Harmon Keller/Alicia Polawski: Internet Famous

Jordan is extraordinarily lucky that my current rotation does not take me to LAX until July at the earliest, because I would be sorely tempted to murder her and then escape to Maine, allowing whoever winds up as Alicia next to deal with the fallout.  For all that being this absurd parody of womanhood has been a constant series of humiliations, this past week has been the most ridiculous.

As you may recall, I stepped in to assist Jordan last year when she required assistance in finishing her student film after her star quit, though I did not truly replace her, but rather played all of the duplicate robots that she would have played.  They were more or less mindless automata, so my work was mainly a matter of standing around in tight clothing and heels well taller than necessary to make up the height deficit with the average man or to appear tastefully fashionable, enough times that Jordan could combine the images.

It was technically impressive work, I suppose, although as somebody who knows all too well that her inspiration for a film in which a man's brain is placed inside a robot shaped like an anatomically-correct woman was not, as many would presume, about an ex-boyfriend who needed to learn a lesson, I cannot much disagree with her professors who apparently found it slight and somewhat juvenile.  It has not been picked up by any but the smallest film festivals, and not getting the best position in those.  This was something of a relief for me as I decided to remain Alicia for another year, and I soon paid it no mind.

Then, yesterday, as I arrived back at the "crash pad" after a flight from Dallas that had been delayed for hours (a delay for which the attendants are not paid!), I heard howling coming from the living room, and with the intent of telling the flatmates to keep it down, I poked my head in, only to see in horror that they were watching "I, Fembot".

I try to back away to write a furious email to Jordan, but I'm seen.  "Guys, she's here!"  Someone hits pause and then all four cluster around me.  "Why didn't you tell us you had a side hustle?  This what you were doing during your leave of absence? "

I took a careful half-step back.  "No, I was just..."  How to explain talking with other people who had lost their identities thanks to a cursed hotel?  "I was using the director's spare room - one of those services - and she had a panic attack about the other girl storming off the set, saying she'd step in herself but she would need far too much padding.  Well, stepping in to help was the only decent thing, although if I'd seen the costumes..."

"But that's the best part!  You look so hot in the outfits and it's so you to just go making guys horny without giving a shit!  Because even if they're programmed to respond, you know the sex-bot doesn't actually care."

"I hardly think that's an accurate--"

"Oh, c'mon, look at you on Insta!  Racking up the followers with all the selfies but never following back, barely responding unless someone comments on the museum or whatever you're in."

I groaned.  "I've told you, I don't take those pictures for 'followers'."

They arched their eyebrows and gave me variations on "sure you don't", but it happens d to be e true.  The only follower, or fan, that actually matters the slightest bit is Daryl, who finds it useful for me to have a social media presence when somebody asks "Magda" about her daughter.  Other than that, it's simply a convenient way for me to have some record of my time as Alicia after I finish it.  I cannot see myself becoming sentimental about this anatomy, but I cannot deny that the opportunity to travel has offset the job which requires it somewhat.  With this application already on Alicia's phone, and sharing the default, it should be a simple matter to extract that which I wished to keep.

Obviously, there was no point of explain that to the gaggle, so I just repeated that my photography was for myself and what others thought of it was irrelevant.  Then I said the shower was mine, ignoring the shouted question of whether a brain in one of those robots would have PMS or cramps simulated the way arousal was, because they wouldn't stick their boyfriends in one otherwise.

The shower was useful; though the Inn has made my body more resilient than it had been for some time, I had been on my feet for some time and just an hour in Texas can make you sweat in a way that sticks even under the perfume and deodorant.  Washing my flatmates' crude comments away was a pleasant enough side benefit.

Afterward, as I say wrapped in a towel, brushing my hair, Alicia's phone buzzed with some notification, and it reminded me that I had set Instagram notifications off, as I did not intend to interact on the platform (and, indeed, most of the messages it notified me of were just men saying how life-changing intercourse would be for the pair of us).  Out of idle curiosity, I brought the program up and looked at my statistics.

I had 20,000 followers.

