How to make more money? Everybody has thought this at one time or another: Beethoven thought about it when he defrauded his publishers; Napoleon thought about it when he had to raise cash for his wars of conquest; and finally, academics think about it all the time when they are paid starvation wages.
I remember my first job out of college, as a lab technician at The Ohio State University. I lived in a squat, lice-ridden pesthouse on Highland Avenue, right next to a field hockey rink with the field lights blazing directly into my window. The building’s owner, a genial slumlord named Cathy, could only be reached by phone - I never saw her face. As a young and stupid tenant, it never occurred to me that she was responsible for taking care of basic things, such as fixing the pipes or making sure that the heat was on during the winter. When that happened, one shrugged his shoulders, put on his coat and socks, and went to bed early.
This is not to complain. Far from it! I look back on those years with a certain fondness, for I now realize that they built character. What is character? Character is realizing that if you don’t want to live in a one-bedroom, zero-bathroom shithole in Crack City, USA, you need to make lots of money. It is only by making lots of cash that you can move out of the dumps and into a hotel suite in Trump Tower, doing coke and having orgies with celebrities. This is the highest aspiration of a society in which the worst sin is not treason, but bankruptcy.
How to do it? For the past ten years I have tried to make more money through whatever means available, including moonlighting as a programmer, consultant, and piano accompanist. I am now at a stage where my needs are met, and on the whole I never want for anything. But still the demon of avarice goads me on; and of all the vices, Greed is the most insidious, the surest way to rot your judgment and despoil your soul. For although one may indulge in women and drink, there will come a time when even if one doesn’t want to leave his vices, he finds his vices leaving him; the only exception is Greed, which becomes more powerful and all-consuming as one ages. We see the spectacle of politicians, mob bosses, and business tycoons at the height of their power with more money than they can spend, but who are so old and decayed that they hardly have any idea what to spend it on. An alcoholic indulges and immediately regrets it; an addict overdoses and dies. But Greed is the only poison known to man that inflames the user the more he tastes it, without end.
And so now I find myself thinking about what to do next, to satisfy my cravings and feed my fisc; if there is a way to help my neuroimaging community and also line my pockets, to serve both God and Mammon. And so as darkness falls earlier and all hell rages outside, here are a few thoughts, the fruit of many hours of meditation:
Sexy carwash fundraiser;
Andy’s Brain Book Merchandise, including coffee mugs and work-from-home apparel (e.g., comfortable but cheaply-made sweatpants to absorb your coffee spills and drips of Nutella falling off your Graham crackers);
Telephone hotline to give the caller words of encouragement about how competent they are and how interesting their research is, or to berate them about their shortcomings and how much of a failure they are, depending on what they’re into;
Andy’s Brain Show, a web series variety show about graduate school - think of it as a cross between PhD Comics and Goodfellas. The show has the following recurring sketches:
I <3 Lab Meetings! Follow wacky Professor Chang and his misfit lab as they try to get through today’s lab meeting! Will this crazy mix of post-docs, graduate students, and RAs ever learn to get along? Viewer warning: Excessive profanity, verbal abuse, some violence
QRPs: Reality TV show following real-life Questionable Research Practice (QRP) investigators Jerome and Ashley, busting high-level PIs and low-level RAs for data peeking, p-hacking, and other abominable practices. They earn the begrudging respect of their supervisor, Sergeant Hardman, for their willingness to bend the rules to bring perps to justice.
Tremendous Energy & Enthusiasm: Set in the spring of 2017, closeted Trump supporter Billy Mills tries to keep his political orientation secret from his girlfriend and his ultra-liberal peers.
Use Correction: Each episode begins with a couple of drunk graduate students thinking it’s OK to do some stats without correction. When they wake up the next day, nobody can remember who’s responsible for the result; they take their case to a tabloid talk show, which is adjudicated by a smarmy host who goads them into fighting each other.
The Talk: Short skit that begins with the protagonist finishing a presentation and starting to take questions. As the questions drone on and on, the presenter’s mind begins to wander and expresses itself in a voiceover, thinking about things such as song lyrics that are stuck in his head, and what the hell the audience member is talking about.
Upgrade: A dating service called “Upgrade” hires out professional men (“Upgraders”) to seduce clingy girlfriends who just can’t accept that the relationship is over. The Upgraders are in a relationship with their new girlfriends for a year to ease the transition, taking the burden of breaking up away from the original boyfriend. This has nothing to do with academia, it’s just a fantasy some people have. Not me, but some people.
Creating a web series would mean hiring actors, not graduate students, since most graduate students couldn’t act their way out of giving a boring research presentation (rimshot). And by actors, I mean undergraduate and graduate students of acting here at the University of Michigan, or even post-doc acting students, if such a thing exists. They would be paid twenty dollars per hour for their time and be given free pizza, or whatever other kinds of food that actors eat, such as pears.
This would have the double benefit of 1) providing entertainment to graduate students and professors who would see themselves in these satires of toxic relationships; and 2) being effective propaganda for academia and convincing prospective students that it’s a quirky, fun, fulfilling place, filled with drunken statistical saturnalias and narrow escapes from learning. Since the life of an academic is constant low-level stress, punctuated by brief periods of ecstasy or despair when reviews of papers and grants are returned - similar to the gambler’s queasy feeling right before the turn of a card - temporary relief in the form of a web series would be a blessing.
As it stands now, our academic instead finds most of his release through the compulsion of checking social media, a diabolical invention which encourages his neuroticism, making him even more anxious, depressed, ill-at-ease, suspicious; he continually goes to the well and comes up dry. My goal is to provide him with another, less pernicious addiction to get him through the day - by taking comfort in knowing that the situations he sees on the screen and those he experiences in the lab are indeed real; to both reassure and disquiet him that the same scenarios will happen again and again; that they have always been there, and always will be. Which is the definition of both comedy and tragedy, after all.