nitpicking.
and the influencer economy.
I’ll try not to mortify my children by sharing specific details here, but I have spent more of my wild and precious life than I would have wished removing nits and lice from my offsprings’ tender heads. Lice removal is not for the faint of heart. It requires patience and care and listening to children’s accusatory protestations, as if standing over the bathroom sink holding a stainless steel comb up to the light to check for pearly, nearly microscopic, eggs is something a person would do for kicks.
This week, lice hasn’t only been on the brain due to the hour I spent peering into my children’s scalps, but also because of the viral New York Magazine story featuring the anonymous self-reporting of salaries by 60 New Yorkers. The salaries reported in the piece, What Do You Do and What Do You Make, ranged from low to shockingly high and, as always, it was both humbling and infuriating to witness people on the internet wonder aloud how folks manage to live in New York on modest salaries. (Housing precarity, food insecurity, and very little savings, you dweebs!)
Among the listed professions was one for Lice Lady ($75,000) and one for Fashion Substacker ($275,300). (I take issue with both of these titles and can only hope that they were at least self-described, but that’s a rant for another time). Both of these entries stood out to me because 1) I’m a regular unpaid nit-picker in my home and 2) I’m a person with a newsletter who, like the person interviewed, has at various times in their career earned income from paid partnerships and 3) perhaps not coincidentally, just five days before the article came out, I received an inquiry from a popular New York City lice removal company, asking if I would consider doing a sponsored post with them.
I demurred without asking for details of payment or timing. (Sometimes, I’d rather not know how much money I’m walking away from.) This partnership is not a strong fit for me, I told them, which was really to say, I don’t feel comfortable earning money by making anyone else feel like this service is a thing that they need. A few days later, the NY Mag article came out and now I’ve found myself thinking about lice and paid partnerships for the better part of the week. Why else have a newsletter but to inflict my thoughts about parasites on anyone willing to read them?