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Paid my electric bill today and then had my taxes done. This was the first time I owed for federal, state, and local (Battle Creek) taxes. It totally sucked. I have enough to pay for everything, but I found out that one of the places I worked last year didn't process all of my paperwork for a higher percentage to be withheld for taxes. That put me in a bad mood. On top of paying all three, I had to pay H & R Block to complete my taxes. I usually do my own, but being a grad student (both full and part time with some confusion by Western over the source of my payments and some confusion about Ball State not charging me out-of-state tuition because of my program and scholarship), working four jobs over the course of 2005 (I am a workaholic, usually), being a teacher (with all the wonderful loopholes for taxes), and changing residences with one area collecting taxes for the time I lived and worked there (affecting two different jobs), I just decided it would be far easier to have someone else deal with the headache. The woman didn't look too pleased when I basically dumped all of this on her. She managed through it, though.
That's all I needed. Someone else to manage it.

On a different note, I have several working drafts of possible personal statements for my grad school applications. One focuses too heavily on my teaching experience, another too much on the implications of my own research into rhetoric, another that has too many ideas about literature and the impact from childhood till now (we are supposed to eliminate anything from high school and below), and the last that really doesn't say much of anything. It's mostly a general statement about finding meaning in literature and what that implies about me. I like certain aspects of all of these; however, I need to find a way to fuse the best ideas from each and create something that screams "Alicia" and shows people where I want this to go.

I cleaned out my spare room. I removed everything therein and am sorting each item. I have bins for keeping, considering discarding, and discarding. What will happen is the latter two bins will both become discard. I have too much junk in my home. Any fool-proof suggestions to help me let go of my stupid, little collection of junk?