Monday, April 18, 2005
Hacks and Tax
This city is seriously growing on me. Not only am I starting to get something resembling a life (with these funny people I know called ‘friends’), but the Hamilton Spectator liked my stuff!!!!! So now I’m officially a freelance journalist, and my first article will be on the experience of South Asian immigrants to Hamilton. And the best part? I’m getting paid!!!!!!!!!! My first paid article! I’m so excited!!!!!!
I found out last Friday, and that evening we went to see ‘Saint Ralph’, a movie set in Hamilton. I was so proud to see my city up on the big screen, and practically stood up and cheered when the lead character appeared in the paper, which was of course the Hamilton Spectator! The paper I write for – in a movie!!! How cool is that????
Anyway, the subject of the film is a teenage boy who thinks he can bring his mother out of a coma by running the Boston Marathon. Canadians have a thing about long-distance runners. They haven’t had much luck with the sprinters (remember Ben Johnson?), but they’re great at dogged determination. This month marks 25 years since Terry Fox, a 21-year-old who’d lost a leg to bone cancer, ran halfway across Canada to raise money for cancer research (http://www.terryfoxrun.org/). He’s the archetypal Canadian hero. The really sad bit is the fact that he couldn’t run the whole way because the cancer returned, this time to his lungs. He died aged 22. Call me over-sentimental, but I love hero stories and I always cry at cancer stories. Seems Canadians are the same – Terry Fox joins the Queen on their two-dollar coin this year.
Sigh…I’m getting sad now. I’ll talk about my new friends, that’ll cheer us all up. They’re mostly from home group, our church’s weekly Bible study that we have at someone’s house. Last Wednesday was the first time we really stuck around and talked to people afterwards. I met a really cool artist, an animator, someone who’s going on a mission trip to San Francisco, and an IT guy and his wife (can’t remember what she does, but she makes excellent chocolate peanut butter goo – I think they were supposed to be balls but the weather’s getting pretty warm now). Canadians are great – they’re so direct, no pussyfooting around, which is handy when it comes to making friends. The artist woman just came up to me and said “I’d like to get to know you and your husband better.” Yay – life’s too short (see above) to faff around with meaningless pleasantries.
The only problem I have with the home group is the actual Bible study part. The group is dominated by students who appear to have been raised by surfers. It’s like the Bible according to Bill and Ted. At one point, we were talking about who we thought Jesus was:
“He’s a dude,” someone piped up (I think he was joking. Please say he was).
“He’s, like, totally awesome?” said another (who definitely wasn’t joking. He also spoke like he was constantly asking a question, the way a lot of Canadians do). “I think the sermon on Sunday was, like, totally right on. It just totally shows that, like, Jesus is who he said he was?”
And so on, with me trying to strain a meaningful sentence from the mass of filler words: “like”, “y’know”, “totally”, “just”, “really” – and let’s not forget “awesome” (pronounced “awesiiim”). Honestly, if it wasn’t for the location I would have said they were high.
Oh well – like I said earlier Canada is a totally excellent place (great, now they’ve got me started) and Hamilton is feeling more and more like home. It just has one or two down sides. Tax, for example. Okay, so this is a down side to everywhere – but in England, if you work for someone, you don’t have to think twice about taxes except the massive chunk they take out of your payslip. Here you have to do an annual tax return whoever you are!! Can’t wait till next April. I’ll probably do a Homer Simpson and desperately fill the form out at the last minute:
Homer: “Okay, if anyone asks, Maggie is a nun, Lisa needs 24-hour care and Bart is a Vietnam war veteran.”
Bart: “Cool!”
But it doesn’t stop there. Joe is officially considered self-employed, and because I do his accounts I also have to think about the unnecessarily numerous and ludicrously complicated levels of taxes: GST, PST, QST, HST, to name a few. Can’t we all just sacrifice our first born sons and have done with it?
