#United States

Last week, just as the third wave of the pandemic was nearing a crescendo in South Africa, I boarded a United Airlines flight from Joburg to Newark, New Jersey. It wasn’t an ideal time to travel but I’d booked the flight several weeks earlier. It had been a year and a half since I visited my family and I wanted to seize the opportunity to get vaccinated in the United States.

I’ve been staring at this screen on and off for the past two days, trying to figure out how to write a blog post about U.S. taxes. I don’t know how to write it in a way that doesn’t suck, because let’s face it: Taxes suck. No one likes paying them, no one likes thinking about them, and no one likes blogging about them. I’m not even sure anyone will read past this opening paragraph. But let’s see – I’m going to try to make it entertaining for you.

Apologies for this interruption to my regular programming – I realize Americans in South Africa represent a small percentage of my readership. But I learned some important information about overseas absentee voting this week and I want to make sure everyone else knows it too.

It’s Day 66 of the South African lockdown. I don’t normally blog on weekends and today I was supposed to work on another task. But I’ve decided to do that task tomorrow and blog today, because I can’t stop thinking about racism and white supremacy.