July 19

Back from QLD with carpet burn on my knees after 4 days as my beautiful tyrannical niece's horsy, and an existential dilemma is looming. Why I am selling my life for $17 an hour to optus and the CIA, in order to pay off the devil (thinly disguised as the Australian embassy in Berlin) who has no compunction about accepting my soul as payment for a migration visa for my Slavic lover? There must be other ways of making a living. Probably this crisis has been brought on by the fact that my beloved Arabic project is finished and I'm back in the outermost circles of transcriber hell where old ladies search in vain for their remote controls under the couch and the answering machine stubbornly refuses to comprehend the term 'adult movies' until the frustrated caller (who has probably had an erection pointed at an undisclosed target for the past week) finally shouts 'PORN! I MEAN PORN'. Which the innocent answering machine hears as poor. Which in the case of this caller is probably not that far off the mark.

The day is both extended and somehow redeemed by the long commute. In the train humanity is at its most naked- nobody is trying to impress anyone, here. There's no point. We pick our noses and stare out the window and push people out of our way like children on the school bus, and for those who care to look the world is wearing its heart on its dust jacket. A hairy youth in a beanie reading Twelve Steps to Successful Living, a fat middle-aged man engrossed in Memoirs of a Geisha, a mousy brown lady of indeterminate years perusing The Satanic Verses- their secret selves are on display. ( I am reading Balzac but I hide the cover in case anyone is attempting to leap to conclusions about me- as I do about them- based solely on my reading matter.)

In other news I am now the not- so- proud owner of a mobile phone, a castoff of my fathers which heralds my entry into the techno-age with a tinny rendition of the Mexican Hat Dance. I pretend I'm not interested in it's eruptions but I'm not fooling anybody as I slink off to the dunnies in my break to see if the vibration in my handbag was actually an abbreviated signal of love from eastern Europe. Now there's no way back.