Time vs money

I applied to Google to put ads on this here web site, so I could earn somewhere around a cent every time one of you clicked on the little ads, and could thus pay my $900/month rent. But they rejected me. *Sigh*. I'm some sort of money repellent. Barely anyone even buys stuff from Amazon from me (using the convenient links at left).

I mean, all I want is to do whatever projects seem interesting to me, from the comfort of my own home, in between reading web comics, and then get that writing published and widely read, and get paid for writing or publishing the stuff. I mean, is that asking so much?

Ms. MK of Washington, Columbia, points out that I need to be patient: there are endless examples of people whose writing wasn't really appreciated until after their death.

Sending book proposals was especially frustrating, since four out of five publishers I'd initially sent my proposal to lost the thing. I called them a week to a month later to follow up, and editor says, `why don't you send me another copy.' I guess it's a weed-out mechanism. Y'know, with all those crackpots out there writing books on implementing statistical methods in C, you need a way to tell the sincere ones from the crazies. It's under review right now by the editors of a series of prestigious (=expensive) monographs. If they publish it, then my little book on how to use a suite of free software tools is gonna sell for US$100.

So they'll get back to me within three weeks. The entire process is a start-and-stop affair, consisting of a day of work to write and prepare and beautify the proposal, and then weeks of waiting. Econ journals are famous for this, by the way. I sent one paper to a journal in November of 2002, and they still haven't gotten back to me. I'd checked back a few weeks ago, and they told me that one referee had sat on the paper for about nine months before deciding to decline the referee request. Why didn't he/she/it skim the six-page paper nine months earlier and come to the same conclusion? Oh, the mind boggles---vehemently.

I wonder why econ journals are so wed to the current referee system at all. The econ professors of the world spend their whole collective lives designing maximally efficient systems, and this is the best they could come up with for their own work?

Grant proposals are about the same. I'd expound, but it'll just make me (more) bitter.

So, what have I been doing about this? Well, first, growth in blog readership has reached a plateau (after only four months), so I'm posting a travelogue of my trip to Morocco. In section five, we laze about on a beach in Andalusia where some of the girls are topless, so this thing is a search-hit magnet. Then the sort of people who search the Web for things like `topless beach, Spain' will all flock to this blog, and thus be inadvertently enlightened in political theory or something.

Also, for the sake of doing something that feels productive in the immediate term, I've applied to a temp agency. I only have to wait a week before they interview me.

Do you remember that ad campaign from Fed Ex or UPS or something, `We move at the speed of business'? Why was that a good thing?

Temping is a good complement to my other work, since it's often completely useless, but pays OK (while everything else I do is somewhat useful but doesn't pay). I used to temp in Chicago. One company hired me to type up job summaries by the employees, except none of the employees really wanted to do these summaries, so I'd spend the day learning C++ and reading Somerset Maugham novels, by cutting and pasting them from here into WordPerfect. Nobody ever worked out that I had all that text on the screen and yet I hadn't typed anything all morning.

Other people hired me because the company wouldn't let them have a secretary but they really wanted one. I'd stuff envelopes for half an hour in the morning and then spend the next seven and a half being a voice mail machine.

Also, I've planted two avocado seeds. Their little roots are already a millimeter long. Unlike our book editors, these guys are always at work, constantly progressing a little bit at a time. I spend all day watching them and making sure that they're warm enough, and they make me happy, in a relative sense. A pal of mine just bought a digital camera (earning me a $21 commission from Amazon), so I'll have a photo for you guys soon. Meanwhile, I'm open to suggestions for names. Sparky? Astrud? [Yes, bonus points for bossa nova themed names.]