They came in waves, it appears - some when Jordan "at-ed" me as he put his short online, but I apparently got put on lists as well, from the obvious ("flight attendants of Instagram") to the bizarrely, specifically hostile ("bitches who think they're too good to follow back but ain't all that").  It's more people than I've had students, quite possibly on a par with the number of people who have read my books or attended my presentations at conferences.  For doing little more than taking photographs of myself.

I looked in the mirror and wondered what a picture undressed would do to all that.  It almost seemed to be worth the experiment, just to see, especially since any reputation that came as a result would fall upon someone else in a few months.  If a younger person becomes the new Alicia, she might even find an account with thousands of followers a positive.

As an economist, I find the idea intriguing, creating something of admittedly illusory value from nothing.  The other side, though, is that it could wind up like Jordan's film - harmless enough at the time, but something I shall have to live with until I no longer have Alicia's face.

-Harmon Keller

Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-wei: Oops I Did It Again

Okay, "oops" is probably not the right word; to gender-swap one of the more memorable bits from Shane Black's script for The Last Boy Scout, it's not like I was naked in Ernesto's bedroom for no apparent reason only to trip and have my vagina land on his rock-hard dick.  No, it was a mutual decision, one coming from equal parts seeing each other constantly while we worked on each other's short films, deciding we needed to spend a couple hours drinking and arguing after our third time seeing The Last Jedi (he thinks it is perfect despite the casino stuff going on forever and do not mansplain Finn needing to know the real world in order to become a true rebel because I get it and it doesn't make the actual mission less stupid), and me just being sick of my vibrator with a song dash of knowing Chen-ai would never approve of him.  I fucked him because I wanted to and stayed the night because why go outside in this unless you absolutely have to, and there's only one thing that would have dissuaded me.

That, of course, being the knowledge that he had been sleeping with the star of my movie since day three of shooting.

Now, don't get me wrong - I've been enjoying the fuck out of working with Bree.  She's the only woman who really nailed the "not trying to be sexy but every move she makes is boner-inducing" aspect of the main character in the auditions, she's way more comfortable walking around a set in her underwear than I was, and she's genuinely funny.  I thought we were connecting even though, okay, she sometimes acted like she was doing us a favor consenting to work on someone else's movie because she was used to coming up with her own concept and choreography.  And, okay, I'm not paying a whole lot of money, so she can complain a little about it not being her most satisfying experience, I'll magnanimously allow that.  But, like, was being female supposed to give me some sort of sexual ESP so that I know the complete history of everyone that I go to bed with?  That seems unreasonable.

Almost as unreasonable as her fucking walking off the set.

Needless to say, I'm fucking pissed at Ernesto for putting me in this situation, even though there's still a huge part of my brain that also wants to say, yeah, bitches be crazy, and move on like nothing happened.  His comment that I shouldn't worry, because if she'd walked off a day earlier, we'd really be screwed, is annoying despite how accurate it is.

See, somewhere during the writing, I got the idea that the sexbot body our hero had his brain transplanted into wasn't the only one of that model his buddy had lying around, and another one was programmed to act as the nurse, another as the maid, and so on.  Kind of fun, right?  And aside from one scene which I think I can edit around, that's all that was really left - we kind of let Bree play the one character and then would do the others, even if it messed with our shooting schedule a bit, thinking this would get better performances.  So, okay, we just shoot with someone else, and grumble about how it didn't need to be digitally stitched together.

The only problem is, man, this is not a lot of time.  The insane cold of the last couple weeks made everyone late throughout the shoot (and the exterior shots miserable), I've only got the lab set rented until Monday, the costumes are made for Bree and my wardrobe gal is not really available for alterations, even if I found someone similarly curvy at the last minute (and I am burning up the phones and IMs to do so).  Oh, and I'm supposed to have company this weekend, an Inn person I haven't met and who are likely to be all "why are you busting so much ass on something you inherited from Missy?"

Something will come together, I'm sure of it, but, fuck, this has gone from something I feel really confident about to a potential disaster.

-Jordo/"Missy" Yuan-wei

Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-wei: And... Action?

