Underrated

I am the champion of the underrated.

Attack of the Clones. The Wallflowers. Ties and dress shirts paired with ripped jeans. Ben Affleck. The world has passed these things by, but I stand up and state the facts that no one wants to admit: Hey, these things have some life left in them! These things have some value! That they may not be seen as hip or likable as a Ryan Gosling or a Timbaland, but when you look at these things with fresh eyes, you start to really see that there's a lot of depth there you had no idea existed. And today I have a new dark horse to champion.

Ginger ale.

You might know I'm a bit of a soda junkie, but there's more to it than that. I'm a seasoned critic, a connoisseur, a man with a knowledgeable palette. I can tell you twenty different brands of root beer and rank them all according to taste, kick, sweetness, richness, and ice cream float potential. I spent a brief period of my life calibrating soda, and can tell you instantly if a soda fountain's syrup-to-carbonation is too high or too low. I know my stuff.

And I know that ginger ale is some of the good stuff - a clean, sophisticated soda, the sort of soda you can classily order in any restaurant, even a really ritzy one. Because ginger ale has that sort of clout. It feels like the drink of a man who's tried every drink known to man, but still falls back on his old workhorse. It's suitable for every occasion. It summons up images of summer evenings on the back porch, and dancing at fancy weddings, and digging in to big steak dinners, all at the same time. This is not a drink to be trifled with.

Yet ginger ale has disappeared from our lives. You can't order it in any restaurant anymore, classy or classless. Even giant soda dispensing displays at Burger King or Taco Bell don't offer it anymore, and those are machines that have been known to offer three different varieties of Mountain Dew, which isn't a drink that needs any expansion.

Even in supermarkets, ginger ale is lucky if it gets any play. Usually it's hidden between the sodas and the sparkling water, as if it was some sort of disgusting corporate invention that combined the two. The best it gets is that it's one of two dozen different varieties of generic brand soda, hidden behind Diet Cherry Vanilla Mr. Pibb, or that one that announces "Taste just like an Ice Cream Float!" Why yes, thank you, I've always wanted to.*

I bought a 12-pack of ginger ale the other day and cracked open a can on the couch as the day wound down. I savored that slightly bitter yet somehow sweet golden elixer - it's not a chugger, it's something you hang on to - and let the worries of my day slide away, enjoying the moment, and trying to figure out just what that beverage reminded me of. And then I remembered. I tell you the truth, it tasted like freedom.

* Personal note: do not ever try this soda. Even if you're incredibly curious. Even if you have in fact always wanted to taste like an ice cream float. Even if you lost a bet and will lose a testicle if you don't drink the soda. It's not worth it.

I once bought a case on a dare, and brought it back to the apartment. I opened one, tried to drink it and utterly failed in that spewing-soda-everywhere-trying-to-wash-out-the-taste-
by-sticking-one's-head-under-the-kitchen-sink-even-though-the-sink's-full-of-dishes sort of way. We passed the can around for everyone to try, and two of my apartment mates ended up puking in the bathroom an hour later after just a few sips. And it wasn't just that we got a bad can. It's just really that bad a soda.

We tried for weeks to get people to try a can when they came over to visit, but there isn't a person on this earth who sees a can that says "Taste just like an Ice Cream Float!" and says "yeah, I think I'll try that." Or at least, nobody who sees our expressions after they pick up a can.

I don't like this sort of thing. I never will.

I wandered in to the apartment post office today to discover that my mailbox had been broken into and all my mail was gone. The door still hung open with a broken lock. Now, normally I'd be inclined to say "well, have fun sorting out my junk mail and returning the three or four credit card offers sent to Soha Abdulbaki or Fekrat Alkateb, the previous owners of my apartment," but I'd sent all my DVDs back to Netflix en masse, and today was the day I was getting a whole stack of them. Which means I'll have to contact Netflix about them, and they'll charge me replacement fees on all of them. Another hundred bucks down the drain.

When I wandered in to the apartment complex to ask if the could fix my mailbox, the lady pointed out that she had no real jurisdiction with my mailbox since it's government property and under federal control (who knew my mailbox was U.S. government property? What if they decide to take my mailbox back and use it for nuclear testing? Will I still get my mail?). She then launched into an explanation of why I couldn't hold her personally responsible for the loss of my mail, which was fine because until then, I'd assumed that it probably wasn't her who'd forced entry into my mailbox - though after she led up front with a forceful denial, I decided to add her to the list. I arched my eyebrow and prepared to launch into an inquisition, but she cut me off. I'll go word for word from here on out:

"You really should take better care of your things," she admonished me. "Why didn't you fill out a maintenance request form before this?"

"Well, I did. A couple times. But the lock was only partially broken before, I could still use it. But now the lock's been snapped off."

"Hey, are you sure that it's broken into? Maybe you just left it open last time. I bet that's it." She turns and starts typing on her computer.

"No. It's really broken. The lock is completely gone. And my mail's gone, too."

"Well, I'll try to get the guys to see if they can swing by later today and take a look and see if it's broken or not," she says, working on a spreadsheet. "What's your apartment?"

"It's nine-zero-four."

She makes no move to write this down. In fact, she's already dialing her phone. "Well, if I see the guys I'll tell them about it. Bye."

I hang around for a second to see if maybe the person she's calling turns out to be the maintenance crew to update them on my situation. She's not. I check my mailbox a couple hours later. I'll give you zero guesses on its status.

Moral of the story: don't send me any mail for a week or two.

It turns out Italy kept all my money this year.

"The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward." - John Maynard Keynes

Today, this quote means a lot to me.

