So I found a quote in the weekend paper attributed to Aaron Sorkin, who, for those who follow a different religion, is the guy who invented The West Wing.

Sorkin says, "Most of my time spent writing something is spent walking around the room not writing".

Oh... my... GOD I AM HAPPY TO HEAR THAT. I am so happy to hear that, it really is pathetic. My heart feels healthier. My blood pumps harder. I sat there ripping it carefully out of the newspaper and thought to myself, "This couldn't be better. It couldn't be better! From now on, everything is going to be okay. Ohhhh life is good. Life is rich with goodness and tart with the tang of as-yet-unwritten brilliant television dialogue."

And then today I thought maybe there could be one small change to the above quote. Maybe I would feel even better if the quote had read, "Most of my time spent writing something is spent walking around the room, eating bits of stuff out of the fridge, surfing the net, doing the dishes, and reading articles about the situation in East Timor, the question of nuclear power, and the significance of "gym culture" in relation to the western world's three most recent terrorist attacks (seriously, go here)".

But, coming just short of that, Aaron Sorkin has pretty much justified the last few, dreadfully unproductive, days of my life.

For that, and for the wonderful, hilarious, downright spunky character of CJ Cregg, I thank him. And I take the first series off my shelf and I decide there shall be another viewing. Just in case there's anything I missed the first eight times.

PS. If there is anyone out there who is an accountant or a tax lawyer, I would very much appreciate advice on whether everything I purchased over the weekend is now tax deductable as a result of the above Aaron Sorkin quote. I am willing to testify in court if required.

Usually, and I think this is maybe part of why I like to write, I really love people. Or, I love listening to them and watching them and working out what makes them like they are. Sometimes, if someone is being a jerk on the train or acting like a princess in a cafe, I'm quite interested in watching everything play itself out. Even if they're being rude to me. It often doesn't annoy me, or whatever. It kind of fascinates me and I stop whatever I'm doing (including having a conversation) and instantly cling like a sea creature to the little personality performance that's going on within ear shot.

But then, sometimes, people just thoroughly, comprehensively, overwhelmingly bother me. And what bothers me most about people who bother me is that they're bothering me at all, because I know (from my eavesdropping work) that people are just a complex mix of ego and emotion and doubt and self-conscious, conflicted, angry confusion about the rest of the world.

As a writer, I know this, and I also know that any biases, weaknesses or peculiarities in my own character are exactly the elements that lead me to respond to people the way I do, and so my own anger or annoyance at other people is actually more to do with me than to do with them.

But MAN some people shit me. Usually it's people like the guy who was at my gym today, who was a bully. Usually it's bullies. Bullies or people who are unfair or people who are idiots pretending they're better than you, or they know more than you. Pulling rank, essentially. I don't think I could have been in the army.

Anyway. Guy at gym today, size of a house, enormous and sweaty and lifting heavy weights with a theatrical gusto not entirely necessary in the Council-run gym full of grey-haired people with "FIT FOR LIFE" t-shirts, and people like me wearing baggie trackies and runners they've had since year eleven. Anyway, so I'm doing this weight machine thing, and I slowly rest the weight to readjust my grip, and suddenly there's a huge sweaty fist on the machine in front of me, and I can hear someone speaking to me. I take my earphones off and look up this enormous body at this huge purple head saying, "I'll just push in here between sets".

He wanted to get on the machine. The machine I was on! I was so astonished that I said okay, and I got up. I thought maybe there was a rule. Then I thought about how maybe there were also rules that bullies with purple heads are not allowed to leave their weights lying around on the ground (as per the sign on the wall that says DO NOT EVER LEAVE WEIGHTS ON GROUND) and other rules that the purple-headed are not allowed to leave their lurid green and yellow sweaty beach towels all over the equipment while they steal other people's machines from under them. I thought about how maybe there was some kind of sub-rule about physical intimidation and general pig-headed arrogance. Then, just like that, I was furious.

So I got more furious. A woman pulled out in front of me in a red sports car because she knew I would slow down because I was in a Ford Laser. I looked horrified and she did a schoolyard what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it face, and I shouted into the hot Ford Laser for the next couple of hundred metres, eventually muttering myself into a silence as I parked my car.

I parked my car out the front of my house, which at the moment has a sign on it that says it's for sale. It's not for sale, the house out the back is for sale, but people are confused, and other people are wandering down the side of our house checking it out. The house out the back is built right behind our house and has a clear view of our living room and our backyard. I mentioned this to "James" - the real estate agent - who told me that it wasn't true and that in fact you couldn't see my house. I told him you could see my house from the living room. He said, "Oh yes, but not the bedroom".

I said, yes you can. If you open the window in the bedroom upstairs you can see right into my house.

He said you can't open the window.

I said you can.

He said you can't.

I said I just did.

He said I think you might be mistaken.

I said, what, about whether or not I opened a window?

