I've finally figured out what I've been doing wrong. Today, having virtually exterminated two chattering year twelve students (honestly, four hours and they didn't do five minutes work - the woman next to me said "hear, hear" and someone else's head popped over the partition and said "I agree!")... I don't feel good about being the person who tells people off in the library, I really don't. Although, if those girls are reading this, your response to "Why don't you girls just go to a cafe?" could have been better thought out than "Why don't YOU go to a cafe", a random selection of answers to which could include:

1) Because you're a poo poo head
2) Because I'll get boy germs
3) Ner ner nee ner ner, I'm telling Mum
or
4) Shut your face, stink-breath.

So I figured it out. On my way up to the gorgeous reading room with the partitions and the talking, I peered into the newspaper room and the genealogy room. Finally: grey haired silence broken only by people asking how to turn on the computers.

Of course, I have to be using the newspaper collection or the genealogy collection in order to be here, which is excellent because I usually refer to the newspaper anyway, but if I make even the slightest noise, I face the considerable wrath of those in the over sixty bracket, whose requirements for large print does not exclude an unshakable moral conviction, at the core of which is BE QUIET IN THE LIBRARY.

I think I just moved up a demographic. Or three.

Here it is, folks. My first official backdown. My first genuine complaint about the State Library, previously listed as one of my Favourite Places On Earth.

WHO THINKS IT IS A GOOD IDEA TO TUNE A PIANO IN A LIBRARY WITHIN EARSHOT OF THE PEOPLE STUDYING IN THE DESIGNATED QUIET ROOM (many of whom have left) FOR A PERIOD OF (so far) AN HOUR AND A HALF BY PLAYING ONE NOTE OVER AND OVER AND HITTING THAT EXACT SPOT IN YOUR BRAIN THAT IS TRYING TO CONCENTRATE.

I think I have officially lost the last quiet, untouchable, peaceful writing haven left on this earth. So long as there is the possibility I will EVER have to endure this TORTURE again, it is, officially, dead to me now.

WHY IS THERE A PIANO IN A LIBRARY ANYWAY?

Oh, please, make it stop.

PS. Any friends who are cheeky enough or members of my family reading this can feel free not to use the word "melodramatic" in relation to any or all of the above, for fear of me imposing stringent sanctions in the future.

PPS. The piano tuner has moved from a middle C to a high C. This is both a relief and a sign that we may be putting up with this for another hour. The dude at the desk across from me has officially discarded his laptop in favour of a skateboarding magazine.

I've been sent an email this week by several people about a playwright competition. I get emails like it all through the year, because I sign up to lists and because people are nice and think it would be good if I entered. I don't think I'd win, even I could enter. But I can't enter.

Competitions mean something in the theatre world. If you win a competition, sometimes it's the only exposure you get. That, and reviews. But a surefire way of getting reviews is by winning a playwright award for "excellence in Australian writing" or for "innovation in theatre" for addressing "issues of concern to Australia" etc. It's all a bit nauseating, but that's how it works.

The prizes are apparently offered to playwrights out of an interest in promoting excellence in Australian writing and revealing interesting things about our national psyche.

Let me be the first to say: what a load of crap.

In order to enter a script in a competition, you have to have done the following with it:

nothing

So, if you have produced the play yourself (because you don't like the idea of your script sitting around in a bottom drawer until someone else discovers it), you're not allowed to enter a script competition.

If you have allowed somebody else to produce the script, whether for stage or radio or in fact reproducing it in any way, you're not allowed to enter a script competition.

If you have agreed to one day in the future possibly allow someone else to produce the play, you're not allowed to enter a competition.

If you have entered the play in another competition, you're not allowed to enter.

So basically, you have to write your play for the competition. You have to submit it months in advance and you have to wait. You aren't allowed to enter it in anything else and you aren't allowed to put it on at the local scout hall.

This is because playwright competitions and funding bodies want to fund interesting and clever Australian pieces that hold a mirror up to society.

Or not.

Maybe it's because they want exclusive rights to put the play on first. I dunno. Just a wild guess.

I've been talking to some writer friends of mine. People who actually do write things that "hold up a mirror to Australia's psyche" and I think they should be able to enter competitions. Under the current rules, Shakespeare would be barred. Yes, I did just compare my friends and myself to Shakespeare. It's one in the morning on a Saturday and I'm getting worked up. I apologise. It won't happen again.

