Gone, all gone.

My hair is changing colors, I think.

For years I've had brown creep up the sides, and I get blonde highlights easily.

Lately, people have been telling me I'm blonde, so I asked the people at the hairplace I go to if I was a redhead.

They actually said I was more strawberry blonde, but if they had to say either blonde or redhead or brunette, they'd say blonde.

The Japanese owner actually pulled out a book of fake hair swatches of different colors and pointed out which color my hair was.

It wasn't in the redhead column. :/

Sex work and male modelling.

So, the other week I got to hear a male model speak.

During the Q&A, I asked about what type of sex work that models engage in, and how it breaks down male/female gay/straight.

First, a lot of people have sidelines, and are students, bartenders, etc.

Second, women tend not to do it, since they get paid so much more then men.

Third, a lot's informal, where people are hired by socialites as personal assistants, instructors for sports, etc., and then propositioned into it; the guy I talked to had been a swimmer for years, and gave swim lessons for example, and was propositioned for more and had to lay down the law that he was only hired to give swim lessons.

Fourth, the higher-ups tend to be (gay) men and (straight) women, so especially for men there's a casting room couch, and no matter how they identify they'll sleep with the sex they're not attracted to if getting a campaign is at stake.

Overall, he said that esp. in New York, there's these old socialites with money who are known to hover around "the industry".

I asked him if there was a slang name for them, and he said no, that the whole thing was known about by everyone but not ever really discussed.

Addendum.

I forgot -

For the 2nd half of the exercise, I switched the scenario around, and said to envision an expensive restaurant downtown where the 1% eat food that's flown in from all over the world and served up by minimum-wage workers.

"So imagine there's this obese girl," I began, "And there's some crocodile meat that's flown in from Africa..."

Later, I said that the construction "the must-be-eaten crocodile" would imply something like that it was so tasty that the girl had to eat it, or perhaps the waitstaff disliked the obese girl because she was obnoxious, and so they made sure she ate it because they could mark up her bill 5000% in revenge.

"She sounds a lot like Kim Kardashian," my tutoree was like.

Stories of Latin Instruction: The Future Passive Participle.

To teach Latin participle forms (2 of which are roughly equivalent to English, one of which is not), I set up an exercise with my students where I say a girl is swimming in a river full of crocodiles, and you hear screams and run up to the river, and you could see one of three things:

- the crocodile ate the girl.
- the crocodile is eating the girl.
- the crocodile will eat the girl.

Then, I ask them which nouns and participles they could use in each of those three situations, beginning a statement "I see.." (answer - "the eaten girl", "the eating crocodile", "the will-be-eating crocodile").

As a closer, I point out that what is in some textbooks called "the future passive participle" actually doesn't have that meaning (i.e., "the will-be-eaten girl"), but actually means necessity - e.g. "the girl who has to/must/should be eaten").

As I told my homeschooled 17 year-old student, "It's like when Edward first smells Bella, and thinks, 'I need to eat that girl'; she's the girl who you just have to eat!"

"Or," my homeschooler was like, "it's necessary to eat her, because she whines a lot."

Moldy bread.

Like I always do, I put some bread I got from the corner store in my freezer, and just take out slices when I need it for toast.

One day, I was eating toast, and one bite of the upper part of the crust tasted moldy, but then I looked at the rest of it and it was fine.

The next time I had a piece of toasted bread, I looked and it was fine, but then before eating it I decided to sniff the crust, and I smelled mold at one part, and I looked very very carefully, and I noticed very small strings of mold by a pine nut sticking out of the multi-grain crust.

So, I ripped that off, threw it away, and then ate the rest.

The rest of the bread in the bag was fine.

GIFT!!!

This past Friday my coat check number was "666".

So, I saved it, and today I'm giving it to a friend who's presenting a paper on the Book of Revelation!

I can't wait to hear what she thinks of it... At the club, when I was in line for the coat check, I noticed the number and asked the (hipster) kid by me if I should save it or if that would be spooky and weird, and he said it was spooky and weird and not to save it.

Movies.

It's so funny, I can go months without seeing a movie in a theater, then if there's a lot out that I want to see, I can see four within the space of a week.

Catalan narratives.

So my one lawyer friend from Missouri is writing a children's book about how her dog wanders all over the city and solves a mystery; she's been doing photo shoots all summer, and wants to publish it as a book for parents to buy for their kids to get them acquainted with major sites before visiting the city.

So, the other week I was having drinks at the student bar and was talking with the Catalan, and he asked how my one lawyer friend from Missouri was doing, and I told him she was working a lot on her children's book.

"Does it have a sad or ambiguous ending?", he was like. "Does [the dog's name] die at the end?"

"No", I was like, "It's a children's book. The dog solves the mystery."

"That is too bad, man," he was like, "Children remember sad or ambiguous endings. The dog should be raped. Then, he should die. In that way, the children are sad, because the dog was raped. Then, they are unsure how to feel, because perhaps the dog is better to die, to keep from pain and save money on psychological bills."