Death and taxes....

Or in this case, just taxes.

We, like probably most other people, paid our taxes this past weekend. I don't know if it's something I did wrong, or UCSC did wrong, but my withholdings ( despite I think being correct on paper) were not withholding as much as we expected. Hellooooooo tax bill. Which combined with helloooooooo kitty surgery equals gooooooooood bye savings. I don't so much object to paying taxes as I object to how  ridiculously fucking hard it is to get the withholdings set up right. Just take out of my paycheck what I owe so I can make realistic decisions about living w/in the remaining portion of my income. This is why I'm bad at haggling - just tell me the actual price and I'll pay it, but I hate, hate negotiating - it feels like everyone's trying to rip everyone off all the time.

I thought I took my fellow-blogger Kungfuramone's advice from 2009 "SO: if you have some weird semi-job at a university like I do, consider reading your pay stubs very carefully and contact the appropriate staff members if anything looks out of whack. I'm going to go drink a very high-alcohol-percentage beer now."


But apparently I screwed that up too. I see taking the second part of his advice in the near future.


And what am I doing to make changes for next year, you ask? Well, as of now, I have no income for 2011. Hurray! Oh, wait. No, the other one. Boooo!  I should hear back on April 15 re the American Association of University Women fellowship and on May 1 re: the DeKarman. My uni also announced 2 Institute for Humanities Research Fellowships I can apply for (one is for 1 qtr of support, the second is for a full ear), and 2 University-wide diss year writing fellowships. My plan is to wait until April 15 to see if I even have to apply (fingers crossed), but assuming I do, I'll go back into full on grant mode by the end of the week.

What do I do if I don't line up anything? Cry. I mean, get really drunk. No, that's not it either... I'm not really sure. Hook up some non-acadmeic PT-work that won't interfere too much with my diss, assuming that even if I don't finishing "on time" it won't matter too much because there won't be a job waiting for me anyway? I guess I'll just have to wait and see.