No-Kill Finance

I’m the sort of guy who likes to have a road map.  I’ve never really thought of myself as such, but it’s true.  Hell, I’m the kind of guy who likes to memorize a road map…before I take on a task, I like to know exactly what to expect and exactly how to cope with anything that might go wrong.  I like to feel like an expert before I even get my feet wet.  I find, though, that people with the exact opposite tendency seem to have a lot more expertise in whatever subject I’m approaching.

Take Katie the Girlfriend, for example.  Where I’ve read several cookbooks in their entirety just to learn the theory behind cooking, she’s been known to roll her eyes at my technical approach and just cook, since she learned how to do so by actually, you know, doing so.  She doesn’t wait for a precisely preheated oven, she doesn’t use exact cooking times…she doesn’t even use exact measurements of ingredients.

Another example:  at the end of the winter (still arguably in progress given last night’s weather), I commenced in reading two gardening books.  While I was busy highlighting passages, taking notes, and sharing my newfound wisdom aloud, she was busy planting seeds, caring for seedlings, and transplanting plants outdoors.  Every time I would point out an error in her ways (“Um, the book says we shouldn’t move them outside for another few weeks”) she simply responds, “Oh well.  This is what I did last year and it worked fine.  We’ll start over if we need to.”  And I don’t know why this logic doesn’t sit better with me.  Clearly she’s more experienced than I am.  I, after all, am not the expert that wrote the book I’m reading.  Actually, I’m pretty dumb in comparison.

Enter tax season.  I don’t know a single thing about taxes.  I (I’m ashamed to admit) have never even prepared my own taxes before.  My dad has always taken care of them for me, and due to the fact that I’ve always been 600 miles away from my parents’ filing cabinet during tax season since before graduating high school, he’s never gotten around to teaching me how.

Now, since I’ve started finally growing up and putting effort into taking care of myself (a change that came far too late in my life), I simply won’t sit around and let other people do my taxes for me.  But, for some reason, I didn’t follow my usual routine and read 600 websites that instructed me on how to file…I just went in blind.

Why, with something so frivolous as grilling a pork chop, am I willing to read a 300-page cookbook, when I’m unwilling to read even a summary webpage in order to learn, for instance, what a 1040 form is?  I perplex myself sometimes…