Taxation, How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the ways.

Errr. Actually I can not count because I do not have to. I have zero love for you because you’re more confusing than the traffic here in Manila and the flip flopping decisions of the Supreme Court combined.

While Elizabeth Barrett Browning was full of words to express her love to her beloved, I cannot find the most positive view, outlook or even mood to find just a little hint of love for you.

I have loathed thee long before I set my  foot in law school. I have no feelings of appreciation towards you because you have taken quite a big chunk of my salary before I could even enjoy it. What’s more frustrating is the fact that employees like me pay taxes by compulsion and yet I can not see if the taxes I paid actually worked for me. It gets more depressing to hear that a friend died because she was held up on her way to work. She too was a tax payer but the taxes she paid did not do her any good. Perhaps it did pay for the casino habits of the wives and concubines of those damned conscience-less members of the congress, or their trip to Las Vegas to watch Manny Pacquiao’s fight and also to gamble or give their damned brats a really lavish life.

I cannot find the words to love you regardless of the fact if it’s the lifeblood of this damned country which what it only does is to suck every centavo earned by its people by imposing different kinds of taxes and giving them some names that normal people cannot decipher. The government perhaps has invented so many taxes to burden the people that they may have named more taxes than Adam did in naming the plants and animals in the garden of Eden.

I disdain thee!!!  especially now that you’re confusing me more just by reading the words of the law where you are inscribed in. Plus add the fact that the teacher does not really care if the student is already dying of hunger or not and still proceeds with the recitation way past everyone’s bedtime.

Oh TAXATION!!!! Please go away!!!!

Or just please be nice, okay? You’re one hell of a bar subject everyone despises.

Law-st in Translation

The words are almost impossible to read. Confusing is an understatement. The sentences are way much longer than Kim Kardashian’s married life and definitely more winding than the roads that bring one to Baguio.

The sentences are a puzzle in itself. Devoid of any necessary commas and other marks, the words that fall in front of each other are the only clues to whatever the sentences try to convey but the numerous presence of words do not make out a crystal clear thought but is rather gibberish at first site.

There is a need to read it again and again to understand what it really means. If reading it backwards would help, then so be it. The time spent in figuring out what it means is excruciating. There are so many things to do and yet time has ticked quite so many times and around the clock for many more times in trying to squeeze out the essence.

In my three years in law school, reading Philippine laws is still a painful experience. The language used is not an unfamiliar medium but how the words are used makes it feel like reading a foreign language book. I do not know if the problem is with me because perhaps I am not that fluent or conversant with English language or that the authors of these laws are trying to make the law look so impressive and yet they themselves do not understand it anymore; or that they actually do not speak good English and they are forcing their English down every law student’s throat as if they were palatable food.

It is frustrating on my part that the years I spent in school has not changed much of my situation whenever I am confronted with the language of the laws. It gets more depressing especially during recitation time that as if all of my classmates did understand it and it leaves me asking myself what is wrong with me.

While I do hope to make it on my fourth year this coming school year, it is also my continued hope that it will get better as time progress.