Taxes... 5 months late

I'm now filling out my taxes for the fiscal year 2006. I'm not actually late since I applied for an extension while I was traveling. If you've never needed an extension before, it gives you until October 15th to get your shit together.

While I was in Malaysia I met this girl who taught in Japan for three years and she told me which forms I would eventually need to file. I'm filling out a 1040 like everyone else (I have to use an arbitrary exchange rate and put all of my yen earnings into dollars), but on top of that I'm filling out a 2555 form, which allows me to exempt up to $82,400 of my earnings from taxes in the US. So, if you're thinking about working abroad, know that you won't need to pay taxes back home. I wish I could just call the IRS and tell them how much I earned, much less than $82,400, and they could just let me go. It's going to take me hours to read through the IRS website and figure this out with the ultimate result (a foregone conclusion) that I won't owe a penny. Can't we just skip everything in between guys?

By the way that girl I met in Malaysia was a total bitch. The second she told me she went to Wellesley I knew it was going to be a pissing contest. I was at an early disadvantage because I told her I taught at NOVA (JET being a much better choice), but I recovered some ground when I found out I was a few years younger than she was. She had found a better deal on her hotel room and rubbed in that it was a single. I played that off like she was being antisocial and told her making friends is the best part of traveling. I think in the end I won. After all, I'm me. There's nothing she could have said to recover from that.