The Gabbler: So, Bermuda, where are you hiding the tax revenue? TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW!!!

Bermuda: Ummm, what are you talking about?

TG: Don’t play dumb with me! Google only paid 3.2% in overseas taxes this year after shifting 80% of their pretax profits (a cool $9.8 billion) to a shell company in, dun, dun, dun! Bermuda! So where’s the rest of the tax revenue?!

B: There is no “rest of the tax revenue.” That’s the point. They legally paid all the taxes that they owed internationally.

TG: But..3.2%? I didn’t even pay that low a percentage when I was making $7/hour working part time in retail!

B: Well, Bermuda’s tax structure is, and has been for centuries, almost completely based on consumption taxes. It’s just kind of how we do things here.

TG: That sounds awesome! No taxes! Your paycheck is your paycheck! Suck it big government! You can take your bloated defense budget and shove it where the sun don’t shine! I’m taking my non-taxed paycheck and spending it on a new bag!

B: Okay, first of all, Bermuda doesn’t have a bloated defense budget. The only defense we have is the Bermuda regiment, which is obligatory for almost all Bermudian males over the age of 18. They meet about once a month for training exercises and mostly just march around in ceremonial exercises and look handsome for the tourists, unless there’s a natural disaster, like a hurricane. So I wouldn’t exactly call that “bloated.” Secondly, you realize that if you took your non-taxed paycheck and bought a new bag, you would be paying the consumption tax and that would go right back to the government, just like an income tax.

TG: Fine, I’d buy it online and ship it in. What you gonna do now, Bermuda? I’m a regular Google! Avoiding taxes, legally.

B: Except you’d have to pay duty, which would go back to the government, just like an income tax. In fact, duty is basically what I mean by a consumption tax, since all retailers have to pay duty on the merchandise they ship in, a cost which of course is passed on to you, the consumer. And all of our merchandise is shipped in. We basically have no manufacturing sector.

TG: Honestly, Bermuda, you’re kind of surprising me here. For a sketchy tax haven who’s completely overrun with money launderers and shell companies, you seem so…legit.

B: Legit is not a word, young lady. Legitimate, however, is. And yes, we are legitimate. Our taxation structure is different, perhaps, but certainly not designed to be “sketchy” or that of a tax haven.

TG: I beg to differ, my dear island nation. According to a 1981 report by the IRS, “a country is a tax haven if it looks like one and is considered to be one by those who care.”

B: Well, well, well. What a precise and recent definition!

TG: I’m just saying. You certainly LOOK like a tax haven. All those light blue waters fading to a deep teal after the reefs? That’s like THE picture at the beginning of every story about tax havens ever. You have to admit, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, you all look a little bit the same. And you’ve all been accused of being tax havens.

B: I think you’re confusing the terms “tax haven” and “subtropical and tropical islands.”

TG: Maybe, maybe not. How about the second half, then? I consider Bermuda a tax haven and I care. I care A LOT. I mean, I may not be British, but even I can see that their people are buckling under these extreme austerity measures and meanwhile Google made $18 billion last year in Britain and paid $16 million in taxes. So, yeah, I think I care.

B: It’s not the responsibility of Bermuda to close the tax loopholes of the UK. We can’t rewrite our entire tax code to accommodate the UK or the US, it would destroy our economy. All international business would leave and we would be stuck surviving off a five month cruise ship season. And shockingly enough, an economy can’t really sustain itself off of t-shirt purchases alone.

TG: Listen here, Bermuda, you better listen to the UK and the US, because you wouldn’t be anyone without them. You’re still a colony of the UK, for goodness sake!

B: First of all, I’m an Overseas Territory, not a colony. And I have my own constitution, my own government, my own parliament, and my own premier.

TG: Okay, but you still belong to them. And the US, you owe them for almost your WHOLE economy. Your precious cruise ship season, that international business you cling so tightly to. You OWE them.

