A note for new models

You'll buy clear or nude shoes because some photographer will emphatically tell you that they're, "a modeling essential". You want to be professional, so this sounds serious. You'll cart them around everywhere but you'll never wear them. Eventually you'll leave them at home, where they'll gather dust in your closet. Only a short while after that you'll show up to a shoot where the photographer will assume that you have clear or nude shoes with you. He'll be upset and will seem personally disappointed in you that you don't have them. When you tell him that he should have told you to bring them if he'd wanted them that badly he'll stare at you agog.

"You're a professional model! You should always have them with you! They're a modeling essential!" he'll say in a way that's just as know-it-all and just as emphatic as the first guy was.

How to play the "woo" game

Preforming the woo test of drunkenness is quite simple and extremely entertaining. I live on a road with two popular bars on one end and one on the other so on party nights there's a lot of foot traffic around 2 am which is when bars and clubs in Va close. There's traffic at around 11pm going TO the bars, but sober people or vaguely pre-gamed people are not nearly as interesting as drunk-as-shit people.

How to play the woo game.

1)Get a group of friends together. If you live in a suspicious city like I do a smaller group is best so as not to intimidate the drunkies.

2)Hang out on your porch around when the bars are closing. Chat, hang out, that sort of thing. Have some drinks yourself. Why not?

3)When you hear people walking up on you who may possibly be drunk the first of your party casually lays out a happy, "woo!" You know what I'm talking about. You must lower yourself to make the annoying celebratory crow of drunken frat boys. "Woo! Yeah brah! Awwright!" That noise. Just the woo is okay, the rest is just a little weird, and douchey.

4)If the strangers "woo!" back, they're drunk. You win a point.

5)Rinse, lather and repeat with the next of your group and the next possibly drunken passerby.

Additional notes:

-If the people don't woo and instead look at you like you're an idiot they're not drunk enough to lose decorum. If you had any points, you lose a point. If you have no points yet, nothing happens, you simply don't gain a point.

-Turns out that there's a fine balance of acceptable woo to drunkenness. The woo game is fun to play as a team for this reason. In each team there's a chief woo-er and an assistant. If you're playing boys against girls, for example, the girls can add extra woo-ness to the boys' chief woo-er by woo-ing in addition to him or saying other douche-isms, ex "Yah brah! Hey you! Yee ha!" This generally cock blocks the woo-er as too much woo spontaneously erupting from a nearby porch frightens strangers into silence. Within a team the secondary woo-er can add just a touch of needed woo or simply lean sexily into view to coax out a reluctant woo....this is probably why an arrangement of girls against boys is a bad idea.

There really is no point to the woo game, it's just a way for friends to hang out and chat and play a little fun with drunk people. I'm sure that you could make the points mean something, hell make the points be some kind of drinking game and get drunk yourselves! ...You may want to cut back on the drinking a little when the people walking by woo at you first.

Land of Opportunity

Falling asleep I realized that I hadn't packed lunch for work in the morning. I got out of bed, threw my flannel jammie top and padded down the hall to the kitchen. Looking in the refrigerator I noticed that the small remainder of a beautiful fruit bouquet I received for my birthday was looking piqued so I took it to the furnace room to dispose of it. Once there I saw that some pieces were still edible. Crouching over the compost bin I pulled the little fruits on sticks out of their foam, nibbling off all the little bits that didn't feel like hairless Chihuahua skin. Gnawing the innards out of a suede-y cantaloupe slice I fiddled with the decorative kale that had come packed around the sticks.

"I bet you I could boil this up and eat it!" I thought, immediately moving to take the kale I'd just thrown away out of the compost bin.

The pathetic nature of these thoughts and actions suddenly hit me. Recent college grad, 45$ in the bank, asking my roommate to hold the rent check so that I can deposit enough to cover it, squatting like Golum over the compost, eating old veggies and contemplating pulling more out of the moldy bin.

"Is this the land of exciting opportunities the graduation speaker promised me?" I mused aloud.

"I dunno," my roommate called from the other room, "but eating a fruit bouquet pantsless seems pretty damned decadent to me."

Thank you Esther for putting it into perspective.

