Studio modeling for art schools is a weird world, and the actual physical demands are even stranger, especially when you’re good at them. After awhile you pick up on what the instructor wants, what the students need, and you come up with something from there. Most instructors are very nice, completely professional, and will mention a particularly good pose you might have done. Some take it a step further and applaud when you have finished the day’s set. Invariably this happens as I’m reaching for my robe, resulting in me being stark naked on a pedestal while a group of 19 year old art students clap their hands awkwardly. It either makes your day or you feel like diving under the model stand. Being gracious while nude is something I have to work on. Weird world.

I’ve never looked very approachable. My face at rest is either stoney or snooty, depending on which construction site I’m passing. Its not a gloomy face, just sparing in movement. This is a mild description- my normal reaction to the not-so-infrequent occasion of people telling me to smile could melt cobalt. This has been said to me my entire life, either by those who didn’t know me or those who assumed they did. These days most men don’t come up to me, mostly because I’m cultivating an image of kickassery, but the ‘why aren’t you smiling’ approach never fails to make me want to go to krav maga class. Instead, I commiserate with like-minded women who also want to kill when instructed to appear more pleasing to the male eye, or I come here. And so it goes.

I’ve been trying to find the perfect word all day to describe the climate outside in NYC, and have settled on primordial. Really, only amino acids and galactic life ooze would find this comfortable, the feeling that every layer of the atmosphere is being leaned on by solar winds and making everyone flip the fuck out. Normally I don’t bitch about the weather when the temperature reads above 80 since I’m that person you want to smack who finds sultry days completely charming, but this is a different level of jean-clinginess. Its a testimony to New Yorker’s endurance of all things for their city, cause boy, the senses reel. I imagine this is what Venus’ capital city will be like all the time, provided humanity a) gets their collective butt off this planet and b) doesn’t nuke everything else in the system.