B: Seriously? Do you even know who you sound like?

TG: A supremely intelligent and attractive twentysomething with a body to rival Kate Upton’s?

B: Ummm…no. To all of that. You sound like Google. Or Amazon. Or Starbucks. Or any of the giant corporations whose basic response to issues of tax avoidance (and its morality) is: you should be grateful that we even gave your country the time of day and created all these jobs and brought in all this revenue.

TG: Well, yeah, but they still need to pay taxes!

B: I agree. Listen, I’m not opposed to taxes. I have a well-staffed government with all the necessary services of a modern-day society: police, fire fighters, public libraries, well-maintained roads, clean streets. That stuff’s not free. I just want to be able to maintain the tax structure that has funded all of those services over the years without having to answer to countries who are unwilling to close their own loopholes and instead blame offshore financial centers for all their problems.

TG: Yeah, but, but, but, Google!

B: Listen, the whole Google situation isn’t great. I never said it was. I regret if they’ve been untruthful with the British government about any of their dealings. And I honestly understand why Prime Minister David Cameron is now asking all Overseas Territories to sign a new document providing more transparency in issues of offshore company holdings.

TG: Is he?

B: Did you do any research for this interview?

TG: Eh, I figured you’d just be this rock in the middle of the ocean without much to say, so I didn’t really think it was necessary.

B: Okay, well, basically, Cameron has asked the heads of state of all the Overseas Territories to come to London this weekend, prior to next week’s G8 summit, to sign an agreement promoting greater transparency and information exchange between the territories and onshore countries. Bermuda’s premier, Craig Cannonier, has erroneously been portrayed by the British media as holding up the deal by refusing to sign. Basically, Premier Cannonier is looking for more time to carefully comb through the agreement with his Finance Minister to clear up any issues and really reflect on how it affects Bermudians.

TG: I knew you wanted to stay a tax haven! You’re not even willing to sign a paper to help out the great and mighty UK!

B: Okay, I can see this conversation is going nowhere. Please feel free to stay and enjoy my pink sand beaches and a Rum Swizzle or two. And please, please, please, don’t overstay the 90 days allowed to tourists or I’ll be forced to dump you into the Atlantic with just a lifejacket to keep you afloat.

Five years ago, when I was 20, I thought that I was going to be an archaeologist.  I was going to unlock the key to Incan laughter, uncover the sense of humor of an ancient people. Then I spent a summer at an archaeological dig in the northern Andes and I figured out pretty quickly that bones can’t exactly tell you their favorite jokes. Especially if the bones are from an animal and are probably actually just rocks covered in dirt.

Dreams of being the funny woman’s Indiana Jones were just the beginning of a long list that I’ve contemplated with various degrees of seriousness over the past five years. Grassroots organizer, project manager, technical writer, translator were all dreams I let see the light of day in real life job applications. At night, when my mind would run wild, I’d see myself as the next Jon Stewart, except not as hot (I’m alright-looking, but I’m pretty lacking in the nerdy, Jewish silver fox department, so there’s just no competition here).

My most concrete dream formed itself into a neat little five year plan: a gap year in Spain, a nice stint in the Peace Corps, a masters in applied anthropology with an emphasis in international development. I was going to change the world! And more importantly, I was going to put off applying for a real job for five more years. But in the most responsible way possible (The Peace Corps! Grad school! It was so respectable!).

I started off all right, settling into a cozy little Spanish town, Esparragosa de la Serena, working at the elementary school as an English Teaching Assistant. I spent my first night alone in the house I was renting, grinning like an idiot, singing and dancing. Hello world, I’ve arrived! I’m an adult! I support myself! Just look at this two bedroom home I’m renting for only 100 euros/month!