If I was truly Canadian I’d go thrash out my frustrations with a good game of ice hockey right now. But as I’ve yet to get round to joining a team (it’s on my ‘to do’ list) I’ve leave you on an upbeat note with another of my published articles:
http://thegrimsbylincolnnews.com/april13_05/aaaGLN_April%2013_pp5-8.pdf
Let me know what you think!
I found out last Friday, and that evening we went to see ‘Saint Ralph’, a movie set in Hamilton. I was so proud to see my city up on the big screen, and practically stood up and cheered when the lead character appeared in the paper, which was of course the Hamilton Spectator! The paper I write for – in a movie!!! How cool is that????
Anyway, the subject of the film is a teenage boy who thinks he can bring his mother out of a coma by running the Boston Marathon. Canadians have a thing about long-distance runners. They haven’t had much luck with the sprinters (remember Ben Johnson?), but they’re great at dogged determination. This month marks 25 years since Terry Fox, a 21-year-old who’d lost a leg to bone cancer, ran halfway across Canada to raise money for cancer research (http://www.terryfoxrun.org/). He’s the archetypal Canadian hero. The really sad bit is the fact that he couldn’t run the whole way because the cancer returned, this time to his lungs. He died aged 22. Call me over-sentimental, but I love hero stories and I always cry at cancer stories. Seems Canadians are the same – Terry Fox joins the Queen on their two-dollar coin this year.
Sigh…I’m getting sad now. I’ll talk about my new friends, that’ll cheer us all up. They’re mostly from home group, our church’s weekly Bible study that we have at someone’s house. Last Wednesday was the first time we really stuck around and talked to people afterwards. I met a really cool artist, an animator, someone who’s going on a mission trip to San Francisco, and an IT guy and his wife (can’t remember what she does, but she makes excellent chocolate peanut butter goo – I think they were supposed to be balls but the weather’s getting pretty warm now). Canadians are great – they’re so direct, no pussyfooting around, which is handy when it comes to making friends. The artist woman just came up to me and said “I’d like to get to know you and your husband better.” Yay – life’s too short (see above) to faff around with meaningless pleasantries.
The only problem I have with the home group is the actual Bible study part. The group is dominated by students who appear to have been raised by surfers. It’s like the Bible according to Bill and Ted. At one point, we were talking about who we thought Jesus was:
“He’s a dude,” someone piped up (I think he was joking. Please say he was).
“He’s, like, totally awesome?” said another (who definitely wasn’t joking. He also spoke like he was constantly asking a question, the way a lot of Canadians do). “I think the sermon on Sunday was, like, totally right on. It just totally shows that, like, Jesus is who he said he was?”
And so on, with me trying to strain a meaningful sentence from the mass of filler words: “like”, “y’know”, “totally”, “just”, “really” – and let’s not forget “awesome” (pronounced “awesiiim”). Honestly, if it wasn’t for the location I would have said they were high.
Oh well – like I said earlier Canada is a totally excellent place (great, now they’ve got me started) and Hamilton is feeling more and more like home. It just has one or two down sides. Tax, for example. Okay, so this is a down side to everywhere – but in England, if you work for someone, you don’t have to think twice about taxes except the massive chunk they take out of your payslip. Here you have to do an annual tax return whoever you are!! Can’t wait till next April. I’ll probably do a Homer Simpson and desperately fill the form out at the last minute:
Homer: “Okay, if anyone asks, Maggie is a nun, Lisa needs 24-hour care and Bart is a Vietnam war veteran.”
Bart: “Cool!”
But it doesn’t stop there. Joe is officially considered self-employed, and because I do his accounts I also have to think about the unnecessarily numerous and ludicrously complicated levels of taxes: GST, PST, QST, HST, to name a few. Can’t we all just sacrifice our first born sons and have done with it?
If I was truly Canadian I’d go thrash out my frustrations with a good game of ice hockey right now. But as I’ve yet to get round to joining a team (it’s on my ‘to do’ list) I’ve leave you on an upbeat note with another of my published articles:
http://thegrimsbylincolnnews.com/april13_05/aaaGLN_April%2013_pp5-8.pdf
Let me know what you think!
