should five percent appear too small

Every dude I know, plus about 80% of the women I know, and nearly every Guju I know would be utterly horrified by me today. Here is where I chronicle yet another one of my frighteningly awful qualities. If some people use blogs to attract people, I think I am doing a good job with mine of scaring any and everyone away.

I know how to make money. I know how to save money. My rent gets paid every month. The electricity has never been turned off. If I lost my job tomorrow, I would not immediately freak out about how I was going to survive. But thinking about money beyond these terms immediately causes me to develop a headache, and makes me inexplicably drowsy. I should care more. Money does, after all, get you a lot of the things you need in life, and can certainly give you the freedom to do quite a lot. But honestly, I am getting bored just writing this paragraph.

Of course, all of this is on my mind because I just did my taxes, and realized that I just got hosed. I did not get hosed because taxes are so exorbitantly steep in my bracket; I got hosed because I do not have any financial sense about properly investing and allocating savings and... sorry, I dozed off again. Even though I took a sucker punch to the gut, I am still not sufficiently moved to actually learn a lesson from all of this.

Except this. If things ever calm down around this joint, I am posting a personal ad for someone with the following qualities: housekeeper and financial advisor/tax accountant wrapped up into one. I think this is a perfect example of what a stingy Guju I can be at times- if I wasn't such a cheap bastard, I would not be looking to date someone with these skills. I would simply hire them. Then again, why pay for the cow when you can get the milk for free? Somehow that phrase seems wildly inappropriate in this context, but f*ck it. It is also inappropriate for a person my age to be so stupid about managing their finances, but here I stand, head in hand, turn my face to the wall. Somehow, I suspect this tax business is one of those things I am conveniently going to neglect to tell any of my male friends about. When they get into lecture mode, they are worse than a pack of aunties.