Document1 - Microsoft Word

I found a new dream job. One of my tasks at work is to make things pretty. So I spend a lot of time looking at clip art and I realized this week that I could be a powerhouse in the clip art model world. Honestly have you stopped to think about that? They hire someone to do that! Someone somewhere got paid to show up and work with a photographer taking pictures pretending to be a family or a business woman or having a wedding then they got paid maybe $300 and signed the rights to the photo and their souls away to Microsoft. I would totally do it. Because I could work it out, dog! Resume time: I can make multitude of emotional faces, I can cry on demand and I look comfortable in a large number of different situations. Ambition: To be Microsoft Word Clip Art’s Zoolander. I figure there are six sub-categories to clip art modeling.

The first category is families/love. These pictures involve either handsome or average looking people doing things that Microsoft sees as family friendly events. For example: Sledding, playing X-Box (stupid product placement), eating, reading books. Depending on the grouping I could easily be the mother or the daughter.

The second category is movement. This is any picture that has some kind of action in it. The topics are wide and varied but the message is loud and clear. “Hey viewer…see us, we have momentum!” I imagine these models singing their own action music in their heads as they did the photo shoot. The third category is friends. According to the existing pictures on clip art you are only friends with people in your age group, who you look very similar to in age/gender/size/skin color/fashion type/shoe size or you are ultimate extremes. So my friends groups would have to be late 20 some-things, who are female/curvy/white/eclectic/8.5 or it would have to look like my group of friends actually looks, just with a filter on, so that my tan friends look darker and my white friends look whiter.

The fourth is what I’ve deemed the “creepy” category. Here is where some photographer went rogue on Microsoft, bless him, and Microsoft being too cheap used the photos anyhow. The photos are all political in nature and all creepy. I want to be in one. Honestly who doesn’t want to put on dramatic makeup and stare intently into the lens of a camera in the hopes of saving the world from global warming?

The fifth is…(get your Streisand Voice on) "people, people being people. Are the glorious people (dramatic pause) in the world!!" This category just has people being people. People reading books, drinking drinks, vacationing, eating a sandwich, taking pictures - people doing the things people do when they aren’t work for the man. Is it wrong of me to be jealous of clip art? As a Shakespearean aside with my stage whisper on, I did notice there was an interesting subcategory to this and really all the categories. There seems to be a whole lot of Asians going on. They are the most beautiful race in my opinion, but seriously give us white girls a chance.

The last and my favorite group is appendages models. Minus the regular bump, scratch or bruise with a regular manicure/pedicures, I could totally do this! I especially feel I could specialize as the model for the last photo I included in this series.

X-Ray Model. How cool is that? An airplane ride would go like this. Seat 13B: “So, going to Phoenix huh?” Ellen: “Yeah, I live there.” Seat 13B: “Yeah, me too.” Ellen: “Yeah.” Seat 13B: “So, what do you do for a living?” Ellen: “I’m an X-Ray Model.” Kapow!! Take that boring passenger 13B! Sigh, This is why I don’t talk to people on airplanes. I get tempted to lie, and lying is the lubrication on the slide to hell.