I finally got my W2s, and decided to take them and my 2006 1040EZ to the coffee shop to do my taxes. I'd like to say it was a daunting affair, a huge headache, and that finally I had to just throw up my hands and go on and have my administrative assistant call my personal accountant and have him file it for me, but the truth is it took me all of ten minutes, I did the math on a napkin, and I made two-hundred seventy-five bucks. When's the last time I made that for ten minutes' work? (Usually that's what I charge for half an hour, but I don't consider it work, really.)

Thank God for the EITC, is all I can say (and if you have to ask what EITC stands for, you don't need to know).

But even if doing my taxes is EZ, so to speak, tax time is still a time for reflection—on income past and future. Personally, I am always amazed, and more and more amazed every year, at how little I can live on, and live fairly well on, if I do say so myself.

There are trade-offs in life, of course. Vast wealth may be nice, but it doesn't suit everybody. Having friends with money works just as well for some people. But then you have to put out.

But the thing about "poverty" that nobody tells you is, it doesn't have to be abject. The abjection comes in when you don't have any dignity in addition to not having any money. We often conflate these two, but there are plenty of people with money who don't have any dignity—how do you think they got all that money in the first place?—and plenty of people with dignity who don't have any money—why do you think they're so poor? You can have too much money—Paris Hilton, anyone?—but you can also have too much dignity. You have to start somewhere, and the bottom is as good a place as any.

There are varieties of poverty, of course, as there are varieties of wealth—some noble, some not.

I realized a while ago that I did not have any particular aptitude for money-making. Whenever I came up with some money-making scheme, it ended in humiliation. This is not all that unusual, of course. It's why the so-called Nigerian Scheme—an obvious utter scam—is still raking in billions. I never fell for it (it's an "advance-fee" scam, and I never have any money to advance) but a lot of folks who should just embrace their fiscal ineptitude have.

I have always consoled myself with the knowledge that "indigent men make the best lovers." You play to your strengths. And the fact is, we can't all be rich. What happens when a society becomes rich beyond its wildest dreams? People start whining about the gap between the rich and the "super-rich."

No thanks. I'll take my $275 and blow it on some variation on the theme of wine, women and song (which is what the government wants me to do with it, anyway—you know, pump it back into the local economy), and maybe put a little aside for whatever ointment or antibiotic I'll need in the aftermath of my spending orgy.

Life is good.


I was riding home from Downtown Crossing this afternoon, when I looked up at one of those transit maps above the sliding doors of the train. Someone had been kind enough to take the time to tick off all the stops on the red line where there were "cute boyz."

"√ = cute boyz" read the legend.

But neither JFK, my old stop, nor Davis, my new one, were checked—aren't baby dykes considered "boyz" now? I have seen some smokin' hot butch babies at Davis sending out some killer baby-dyke sex-rays. I've done more than a few doubletakes since I got here.

So Davis's failure even to place was disappointing, to say the least. JFK I can kind of understand, somehow. But Kendall didn't make it (what about all those hot little geek boyz at MIT?), and neither did MGH (hunky doctor boyz, anyone?). Between JFK and Braintree, none of the stops made the cut—come on, Braintree line!  Get with the program! The Ashmont branch fared better, with all but Savine Hill and Shawmut checked off.

It's possible this was not a scientific survey of "cute boyz," of course.