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Snowed under

Thing number 386 that they don’t teach you in art school: how to navigate local business excise tax laws.

My wonderful and brilliant accountant takes care of the heavy lifting of my federal business taxes, but since the deadline to pay the Washington piper falls before the federal paperwork even arrives in the mail, I file my state taxes on my own. To be perfectly honest, I take a kind of perverse pleasure in bean-counting—there’s something satisfying about the annual financial housekeeping rituals of compiling and tallying. But now that I own a business in a state that relies solely on sales tax revenue, business excise taxes and weird, archaic, late 19th-century property-assessment laws that tax my homemade bookshelves and vintage filing cabinets (I kid you not), the annual tax ritual has turned into an entire weekend curled up with my calculator.

Since I’m obviously a tax-happy liberal gal who loves her some socialist blueberries (not to mention public libraries and paved roads), I’m perfectly glad to fork over the revenue—I’d just love it if they’d just levy an income tax instead, and spare me (and all those poor state employees) the paperwork nightmare!

Political grumblings aside, I’m just chalking this up to All Those Really Important Things You Have to Learn on Your Own When You Start a Business. I’ve got some fun stuff to share with you, but I’ve gotta get this stuff done first. In the meantime, playing in my head over and over again is that little diddy Bobby McFerrin sang on Square One: “Anything you wanna be, you’ve got to know math.”

So true, Bobby. So true.