin’ It

“Tell us something you learned about a grandparent that surprised you.”

I briefly considered talking about the utterly shocking news that one of my grandmothers not only has a tattoo, but got a tattoo recently. We were discussing my own tattoos, and she just BURST out with this revelation. It was basically the best moment all weekend (which is saying something, considering it was the weekend I graduated college). Instead, I’m going to go with something a little more recent, a little less surprising and of more best-moment material.

Continue reading »

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♣ Laura’s Epic TV Watch List

I watch a ridiculous amount of TV. A full list can be found here.

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♣ People I Love

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