The season of stupid people

This is the time of year when everything goes sideways. A lifetime of Septembers has left me with a vague sense of dread. What will I wear for the first day of school? Will my classmates laugh at me when they see me with my new glasses? What if I don't like my teachers? What if they find out I'm smart? So much to worry about. New year, new classmates, new teachers, new clothes, same dread.

I don't care anymore about classmates and teachers, and I really don't care what I wear, much to my sister's consternation. But the season still deflates my will to live. I think it has to do with the angle of the sun. We've had a lot of sun this summer, and it's been great. Then Labor Day, and bam, the air chilled, just for a few days, but now the air knows it can grow colder, and so it will, without regard for hothouse flowers like me, plummeting to 50°F, and if it can fall to 50°, what's to stop it from plunging to 40°, or 30°? Or even lower? Labor Day is when the bottom falls out of summer, and I can feel the dark clouds piling up just beyond the western hills, raging in from the ocean to drench us in bone-chilling rain. Any minute now. Even though today the air is warm, it's a vile deception: There is something in the air that smells like death.

When I was struggling to finish my Ph.D., whining almost continuously about my woes via this blog, I always knew there would eventually be an end to the struggle. Either I would fail, or I would quit, or I would finish. Whatever happened, I always knew that it would end someday, and that helped fuel my persistence. Finally, I phinished, as they say.

I launched my business with hope and mild excitement. Now, nine months later, I am thrashing in the messy bog of my startup debacle, and I realize, there may be an end to this suffering as well, but unlike with the doctorate, it's not as easy to see the finish line. I mean, I know the ultimate finish line could look like me admitting defeat and joining the ranks of America's jobseekers. That is not the outcome I would prefer, but as every day passes, it's looking more and more likely.

To earn money, I've been editing academic papers. It's not fun, and the pay rate is erratic: How much I earn per hour depends on how fast I can edit. Sometimes the authors are good writers—not much for me to do, a few formatting suggestions, a word change here or there. I can easily earn $40 per hour. Other times, English is not the first language, which means I'm editing what pretty much amounts to poetry, not good when the topic is land use in China. The paper I edited yesterday was some poor schmuck's literature review. “My Chair has returned this seven times! I just don't know what else to do!” Sound familiar?

By the time I had compiled an extensive list of suggestions to expand and revise his/her literature review, I calculated I was earning $17 per hour. I guess in some (third world) countries, $17 would be a princely wage. Maybe I should move there. As long as I have internet access, I can edit academic monstrosities from anywhere.

I just finished editing a journal article for someone in Texas. I calculated I earned $25 per hour on the paper, mostly cleaning up Word tables. (How the hell do people manage to butcher Word tables so thoroughly? I don't get it.) I submitted the paper and prepared to start my real work for the day: writing the workbook for my first marketing research test class. Five minutes later I got an email from the editing agency: The client has a new version of the article. Can you compare the two versions for differences?

Really? I spent a couple minutes doing a document compare between my revised version and the author's new version and realized that was a waste of time. Then I compared the author's first and second manuscripts: Word found no differences between the two files. WTF? Is someone trying to gaslight me?

What did I tell you? Everything is harder is September. This seems like proof to me. Of course, I am biased toward chronic malcontentedness.