Just as a precaution, if you see me in the street, here is the kind of question I am getting tired of:

"You lost your entire hard drive? What, everything? Don't you back your stuff up? I always back my stuff up. I back it up nine times a day in three different languages and keep copies in four different buildings across five continents and then I send it to myself in a time machine and store it in a vacuum pack in the future."

And, to save time, here is my answer:

NO I DID NOT BACK MY STUFF UP OKAY YOU SMUG PRICK? I WAS BUSY. I HAD THINGS TO DO. I WAS "PLANNING" TO BACK MY STUFF UP. I WAS UNDER INSTRUCTIONS FROM RITA TO BACK MY STUFF UP. I DID NOT BACK MY STUFF UP. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? I HAVEN'T DONATED BLOOD FOR MONTHS EITHER. AND SOMETIMES I SWEAR AND QUITE OFTEN I FORGET PEOPLE'S NAMES AND ONE TIME I PLAYED A TRICK ON MY SCIENCE TEACHER BECAUSE I KNEW SHE WAS DEAF IN ONE EAR. I AM IN IMPERFECT PERSON IN MANY WAYS. BUGGER OFF, FOR INSTANCE.

That is all.

(Except this. Anthony Lane on Zellweger. Oh yes).

So the Sydney Festival was... well, it was fun at first.

We saw a few things, including the brilliant Small Metal Objects, the staging of which takes place at a train station (Circular Quay) and which broke down so many of the squirm-worthy pretensions that form the backbone of most theatre I seem to go to. It was truly inspired. If you haven't seen it: the actors converse into the headphones of the audience, who watch the crowd until they locate the bodies that match the voices. So you're hearing a conversation and you're looking at the crowd of (real) people at the station who don't understand why there's an audience with headphones looking at them, and then suddenly you realise two of the people in the crowd are the people having the conversation into your headphones. This does brilliant things to the way you watch/are watched/watch other people being watched etc that really makes you think. Add to this the fact that some of the performers are intellectually disabled and suddenly there's another dimension to the people looking/being looked at/"what's going on here? You looking at me?" scenario that already exists in a crowd of people looking at each other.

It would have been interesting to see the show on a weekday, when people at train stations behave differently. I saw it on a weekend, when people were slow, and curious, and bored. Hence there was a man who danced for the audience (what are they looking at? he asked his friend and then gave us something to look at, in case that was what we were there for). There was a group of young boys who circled one of the actors in a way that could have turned out to be threatening, except that all of us were watching, so it didn't.

I know most sensible people have already seen Back to Back theatre performing this show before, when it was in Melbourne, but I hadn't seen it. I'd see it again though, before the troupe (originally from Geelong) takes it overseas and gets famous. I recommend.

Anyhoo, then we went to see a Beckett play, at NIDA. Tell you what, if you've got any spare cash, you should get it down to NIDA pronto. Tin shed, that joint. Smell of an oily rag. Check out the foyer for instance.

Beckett was wonderful. Here is a photograph of Barry McGovern, but only because I can't find an actual photograph of his voice. Gorgeous voice, gorgeous performance, beautiful words, and all in all it was a fantastic piece of theatre with all the artifice that so often forms the basis of the aforementioned pretensions, but with none of the pretensions. Here is a review.

Then, on Sunday, when I had planned to work on my play, my hard-drive died and all my writing was lost. My writing, my notes, all drafts of the comedy festival show since early December... all gone. Forever. Back to the theme of this post: drama, with no pretension.

Back up your files.

Since then, I have been reading about important things like the abduction of children, the meltdown of the planet, the David Hicks situation, and war. Comedy Festival scripts and writing collections are really not that important.

Still. Back up your files. Now.

I was at university for six and a half years. I studied a variety of things, from the Australian Constitution to the formulation of a social jurisprudence in the Bridget Jones books.

While studying at the university, I honed one skill in particular. I became very good at working to deadlines. I can feel a deadline. I can sense it. At the start of the semester, I would write down the deadlines in my new diary with my new pen and I would know when they were and I was certain that this year I would start studying, researching, or writing several weeks before the due date.

