Three Hour Love Affair

I fell hopelessly through all stages of love in the three hours I spent modeling at School of Visual Arts this evening. Who knew that male models from Russia could be so appealing? Or that yours truly could be so charming and at ease around aesthetic perfection?

Look at him! Do you blame me? (And this is one of the tame photo options) Can't believe the photographers kept making us pose together so often.... I don't remember a time when last I giggled so much!'

Anyway, I managed to get my wits about me and spent the evening with some girlfriends at Penrose, amazing new place near my apartment that just opened (good GOD the mac and cheese alone is heaven in a cast iron skillet). During that time, I met some gorgeous people, thought about the story of the young boy who meets God when he's trying to save all the starfish on the sea shore before they dry out, and then meditated about what facilitates and nourishes unconditional love.

The end to this circuitous jaunt is Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, which I realized was the anthem and mantra I always needed to be a better significant other, a better friend, a better daughter, and a better dancer...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come: 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.