Today I wrote a flash of sex in my novel, just a bitty 200-word scene. Yet I am completely drained, I think I may have to step away from the book for today. I don’t know why this story–especially the sexy parts–is taking so much out of me, like my brain has to make this incandescent effort to extrude a mere paragraph and then it is done. It needs a glass of warm milk and a nap. And a hug.
The novel features a bad, bad man from Romania. Why are evil Eastern European dudes so extremely hot? I must have watched too much Cold War agitprop growing up. Or maybe it’s the accent. Nom nom nom that accent. Anyway, I can tell this guy is going to be great fun to write because I find myself wondering aaaaaah why doesn’t he exist so that I can have sex with him?! (Of course if he existed I would never have sex with him; I always wind up with soft-spoken intellectual types.)
So, like most of America I filed my taxes yesterday and I must say SELF-EMPLOYED TAXES = OW. So much for all the bullshit about how our pioneer nation favors a spirit of independent entrepreneurship. What pisses me off isn’t so much the amount, though the amount is substantial. I wouldn’t be nearly this irritated if my money didn’t go towards bank bailouts and troup surges. I wish I could earmark my tax contribution for our crumbling social safety net and educational systems. And goddamn universal health care, but what kind of crack am I smoking?
Also: if I were some trust fund baby who’d “earned” that money from interest and dividends, I would have gotten to keep a lot more of it. This gets my goat like nobody’s business: our nation likes to pretend that there’s no such thing as social class while ridiculously favoring the idle rich and blatantly screwing the working poor. Seriously, I would walk around humming L’Internationale for a few days except my fury has been soothed by the arrival of the festive purple sneakers I ordered (even though with all the money I coughed up yesterday, I could have purchased about 250 pairs of those suckers). I’m sure Marx would chide me about the weakness of my convictions, but I am no revolutionary. Merely a malcontent wearing new shoes.
Elena Mauli Shapiro 
Let me just say a work here about self-employment taxes. Your social security and medicare taxes, which double if you are self-employed because you have to pay the employer’s share as well as your own, do not pay for bank bailouts and wars. They pay for social security and medicare. And in the case of social security taxes, the more you put in the more you take out when you retire, so think of it as a savings account of sorts. You’ll get it back, assuming you live that long. A melting glacier might do you in before then.