When Cycling, Which is Worse? Getting a Flat or Losing One?

           

            I got up at 5:00 on Wednesday because I had to work a morning class at OCADU and I still wanted to get some of my usual activities done before leaving. It was fortunate that I’d been so tired the night before that I went to bed a little early, so I was fairly well rested, despite the fact that I still had the cold. I managed to put in half an hour of song practice before heading out.

            It was a strangely warm day, especially when I think of some of the bitter Februarys that I’ve experienced in the past, even in Toronto.

            I was riding along College, approaching Bathurst when a cyclist about ten cars ahead of me stopped, turned her bike around and started heading back toward me. When she saw me coming she lifted her bike onto the sidewalk. Just before I was about to pass her I saw a woman’s shoe on the path, but only as I was just about to ride over it did I notice that the woman with the bike had one bare foot and one foot shorn with the exact type of flat that I suddenly was hoping I wasn’t flattening. I’m still not sure if I ran over it or not but I didn’t feel a bump so I probably didn’t. I assume that because of the extremely warm winter weather, this woman had decided to ride her bike to work, wearing her work shoes rather than sneakers, and it didn’t work out the way she’d planned. At the lights she passed me but kept to the sidewalk this time to be safe.

            I worked for Nick Aoki’s class. In between poses he showed slides of painters who work doing backgrounds for games and animated films. He seemed to have something negatively personal to say about each artist whose work he showed, such as, “I don’t really like this guy!” or “This guy’s got a chip on his shoulder!” or “This guy says, ‘Don’t go to art school!’ even though he goes to art school!”

            Every one of Nick’s students in that class were of East Asian descent, and mostly female. This seems to be a trend these days, though I’ve seen the slow progression towards it over the decades that I’ve been working as a model. The class I worked a few days before that was all female except for one skinny bespectacled guy with bleached hair, who kept to himself through the whole class.

            At the end, Nick asked me if I had any other classes that day. I told him that I had six more hours but that I was going to go home and try to sleep for an hour and a half before coming back to the college. He nodded knowingly and said he had a residency he has to attend and that he would be sleeping two hours in the car. He declared that he hated these 8:30 classes. I suggested that a 10:00 start would be a lot more civilized. He agreed.

            I did manage to enjoy a restful one and a half hour siesta and then headed back to work.

            I modeled for Rob Nicholls’s class, and it was both my first naked job so far this year and my first of doing only short poses.

            After that I went upstairs to work for Yang Cao’s class. They were just doing portraits and so I didn’t need to disrobe. Cao told me to tilt my head to the left because he noticed that my head tilts that way anyway. I’d never noticed that to be the case.

            When I got home there was only time to make something quick for dinner, so I just heated up a piece of pork in the oven and had it with some heated tortillas, washing it all down with a couple of Budweiser Shots that my upstairs neighbour had given me a month before.