Unfortunately, though, my brain had other plans for my life. My neurons love to do this nifty little thing when I’m hungover and fire uncontrollably. Otherwise known as a seizure. After the sixth time I found my eyes blinking open from the floor, sore and confused, I figured it was time to give the Peace Corps a call and ‘fess up about my medical condition. Declared medically unfit to serve, I watched my carefully concocted five year plan disintegrate.

It was time to do the unthinkable: apply for a real job. So I got out my handy dandy resume guide, I logged onto Idealist, I wrote some cover letters and I sent my meager qualifications and my heart out into the world. For awhile I was excited. I could be anyone I wanted to be! Maybe I hadn’t given archaeology enough of a chance. Maybe somewhere, out there in the world there were bones who could tell me their favorite knock-knock joke!

Soon, as I sent out application after application into a black void that never even bothered to answer my follow up emails, my job search parameters widened to include “any job in any industry anywhere in the world that would take me and pay me enough to survive.” Eventually, these strict standards landed me a gig nannying for my aunt and uncle in Bermuda, world renowned for its beautiful beaches and non-existent income tax. Thanks to my college degree, I was able to very quickly learn the complexities of changing diapers and sweeping floors.

Now that I had my professional life totally in order and was living out my childhood dream of domestic servitude, I decided it was time for a real, adult relationship. Romance had too long taken a backseat to my unbridled ambition, but I was settled now, with a promise of an unprecedented year and a half of employment before I had to find another job. So I found a boy and I lost my heart to his beautiful smile and his strong arms. But I hoarded my feelings like precious jewels, forcing him to pry them from my lips with excessive promises until he left me, presumably for someone with a more open and sunny disposition. Overnight he became my worst nightmare made flesh.

Luckily, getting rejected from the Peace Corps and ending up a domestic servant in Bermuda after being unable to find anyone else in the world to employ me taught me that when God slams a door in your face, practically breaking your nose in the process, he opens a ventilation shaft, forcing you to slowly crawl your way to a better tomorrow that I’m sure I’ll find eventually, one day, in my 30s. So I just picked up the pieces of my heart littering the floor and shoved them right back into my chest where they belonged and moved right along. Which brings me to today, when I once again see the shining hope for a beautiful, fabulous somewhere in the distant future, beyond the bounds of a lonely, damp, cockroach infested apartment lost somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.

These are my experiences of being a so-called “twentysomething.” This is the only voice of my generation that I really understand, vacillating between hope and desolation, between unbridled confession and sarcastic distance, between absurd comedy and total heartbreak. I don’t claim to speak for everyone, just for those wandering that grey area, that lost space, somewhere between unemployment in a childhood bedroom and a stable career, starter home, and loving spouse. The ones who, totally unfulfilled by their menial jobs and their miserable love lives, are forced to turn to cyber space and create humor blogs, just so that they can carve out a small space in the world, build something, grin and say “look, that’s mine, I made that.”

Other generations may be confused by us, by our hipsters, our love of irony and sarcasm, our wanton chasing of heartache and adventure, our inflated egos and dreams of grandeur. Some may even be slightly awed by our easy way with technology, the way we crack open a world of opportunity from our laptops, sprawled on our unmade beds. Others are more critical, citing our narcissism, the slow turning inward in the face of so much possibility, the way we give in so easily to any opportunity to share and analyze and share and analyze our feelings again and again. They ask what new we have to offer, shake their heads at the idea that such a self-involved generation is the future, demand that we contribute more, that we build a new future for generations to come.

But we’re too busy just getting by, fueled by the endless shimmer of that big, bold future in the distance to concern ourselves with creating something for some snot-nosed teenager whose life revolves around her One Direction posters. We’re too busy failing to build anything.

In my own days as a snot-nosed teen, I had a particular fascination with Aesop Rock, a rapper who declared in the song “Daylight”:

“Life’s not a bitch. Life is a beautiful woman; you only call her a bitch because she won’t let you get that pussy.”

I think, more than anything, those lines sum up my worldview as a twentysomething barely getting by. I’m just trying to get that pussy.