My Christmas present

I got a bread maker for Christmas. This is not the least of what I've gotten, but it is high on the list of things that excite and interest me. I got a crock-pot as well, to replace the much used one that an ex-roommate stole when he moved out. Moraxian [link NSFW] will tell you that during our first shoot I was using the crock pot to make vegetable stew. Fantastic shoot. My first commercial bondage shoot is now forever tied to the scent memory of savory vegetable stew cooking up. I'll walk past a restaurant and the cooking smell wafting out of the kitchen will envelop me in warm, snuggly memories of being tied to a chair with a bomb strapped to my feet.

Anyway. The present that I'm basically most excited about this year was a bread maker. I'm pretty sure that this marks me as one of the most irredeemable kind of nerd possible. The fact that as soon as I broke out the bread maker -before I did anything else- I read the entire manual probably doesn't help my nerdery.

RP drove me home from my parents' house (his parents live not far from mine) and insisted that I break out the machine as soon as he had me transfered to my house. He waited impatiently the entire time I read the manual. Finally, I was ready to put in the ingredients.

Since the manual made it sound like the slightest little thing could result in inedible crap for bread I followed the instructions exactly. RP fidgeted, "Make sure to-" he interjected.

"You sir, are a backseat bread maker."

The mix of ingredients dumped in the machine I shut the lid and pressed the buttons. The bread maker beeped, RP ran over and we both peered in the window of the lid like little kids anxiously awaiting Santa. We stood there for a solid five minutes, fascinated by this tiny machine creating bread. This is the exciting and glamorous life of a model.

The pickle tradition

When I was a kid in Hawaii my family hosted missionaries and missionaries-in-training on their way from or to mission trips in the pacific. It was really cool and we met a lot of people....very religious people, but still. One Christmas we were hosting a young missionary from Germany when she told us of the pickle ornament, a German Christmas tradition.

In Germany, she said, families have a glass Christmas tree ornament in the shape of a pickle. The oldest members of the household hide this ornament in the tree on Christmas eve. The next morning everyone looks for it (except, of course, the person who hid it) and the person to find it first wins. If an adult to finds it said adult gets good luck for the rest of the year. If a child gets it, he's given a small treat. As a kid I always thought it was sort of a gyp to be an adult and find the pickle.

"Great! You get good luck all year!"

"You are totally just saying that so that you don't have to give me a piece of candy."

The Christmas the missionary returned to her home in Germany she sent us our very own glass pickle ornament. My sisters and I were thrilled! Unfortunately, mom and dad were working 3 and 2 jobs respectively, so they were always dead tired wrapping presents on Christmas eve. Consequently, they totally forgot to put that little glass pickle in the tree. Christmas morning my sisters and I would run out and scour the tree for several minutes while our parents wilted from guilt in the background.

The bad news is that they never remembered to put the pickle in the tree. The good news is that every year we caught on a little earlier and now have a hilarious story to tell of thwarted family traditions.

Relating the story to some friends this year I realized that either I'd forgotten the origin of the pickle myth or the missionary had never told us. Google to the rescue.

Imagine my surprise when I found that most Germans have never heard of the pickle story and are puzzled to hear that Americans think it's a German tradition. Doing some research I found that, while the "pickle tradition" is now accepted in some parts of Germany, many of those Germans believe that the tradition came from somewhere else.

As best I found in my limited digging, one of the origins of the story is that a Bavarian-American fighting in the Civil War was captured around Christmas time. Dying in his cell from starvation he wished only for a pickle to eat. He was given the pickle by a kind guard and it cheered him so much that he didn't die. Returning to his family in Bavaria he started the tradition as an affirmation of life and Christmas miracles.

Two things stand out as being very amusing in this story. First, the guy was Bavarian, immigrated to the US, fought in the civil war and then went, "Fuck this, America sucks. I got in a war, starved near to death and then the country went to shit. Bavaria is not looking so bad now." and moved back? Secondly, in the words of another critic of this pickle story origin, "If you thought you were dying, would your last wish be for a pickle?"

I'm not sure if this is the real beginning of the pickle tradition though it seems to be one of the more widely spread myths. I do believe though, that I will cherish this story as the correct one, as it fits so well with the comedic nature of my own family's pickle tradition.