I was just reading a post over at Acerbia about a modeling job D is currently involved with and it reminded me of a similar situation long ago, when I was a model in Japan.

This was more than fifteen years ago. Back then, all you needed to get a modeling job in Tokyo was to be non-Asian, and have a little luck at the auditions. I was primarily an English teacher then, and like many in that branch picked up a little extra money now and then jobbing as a movie extra or smiling over a word processor in an electronics catalogue or something like that.

For better or worse, probably better, I lacked the right attitude to be a proper model (as well as the right looks) and generally had luck at auditions only when they were looking for a whole crowd of foreigners. Once, though, I was a finalist for a television modeling job.

They were looking for someone to be Julio Iglesias’s hands on a commercial for his latest CD. They had footage of him, and wanted a closeup of his hands holding a glass of wine and the CD.

It was late in the afternoon. I was the only one left in the studio. They took Polaroids of my hands. I grimaced when I saw the pictures – the color balance was off and they were waxy, yellowish and in general very corpse-like in the pictures. Glancing at them now, I’d have to say they are in real life more pinkish, hairy and slightly stumpy, although my nails and cuticles are in better shape than D claims his are in his post.

Anyway.

I was living in a boarding house for foreigners at that time. We had a central pay telephone in the lobby, and a message board. Whoever happened to be walking by answered the phone when it rang and wrote down a message.

When I got home (I’d had a teaching job after the audition) I saw there was a message for me:

“MIGUEL: AGENT CALLED – YOU DIDN’T GET THE HAND JOB?????”

Shortly thereafter I decided to concentrate my efforts more on teaching, editing and writing.

I’ve been reading a book on mind-mapping, “The Mind Map Book” by Tony and Barry Buzan. I’m not sure what to think of it. I haven’t tried doing a mind map yet, so I can’t say whether it works. The book makes some astounding claims about how it can improve memory retention, organization, and creativity, all things important to me. The positivity of the whole thing reminds me, although there is no other reason why it should, of other systems that ended up evolving in to sects and cults (Transcendental Meditation, other new-age stuff), so I retain a measure of suspicion about the whole thing. Have any of you experience with mind-mapping?

Using this method, I’m going to try to map the novel I wrote, in the hopes that it will kick-start the rewriting process, which is currently giving me big problems.

Continue reading →

And don’t even bring up Patriotism. It’s a dead word. It’s an economic term. Put the word “Act” on the end of it and it’s cameras in your brain, microphones in your butt, and FBI superpowers that only a Stalin could appreciate. Trust your masters, love the State, take three tabs of Paxil, feed your kids something from the Super Value Menu, ingest nine cups of sugar, eight cups of salt, think about celebrities while you’re having sex, bemoan your ailing portfolio and cheer on that aircraft carrier as it takes poor American kids half way around the world to shoot at and be shot by poorer kids.

[Via Words Mean Things]

I wonder how those Iraqi kids like their affirmative access to depleted uranium and sewage-infested drinking water?

Today you can feel yourself small and weak. In such case it is better to close in an own hole and to limit contacts with the people. The risky actions today will not be justified.

The Martin Luther King you don’t see on TV.

Gamma returned from ballet class.
“What did you do in class today?” her mother asked her.
Hair still up in a bun and still in her outfit, Gamma showed her.
“We jumped thirty five times each, like this,” and she jumped thirty five times, gracefully, farting with each jump.
“But I didn’t fart in ballet class.”