Anticipatory blah-de-blah

John Biddle, NIN in 2011

Full-time planning for modeling is underway. I've been doing some modeling over the last year, of course--but it's been a year and a half since I was full-time, taking those adrenaline-aggravating trips where my hours are laid out on a spreadsheet and I sometimes am left to deal with very unexpected downturns.

It can be stressful, it can be exhilarating, it can be disheartening, it can be rewarding.

That's the infectiousness of it, I suppose--I see it all the time. A well-known model will announce that she's going to retire...only to return a few months or a year later.

And it makes sense--both the attempt at quitting, and the failure to truly knock it. After a certain point, I think some of us just have the lifestyle embedded in ourselves in a very fundamental way, and it becomes tempting--but almost impossible--to renounce.

My best trip ever, as a model, was when I went on a comprehensive tour of the east coast a couple years ago. I not only made more money than I have anywhere else--but I made more friends, had more fantastic experiences [not a single bad shoot], yielded wonderful results [my portfolio was quite happy for that trip], and had a lot of fun side-adventures [including milking goats, building a cob bench, and riding a Vespa around Western Mass, getting shown around secret parts of the Natural History Museum in NY, decorating myself in random objects and sitting in a sink pretending to be a pirate of sorts, and being taken out to some phenomenal eateries...oh, and I posed naked outside of the UN in NYC, that was a rush]. Had only one cancellation--and that one led to a referral to a wonderful two-day shoot, so no harm done.

Hoping to top that experience this time around. 8]