under the blanket

Unexpected windfall in the mail -- a cheque from Cosmo for one week of internship in April with the princely sum of £60. Well, it is a lot of money by my standards, especially since I had written off the whole nightmarish experience and wasn't expecting a single cent.

As I look at my dwindling bank account, I wonder if I should have just hung in there at Cosmo for the whole month instead of bailing after one week, purely for the money. I mean, the work wasn't tough. It was, in fact, brain-numbingly boring and downright exploitative. Take orders for coffee, photocopy letters, distribute the mail, sort out contest coupons, take more orders for coffee, man the phones during the lunch hour, deliver packages around Oxford Street.

No, thinking back to how I was treated like a 18-year-old with zero brains and experience, I have no regrets about quitting, except for the missed chances of reading the side-splitting letters people send in. Written in the inimitable British way, they sure beat those psycho letters I used to get at work.

Anyway, I actually rescued one letter from the Cosmo trash because it was that good. Lemme dig it up now to brighten up my day.

[Juicy unedited excerpt from the letter below. Also, warning: explicit photo coming up.]

"One is rather, er how shall one put it, 'hard up' these days, and thus one puts one's self forwards as a potential male model for your good magazine.

See enclosed photo. I can do one or two yoga poses as you may require of me. Clothed or not clothed as you require.

While we're about the subject one may wonder what you may consider as regards the new Sexual Offences Bill. As far as the current offence of 'indecent exposure' is concerned I'm as ever quite a libertarian on this subject with if possible MORE opportunities for, shall we say open people to be more OPEN in more and yet more places where they may choose to be open in this regard.

When I was a student some years ago a female offered me 50p for a shall we say INTERESTING photo."

The letter continues in the same deluded fashion for a couple of pages, followed by a diagram of the human body for "Sex By Numbers" and 15 body parts to kiss. Use your own imagination, I'm not going into details here, though I'm keeping all the instructions for future reference. But it is really the enclosed photo which never fails to crack me up:



The caption scrawled behind the photo is "A sun salute???"
[If you look carefully at his, um, nether regions, you will see the salute. And I am not making any of this up. Honest. I'm not that imaginative.]