As you might expect, I've gotten pretty damn comfortable with naked (or nearly naked) female bodies by now, both my own and others.  Not that I wasn't before I had my own boobs - I was down for naked chicks any time - but it's different now.  I still feel a level of appreciation that I doubt any girl who has never been a heterosexual man can truly understand when I wake up in the morning and see myself naked in the mirror, and when I'm in a changing room or something (but, like, not in a pervy way).  I've been naked with guys and found that I really like being picked up, squeezed, and given a little taste of a guy's strength - not really rough, but definitely not hesitant.  I don't freak out at guys' dicks, whether they're visible and erect or just a promising bulge, though that admittedly took a while.

And yet, spending two days in my underwear shooting my scenes for Ernesto's sort was weird.  I'm playing some sort of high-end escort, so I actually had to do way more with my hair than I usually do, with a wave and some chestnut coloring, on top of wearing my fanciest matching set of undies that isn't actually sheer enough to let people see my nipples or landing strip.  I also brought a nice dress to just sit in a heap on the floor (I'm half-tempted to send Ernesto the receipt from the cleaners).  The make-up lay not only did my face so that it would look properly lit on camera, but also so my lipstick would look like it had been super-red the night before but just faded enough now.  I have fun getting this body all dolled up, but the whiplash between folks treating me like a prop and then wanting me to show human emotion on a set is not really something I enjoy being on this side of.

Plus, you're half-naked around a bunch of people.  It's a student film, so there aren't a bunch of assistant directors and stuff, and there's only one other cast member in my scenes.  He's a local professional - I suspect that student shorts are a non-trivial part of his income, along with local indies and whatever he can scrounge up in New York - and is odd going from flurry to businesslike and back when Ernesto says "cut!" or "action!", especially since I get the feeling he thinks I've only got this part because Ernesto is fucking me (and correcting him to "no, it's because Ernesto fucked me once" would just undermine someone who is nervous enough).  Even besides him, though,  there's still a lot of people in the room, and that is okay for them to be watching me intently while the camera is recording, but kind of looking away until I've got my robe on while everybody sets up and tasks about what we might try in the next shot, is kind of screwy.

Annette laughs at me feeling weird about that, since she figures is about what I deserve for "I, Fembot" being such a super-sexualized thing, which is rich because she got me to pull a bunch of stuff out as more creepy than sexy.  Maybe she's right; I know the first auditions, before I did that little acting gig, had me really enjoying that I could ask a girl looking for a job to show me her tits, on how sexy she could walk in stiletto heels, that sort of thing.  It's part of the story, sure, but as someone who used to get told to fuck off by hot girls on the regular, it feels really damn good.  And it led to hiring someone who I think is going to kill it, even if she's done way more work as a burlesque dancer than an actress.  If nothing else, I know that nobody is going to watch her scenes in my movie like they might watch mine in Ernesto's and be like "meh, whatever, she's like a six" (probably because they just don't like Asian girls).

And that carried over into casting the other roles (aside - even casting a short film is fucking agonizing, since you've got to do it for every damn person in the foreground and there's like a thousand people and lining up schedules so that people can read together is a pain in the ass and the only thing worse than the idiots who can't figure out what you want from the character are the smart ones who find something you miss that means you might have to adjust everything else...).  Like, I don't need to see the best friend's cleavage or the abs of the guy who gets killed twenty seconds in, but I wanna, especially if I've just been looking at guys to play the nerdy inventor and trying to determine if they're just the right amount of schlubby.

And that's before you take into account all the producer crap I've taken on because, I dunno, it seems like cheating to hire someone to do stuff and I get a certain amount of satisfaction in spending Chen-ai's money.  After haggling with a building owner who should be fucking thankful that I want to rent his lab space for a few days, or putting what seems like too big a deposit down on lights, I deserve a few perks, whether it be checking out a hot girl or seeing if one of the guys would like to discuss his part further over drinks.  I start to understand where Harvey Weinstein was coming from until you remember that he would bend me right the fuck over a table and probably not bother with a condom.

So I'm trying to be better than that, but, honestly, there are days when, after cramming so much of getting ready to make this movie around my actual classes, I honestly wonder how Ernesto manages not to be a dick on set without having to worry about that scenario nearly as much.

Ah, well.  Shooting starts the day after Christmas, which means I've got an excuse not to go back "home".

-Jordo/Missy/Yuan-wei