Most people don’t know this about me, but I used to be a model. No, I’m serious, I used to be a late-child/early-adolescent model.

In seventh grade, my school got a call from an ad agency looking for a “male, Asian-American student, between the ages of 10-14″ who would be willing to model for them. (As an addendum, they also had the requirement “must be ridiculously good-looking”, but that’s pretty much implied since I got the job. Just kidding. Obviously). Anyway, my school sent me to see the ad people, and after a brief meeting, they asked me to be in their shoot. After getting my parents to sign the release form, I showed up the next day to shoot the shots.

It was a weird shoot; in hindsight, it was probably pretty racist too. The photographer had me in a lab coat, holding two beakers and pouring the contents into a large flask. Their vision was to show an Asian-American kid performing a science experiment… Stereotypical, much?

The photographer kept telling me that they’d be adding in smoke when they edited the picture, so he wanted me to look really surprised. He kept telling me to look shocked and to have my mouth agape and O-shaped in awe.

Anyway, I never asked what the photos were going to be used for and after a few years, I’d completely forgotten that I had taken them. I also gave up on trying to become the pre-pubescent version of Zoolander (but not before I perfected “Blue Steel” — with it, I can make a crying child, smile… one of Blue Steel’s many uses… yep, I am “teh Sex”).

Then one day in tenth grade, I was in Spanish class flipping through one of those Bienvenidos books, when I found that picture of me. It looked exactly the way the photographer said it would look. Me — wide-eyed and open-mouthed in awe — holding two beakers, pouring the contents into a large flask, and having pale white smoke billow out.

But since I went to public school and had to share that book with at least 30 other people, one of the previous users had also seen my picture… and altered it with pen and pencil drawings.

This new, doctored photograph showed me clutching two large, veiny penises, and had a word-box coming out of my wide-open mouth saying: “Yo quiero COCK.”

I can’t emphasize this enough: my mouth was WIDE open… and the pale white smoke the photographer had edited in, kind of looked like something else…

What’s really bad is that I was bug-eyed too. I seriously looked like I was about to be orally-raped or something.

That is why I hate having my picture taken… I’m worried about being pictographically defiled.

So in closing, I guess the moral of my story is this: never be a male model — you’ll be orally raped.