I went to H&R Block to do my tax return yesterday. It took almost three hours of non-stop work by my representative, and sometimes multiple representatives, who had never seen a tax return quite like mine. Let's review:

• In the 2006, I lived in New Hampshire, Kentucky, Texas, Italy, and briefly, Ohio. Of those, I held jobs in NH, KY, TX, and IT. Yes, IT stands for Italy, which inconveniently for me is not in the United States, and is not recognized as a country by some members of the United States Government. We'll get to that later.
  
• I paid a state income tax in KY and TX but not NH.
• I paid a national income tax in all four places.
• I received over $1,000 from Asbury in January as the back-end payout of a grant to do mission work in Romania. Thoughtfully, they listed this money as self-employment wages so that I'd have to fill out an extra form, and pay extra taxes on it.
• I graduated from college in May. It's this fact that ended up saving me.

By the time we finished all the paperwork, we'd crashed the computer twice, converted money using an online money converter we found via Google search, translated a tax form using the Google Language Tool (!) and reworked everything several dozen times. The bill ended up being $450, in order to get a refund of $500. H&R Block has to take an additional chunk of that so that they'll take the bill out of the refund, since I couldn't afford to pay $450 in person, so it went down to about $20. Yaay.

So we reworked everything again. We realized I was paying $67 to send a form so that Kentucky would send me a $4 check. We ditched that form. We realized that I was under-utilizing using my college tax credit, which would more than compensate for me not filing for foreign tax credit, so we ditched that form, too. In the end, my refund ended up being a little north of $100, which is less than thrilling, but at least I don't owe money.

But did you hear me back there? "Filing for Foreign Tax Credit?" "Under-utilizing my College Tax Credit?" I learned a lot about taxes yesterday, didn't I? I've never filled out my own tax forms, so it was all pretty new to me. All this fun new knowledge aside, though, I also learned something that was much less exciting:

I applied last January to for a form from the U.S. Government stating that I am, in fact, a U.S. citizen who pays taxes in the United States, and therefore am not liable to be taxed anywhere else - certainly not in Italy, while working at that haven of international unity, the Olympics. You'd think they'd jump all over this to make sure that the money I earned ended up where it belonged, in the hands of the U.S. Government. But they did not. They sat on the form for two and half months, then returned it with a note saying essentially - and I'm not making this up - "we don't really understand what you mean when you say 'Italy.' What country, exactly, are you going to? Please be more specific this time." So I send the form in again, once again writing "Italy" in the destination blank

By this time, I'd received my payment from the Olympic Committee, minus the $1100 they removed for taxes - over a third of what I'd made. They promised to wire me the rest just as soon as I turned in that letter from the government stating I'm a tax-paying citizen of the United States, but if I can't get that in by the deadline, I'll lose all the money.

A couple of weeks later, I call in to check on the form - I'm getting frustrated again, just thinking about it - and they pass me around for a bit before assuring me that my form will be sent out in a couple of weeks. I call a couple of weeks later, and they said I never sent in any form, and they have no record of anyone with my particular SSN ever calling them. So I send in another form. And then another. Nothing happens.

By the end of May, I'm desperate - the deadline for the form is the end of June and I still don't have this most basic of letters (apparently it's a pretty common letter and should only take a few weeks to receive). I call several times and sometimes I am assured that the form will be there in a week or so, and sometimes I'm told that I've never applied for such a form and they have no record of me. And so I hope that at least some of the time they're telling the truth, and wait for the form. But it never comes.

June passes and the form deadline slips past. Then, a week or so later, the letter comes. I hurriedly rush the form to Italy, e-mailing ahead to let them know it's coming. But it's too late. The money is gone.

A few days later, I get another letter. Not a copy of the original letter, but a response to one of the other applications I sent in. The next week, I get yet another letter. The IRS may not have been swift, but they were thorough - they returned letters for three out of the four applications I sent in within 7 days of each other.

I was pissed, but I got over it. But yesterday, I discovered while filling out my tax return that as a result of my being a poor student, I would've gotten to keep every cent of that money. I could've been $1100 richer last summer - I could've bought a car that actually worked, or bought a bunch of cool t-shirts, or put $1100 of food into my stomach and be $1100 fatter. That money was all mine to keep, but instead it's funding industrial expansion in Milan. Yesterday just made me mad all over again, only I also had to pay H&R Block $400, so I was doubly pissed.

I hate this time of year.

Good Friday Service

Around here, Maundy Thursday is the serious service - rather than focusing on the Last Supper or the washing of feet, it jumps straight to the crucifixion. Why the jump? Isn't there a big Good Friday service? Well, of course there is, but we wouldn't want to waste our time on the crucifixion. Not when we can have a rock concert! Woo!

In all seriousness, it's a pretty good deal. There's a cross-raising ceremony on Friday, and the bands we have play are by-and-large worship bands. And right before the big act plays, someone gets up and speaks for about a half an hour and lays out the whole Christ-died-for-your-sins-story, which I don't know why, but somehow it seems a whole lot fresher when you hear it outside from a stage than behind a podium in a sanctuary. It always has to me, at any rate.

I shot a whole lot of video at the concert, probably none of which I'll be able to use, but I thought I'd take some screenshots of some of the better shots that I got and make them into pictures. Here's a couple of the better ones from a band called the 71's, which is composed almost entirely of people I work with. I only put up six photos so you'd be more likely to click on all of them.

SNL Clips

NBC has finally caved and put a whole pack of old SNL clips up on NBC.com for free, dating all the way back to 1976. There's a whole lot of bugs that they haven't worked out yet - a lot of the clips are buggy and they end halfway through the clip, but it's a joy to see old forgotten Bill Murray and Chevy Chase sketches available again.

One of my favorites from this season - "The Blizzard Man" - is available here.