There's a scene in the upcoming movie Happy Feet, which a group of us saw yesterday at a charity screening, where a penguin is terrified of jumping off a cliff. "It's okay", he says to himself, "Trick yourself". Then, teetering on the edge of the cliff face, he shouts "Look over there!" at which point he looks backwards while walking forwards, saying "Where?" and topples over the cliff.

The joke is funny because you can't trick yourself. You can't tell yourself the deadline for your essay is two weeks earlier than it actually is. You can't tell yourself the exam isn't on the 30th, it's on the third. You get really good at knowing how long you're going to need and you leave it until then. Then you research and practice and study and write and then on the Friday of the due date you submit your work and you go to the pub and by Monday you don't remember a single thing about the entire subject matter you've been learning about for the last six months.

So I've been trained like this - the bad habits of a tertiary education often come in the form of caffeine and nicotine, but in my case it's definitely an inability to work without a deadline, and a habit of leaving everything up to the last minute.

The Comedy Festival is in April. In university lingo, that's getting close to the time where you ask for an extension.

Better get myself down to the library.

Also, why is this conversation happening? (Or in the stupendously irritating Age)? I know why. It's because these kinds of people are so loathed and detested by women with any self regard whatsoever that they don't actually know any, which is sad because there is no better feeling than laughing tea out of your nose because your friends are the funniest people on earth. For the record, two of the top three funniest people I know are women, and the other one is frankly just an unfortunate product of genetics.

So there's a reason I've been missing, apart from the internet being down and the sun being out.

I've been missing because I've been uninspired. When the newspapers are full of this, this and this, it's very easy to think you're living in some kind of darkly comic novel.

Honestly, there's a bunch of blokes failing to recall whether they raped and killed a woman and took photographs of it, there are two political leaders (from either side of the vast political spectrum) claiming that migrants should sit an exam in English language* and Australian history, and one of the most watched "journalists" in the country is going to court over a child from a region that Australia has been trying to pretend doesn't even exist.

How genuinely dysfunctional.

So anyway, for once in my life I decided this evening that I had to disengage. I needed to not think about politics, or the media, or thugs, or the fact that John Howard wants people to learn about Australian history (which incidentally I thought we weren't supposed to remember) and then of course there's the fact that the opposition leader has put himself in the almost impossible position of being legitimately accused of racism by Amanda Vanstone.

So, in order to disengage, I decided to go and see a very brainless but potentially enjoyable film, the new Jack Black film.

Anyway, half way through, a group of people turned around to ask the couple behind them to please remove their feet from the backs of their seats.

So the people who were asked to take their feet off the seats told the other people to (and I'm editing this for all the under twelves) shut up, go away, leave them alone, and "Go home" because "You're not in China anymore, mate".

This impressive display demonstrated a fine understanding of Australian history (Chinese history not being relevant in Australia until the gold rush), a fantastic command of the language (although sadly not the use of the word "dinkum"), and even a reference to the "essential Australian value" of mateship ("You're not in China anymore, mate").

There was then a stand up screeching monologue wherein it was determined that some of the people in the cinema were "Asians" and that the two loud-shouty-type-racist-people "had paid good money" to be sitting in the film racially vilifying other persons. All of this screaming was happening during Jack Black's leaping around doing accents in tight lycra pants, and it resulted eventually in an almost-physical fight.

Since my disengaging tactic hadn't worked thus far, I decided to alert the very startled (twelve-year-old) manager to what was going on, and to his credit he did attempt to stop the madness, with the result that the loud shouting (from the non-Asian contingent) continued until after the movie. When I left, the manager was offering to arrange a safety escort (presumably in order to protect the Asians on their way back home to China).

Thankfully, I can report that when the lights came up, the entire cinema turned to the couple of - what's the fair dinkum English expression here - dickwits involved, and collectively greased them off or loudly commented (I saw several people complaining after I did). So, I'm not disengaging anymore. It doesn't work.

I've got no idea what the Jack Black film was like. It was the first film I'd attended since the Melbourne International Film Festival, which was largely "Asian" and some of the films from which have now gone back home to China.

FanTAStic day for Australia.

* Very interesting to me that a plan aimed at teaching English properly should be entitled the "fair dinkum" test. Doesn't it just roll off the tongue? Such excellent expression would make the proudest wordsmith blush.