Today’s soundtrack:
Dooba dooba dooba doo-ba,
Ah ha ha ha.
Today at 8:02pm: Trying to get the down comforter into the down comforter cover. There’s got to be an easier way to do this


Something cool happened. I got a call from Betty, who invited me to participate in a rather unusual photo shoot. A videogame company needed “archetypal background pedestrians” of all ethnicities as part of some character study, I’m guessing they’ll insert the subjects (or characters based on them) in the backgrounds of future videogames.

Best of all, she said it would take less than an hour, and that it would pay a hunnert bucks. That’s my kind of time-waster!

So me, Kat and Betty trekked over to a photo studio on the west side, each of us carrying several different “outfits,” as we’d been instructed to.

In the studio they had a plain white “seamless” backdrop. On the floor was a penciled-in circle about the size of a basketball, bisected every 45 degrees. Basically you stand in the circle with your arms out to your side, then they shoot you, then you rotate 45 degrees, then they shoot you again, then you rotate again, etc.

Garment racks on the side of the studio held various outfits ranging from pimp to athlete to barfly to surfer (the wave kind, not the internet kind). I’d brought my own clothes and went with a backdated grunge look, and then my normal clothes.

We got to see photos of some friends of ours who had also participated in the shoot, and it was pretty funny to see, for instance, our architect pal disguised as a hip hop thug.

On the way out I ran into Rianna, one of my favorite girls from back in the day. We used to hang out a lot, I even brought her to a wedding once.

Rianna’s Taiwanese but was raised in Argentina and then Queens, so she speaks Spanish, Mandarin and the type of tough-girl-from-Queens English that makes it sound like she’s holding pins in her mouth. Anyways Rianna had heard about the shoot through a friend and was also participating. Sometimes New York is a small town.

“Hey Ri, they’re paying me like two-fifty, three hunnert bucks. What’re you getting?”

“Pssh, I’m getting five hundred, sucker.”

It’s good to see Rianna again.

After the shoot Betty, Kat and I went to some soup joint on the west side, even though we couldn’t see the place through its windows. It was stupid cold out that day so the windows were all fogged up. I expected to walk in and we’d just see some really big, fat, sweaty guy wearing a wifebeater and steaming up the glass.

The girls ate pastries and we lounged around for a bit. Betty and I are freelancers and Kat’s a student, so we can do bullshit like this on a weekday afternoon. I wish every day was like this.

The downside is that I have very little to no money coming in for February, I mean I don’t even know how I’m going to make the rent. I pay my taxes quarterly and the math was not kind to me this past 15th. I’m nervous as fuck about next month but I don’t like to talk dough, at least not specifics, so I’ll leave it at that.

One thing I will say is that if any of you are looking to hire a writer I’ll do birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings, boat launchings, whatever it takes. In two weeks I need to feed my landlord a four-digit number and I’ve got less shame than Hester Prynne.