23.07.05..9:40 am

After two weeks of sitting on my ass, getting used to sitting on my ass and then finally getting some research done* I FINALLY got another temping gig this week.

UberSwankPartners Ltd is home to the best little gathering of mismatched reception type people forced to work together in a manner that can only breed hatred ever. I was there to cover the tail end of a long weekend for one and then the two mid-week days of leave for the other. On the first day I find myself in an eight hour long giggle fest with a gorgeous girl who can only be described in terms of Truman Capote's Holly Golightly (note: NOT the film version and Audrey Hepburn's charm and grace, but the disconcerting grace of a child call girl): Holly is charming and lovely and delightful, but also shrew and conniving and a self-confessed-though-not-quite-in-these-exact-terms gold digger. Her ideal man is not someone who she will love until her dying day but someone who is wealthy. All her stories about men begin with, 'Very attractive..moderately wealthy.' The other woman I worked with was the total opposite, virginal spinster (if we're carrying on with Truman's terms) with a permanent look of mild surprise. You know how the lines of a cloud that a child has drawn look? Or the enormous arches that you're eventually told are BIRDS (in a tone of intolerable patience that only a six-year old can muster).

It was a funny three days, but as my bank account is looking a little shredded I was happy to have it, the only slight problem was that it was at UberSwankPartners Ltd and I have no uber smart clothing and thus had to go out and fork out far more than I have ever spent on clothing in on go on a suit (ok, so it 'came' with three tops and another pair of trousers, but still!). As I don't foresee myself having to wear this get up often I decided to go for more character than professional and wound up with a delightful little cropped jacket with 1940s style puffed shoulders and cropped tuxedo pants (re: trousers). However the actual FINDING of such pants was nigh on impossible: for whatever reason the Clothing Gods have deemed me well below the Britsh Sizing Line and I'm now sitting comfortably at a size 6. A BRITISH SIZE SIX. To paraphrase my friend Vivian during the Great Vanishing Act of 2003 when I lost 2stone without knowing it, Where has my ass gone? Or rather, where have my HIPS gone? M's started calling me The Hipless Wonder. It was funny until I started looking for pants that actually fit.

So there I am in my new little suit trotting into my new placement in fucking SILVER SHOES because I stayed ay M's and don't have anything less whorish down there and I'm all pleased with myself for looking so smart and I go into the washroom where there's a floor to ceiling mirror on the wall that meets the row of sinks and catch my reflection as I bend over to wash my hands and notice my the top of my bum is pretty much uncovered. THE PANTS HAVE GROWN, PEOPLE! They had mysteriously expanded over night. So I spend the rest of the next three days jacking up my pants before I sat down and trying my best to avoid bending over at all costs. My question now is: seeing as I've already worn them and spilled salad dressing all down one leg and then tried to stop the flow by pressing my other knee in to serve as a dyke which proved entirely useless in dressing flow stoppage, and then seeing as I cleaned them really well in the disabled toilet because it was the only place private enough to whip of my pants and stand half naked in a thong and suit jacket to very gently scrub off any and all evidence of the lemon-garlic carnage, am I STILL withon my rights to take them back because they show off my ass inappropriately??

I'm not going to say too much about this because I'm in a continual state of struggle with my London-Space continuum. I've spent the past few days struggling both with the 'attack' on London and with the fact I've decided that NOW is the time I ought to stop smoking. I say 'attack' with quotation marks because it wasn't really an attack, more a bungle, if that's what it was. I just don't know.

I've lived in London for the past couple of years. I've a home and a partner and a life here. And all this time I've felt safer here than ever I did in Toronto walking home at 3am or where I went to university after a late shift in the pub I worked in for less than a term. I've walked home accompanied by back-talking trasvestites in strictly
homophobic neighbourhoods, I've biked home against the current of angry taxi drivers with traffic lights on the brain and drunken skinheads with empty bottles to toss at cyclists on the brain, I've BEEN drunk and angry and threatening to through empty bottles at skinheads, but I've always felt safe here. I rarely take the tube because I get disoriented coming out the other end, but buses were my staple.

It seems foolish to me to claim it 7/7 as so many of the British tabloids are proclaiming, or now 14/7 after this past Thursday, but there doesn't seem anything else to call it. The London Bombings just seems so dramatic.

Over the weekend after the first attack I still came into town, went about my market hopping, laughed with my Dear One. I worked at the Betsey and was one of a hundred people laughing and chattering and drinking (or at least trying to shirk out of payment for pints; there was a Marxist collaborative meeting going on). I don't know anyone who was hurt. My flatmates friend got mild injuries from one of them, but that's it. As though it were another country, nothing has changed. And now there's another one.

O I don't know. I'm not sure how to say this without coming across all preachy or whiney. It's just that it STILL seems so insignificant against the backdrop of so many other people who are actually under seige, against the landscape
of so many families who were effected after 9/11, the bombings in Madrid, the constant barrage on Iraq, the war in Afganistan.. I feel guilty thinking that three bombs in London a worth so much. And yet this is my city. It's my home.

Basically this time I'm a little more annoyed than confused. I'm not angry yet, but if there's a third I'm going to have start pissing on this little parade because that's just a little too much for my liking.

Wholly inadequate, but for now it will have to do.

Sweet mother of fuck I've been writing this for over an hour. Did I tell you that my thesis ISN'T due on 23 September like I thought?? NO! It's actually due on 9 September. HOW DID I GET THAT WRONG?! So yeah. The panic has commenced.

****emmms