Unsolicited Advice

I've just frittered away several hours watching ladies on YouTube tie hijaab. I am unqualified to comment on the appropriateness of wearing headscarves to express solidarity with Muslim women. My childhood was WASPy as, aside from the fact that my parents are vehemently secular. Instead of being too lazy to go to one church on a weekly basis, we were industriously committed to not going to all of them. I used to wear a scarf wound around my head to keep the snow out of my hair in Flagstaff, and got honked at by redneck chucklefucks, but that's as far as I've ever gone. If you ever had any doubt that people everywhere are fundamentally the same, let me dispel it by pointing out that those headscarves are fashion pieces . They're no different than any of the clothes you go shopping for. "The Man" makes you wear pants when you leave the house, but you get to pick the pants, and for the most part you try to pick pants that make you look like a competent, attra...

The dance studio is closed for renovations right now. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing for my state of mind. I can't go down there and faff about in a rehearsal room if I really need to not stare at the walls in the apartment anymore, but all I ever do in the rehearsal rooms is faff about -- I stretch a lot, I do a lot of drills, and then I'm at a loss. It's choice paralysis in part; there are an infinity of things I can do, so how do I choose? But it's also a matter of cognitive dissonance. I used to dance a lot. My mother and her sisters took a lot of dance classes when they were kids, and it was one of the few after school activities whose cost she never bitched about. My sister and I had a long string of group, semi-private and private lessons while were growing up. My grandparents had framed photos of each of us in recital costumes up on their wall -- me in a star-spangled leotard with a foofy headpiece and an enormous tulle frill on my ...

Jesus Christ, I feel like I've been drowning over here. Too many smaller things to deal with can be just as catastrophic as a couple of HUGE things hitting at the same time. Trying to cover a bunch of stuff I've missed over the past couple of weeks: Tabbiewolf was good enough to whip up a sketch -- and even color it! -- after I got curious enough to ask what kind of critter she thought I'd be. (Normally people go straight for 'fox', probably because of the red hair and va-va-voom.) Tabbiewolf is a freelance artist specializing in toonified critter avatars and the like, so if happen to be looking for one, head on over and ask about projects. She drew me as a bobcat, which is one I've never gotten before. Cute, non ? I sent her to my online portfolio for reference images, and I am amused to note that I apparently really am that busty. I don't tend to think of myself as top-heavy, especially since one of my best friends has knockers literally the size of he...

The blogosphere is still not over the urge to define, out, educate about, and try to guard against creepdom. Fucking good . You have no idea how much time I spend telling people to not be idiots and if they don't want to be around someone, don't be . If you want to dig around deep inside your head and figure out why they're creepy, more power to you, but you should do it far, far away from the person who provoked that feeling. I do most of my modeling business online. This means I do a lot of vetting of photographers sight-unseen, while we're still corresponding via email. There are some things you can get from writing and some things you can't, although the list of things you can get is a lot longer than most people realize. I tend to solve ciphers and cryptograms pretty much just by looking at them, and when people boggle, I tell them I'm cheating: I know that whatever it is, it was invented by someone with a human brain, and human brains all work in some pr...

One thing a lot of people have trouble with, I find, is constructing explicit boundaries for themselves. It's not a thing you really think about, if you've spent your life in the company of reasonable people. Reasonable people have a sense of 'that would be insane, why would I do that to someone else?' that crazies and creepers lack. If you've always gotten by just fine with a Stewart-like definition of out-of-bounds behavior (" I know it when I see it "), then suddenly being confronted with someone who has no qualms about doing whatever they damn well please, crazy or not, is really baffling and dangerous. The best I can do with advice here is just tell you to sit down and think it over. If something someone else is doing or trying to get you to do is making your stomach twist, then it's probably a bad idea. If you can figure out what about the situation is giving you the willies, then you can more easily recognize it when it comes up again, and fla...

The thing that really struck me about my first modeling casting call was that it was really nothing like anyone ever says it is. The media likes to tell you that beautiful women are horrible to each other. That cheerleaders squabble and steal boys and try to rip out handfuls of their rivals' hair when it finally gets physical, that models are snooty and egotistical and pick catfights in order to sabotage each other. I've seen beautiful women being horrible to each other in everyday life -- and beautiful women being horrible to average women, and average women being horrible to beautiful women, and average women being horrible to both themselves and one another. Physical beauty and other peoples' reaction to it is a very public thing, so if someone is just generally inclined to be horrible and is looking for an excuse, it's a very popular target. I've never met another model who made the decision to be horrible to me. For all I know, they think I am short and squ...

Just got back from my first honest-to-God casting call a couple of hours ago. I've never been to an open call before. There were open calls in Arizona -- they happened once in a blue moon, and they were all in Phoenix, where I would not set foot unless someone I sincerely cared about was about to die there. Some of the other models there lamented that Boston was a small market. Ha ha, I say. You think this is a small market because you live a train ride from New York City. Try Flagstaff for a couple of years, and tell me what you think of Boston. [The call was for a company called VienneMilano , and I encourage you to check their stuff out. They import European stockings. I am happy to recommend them, partly because Vienne was there and was a very friendly, professional lady who seems to know what she's doing, but mostly because one of the models from their previous catalog was there helping to run things, and she was wearing a pair of their thigh-highs. Nobody knew this unt...