I'm so fashionable

Since June, I've been freelancing. Which includes playing video games, sleeping in, watching Scrubs 4 to 6 times a day, and complaining about how the feral cats in my backyard bring down my quality of life. In my spare time, I collect back-pay from the New York State Dept. of Labor and hope jobs will fall in my lap. These include digital tech, when I go on a shoot with a photographer and art director, hook a camera up to a laptop, and tell them the photos all look good, and doing color correction and retouching for photographers I made contacts with at my old job. It's been swell, and I haven't been too stressed out.

That is until I picked up a job with a fashion photographer named J. Castle Greyskull.* She had placed an ad on Craigslist looking for people who had worked at my company and a few others; I answered, and one short interview that involved playing Spartacus' favorite game (try to bite whatever part of me is near his teeth)**, I was hired. The job involved 10 hour a day shifts, editing and slight color correcting photos at Fashion week. Visions of beautiful models crowding around my laptop and offering to rub my broad shoulders flowed through my mind.

The vision started to blur a little and the women seemed less attentive to that knot in my back on arrival. I was greeted by 6 plus foot tall giraffe women, each weighing maybe 24 pounds, handing out copies of Metro. These weren't even the runway models, yet they made me look fat! Next, everything came to a sudden halt when I realized I was going to be spending 8 hours out of every day sitting in the Kinko's next to Bryant Park with a mostly incompetent partner (and next to a guy playing some first person shooter from the 90's) followed by more hours in Greyskull's apt. with her assistant, Judy Judgemental. Who was a flamboyant gay man who spent as much time as possible discussing how fat Britney was at the VMAs, anal bleaching, and how he didn't have an original opinion of his own. Wow, was this job turning out to be fun.

After 4 days, working 12-13 hours per day plus 3 hours of travel round trip, I ended up getting sick. It was after this that I complained that 13 hours is not the same as 10 and the photographer and her cowering minions laughed at me. Two days later, I had quit from coughing and overt surrounding crappiness. I was blissfully sick for another week, but at least had no reason to leave the apartment.

I realized something then. I'm willing to put up with a lot (such as 18 hour work days when I was in St. Maarten) in pursuit of something I want to do. Greyskull had some terrific connections. Still, I couldn't imagine myself cornering a celebrity and, along with 12 other vultures, asking them to swivel their heads my way "one more time" seventeen times more.


*Part of that name is real. You figure it out.

**Spartacus is a dog.