He said, excuse me. He spoke to someone else. It was a woman with an American accent. She wondered if they'd had many people through the house today. James said not many. She said that's interesting. That might be because the open for inspection time listed in the newspaper is half an hour early.

He said, no it isn't.

She said, yes it is.

He said no it isn't.

She showed him the newspaper.

He cleared his throat.

She described the crowd that gathered at the advertised time. She used the words "angry mob".

I liked her.

I'm thinking maybe I stay inside this evening. A wanker ratio of 3:1 never bodes terribly well.

So today I was getting things ready for the cast and crew screening we're having on Thursday night, for our film, I Could Be Anybody. I'm halfway through my list of things that need to be done by then, so the glass is half empty, or full, or something.

Anyway, I decided that I needed to go to gym, even just for half an hour, even just because if I don't it will become a metaphor for life merging into work. So I did. And there were these two teenage girls doing weights together. One of them said to the other, "Did you see that guy upstairs in the cardio room?"

The other one said, "No. Why? Was he cute?"

"Yes"

"Would I think he was cute?"

"No"

"Nya. Then who cares?"

That reminded me of these drama games we used to play. You had to establish your status somehow. One day we worked out that in Australia, laid-back can be the most powerful position you can take.

Just prior to that, I'd been parking my car in Collingwood (dropping something off at the awesome DVD place, Eskimo Productions) and there was this guy taking the front off his terrace house. He was sweating and covered in plaster and paint. He heard me pulling into the car park out the front of his place and he turned around. His T-shirt said, "information is power". The car in his driveway was an old green ford with a bumper sticker on it that said, "my other car is the met".

For those of you not living in Melbourne, that means "my other car is the state-owned public transport system before it was privitised".

So anyway I got out of the car and there was a cat hanging around the back wheel. I said hello to the cat who then did what all cats like to do when you say hello to them, which is get under your feet.

"Come on Nietzsche", said the information is power guy, "leave people alone".

... sometimes it just writes itself doesn't it?

Today is the first Sunday for four weeks that I haven't had to cram everything in before a seven thirty show. It's the first day of no comedy festival shows whatsoever.

So I got up at two this afternoon, after a rather colourful night at the festival club, and I thought very seriously about getting some of the work done that Rita and I had scheduled in for Sunday. Then I got dressed in what clothes I could find that weren't held together by cigarette smoke and rain (it's been a very healthy couple of weeks) and I went for a walk. Which was quite adventurous, considering the other option was staying in bed.

In other news, Sammy J, the guy who plays the Young Liberal in I Could Be Anybody, was awarded Best Newcomer last night at the comedy festival, which is enormously exciting and he should be sent to the congratulatorium (along with Tim Stitz, who is already there. They can have cups of tea together by the fire and talk about what to do next).

Also, I went to the Victorian College of the Arts graduation ceremony the other night. I was outraged that I had to pay thirty dollars to go and watch someone walk up on stage and collect a piece of paper. I would now like to retract that outrage. It was quite brilliant, with bits of film, music, dance, and performing that really made me wonder (once again) what life would have been like for me if I'd gone to art school.

Ben Hjorth, who played Oliver in our play, People Watching, led the most astonishing chant from the back of Hamer Hall in Melbourne. The people who did Men of Steel at the comedy festival performed some of their hilarious food-fight puppet comedy (a genre consisting, I should think, only of them) and the kids from the school of dance made me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my body (walking? sitting around? Pathetic!). Then, hours into the ceremony, a shambles of musicians appeared onto the stage and played some awe-inspiring stuff (and I'm leaving out the actors and the film makers because I'm far more interested in watching things I don't know anything about). So there. Pretty excellent stuff. Stew graduated (and surprised everyone a little when he took a polariod of the actual moment he shook hands with the Vice Chancellor) and then my friend Simon graduated, as did our 1st AD from I Could Be Anybody, Eva Tandy (who was whooped with considerable gusto by the rather reserved audience). I'm very lucky to know these people.

Anyway, I have to go and fall asleep over my new book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman. Yay for learning things from other people.

In training for the Sydney Writer's Festival, I've decided I need to finish the books I've started (those on the top of the pile next to my bed). Until then, I'm not allowed to buy or borrow new ones because I don't deserve them.

Over the years, I've become a hopeless reader. When I was a kid, I used to read every book from cover to cover, and then read every other book by that author, in order of books written. Now, I'm hopeless.

You know on your computer, if you press ALT and TAB at the same time, it flicks between one program and another? That's how my life works. There I am, working on a film and then ALT + TAB I'm also working at the Comedy Festival but ALT + TAB I'm working at the Law Foundation and ALT + TAB I'm working at Radio National. All the other windows are open and the programs are running and stuff, but I'm flicking between them all the time, so I never quite optimise my experience.

That's how I read, too. I've had Alan Bennett's new book (which is so funny and brilliant) next to my bed since I ordered it online so I'd get it before anyone in Australia could claim to have read it before me. Several ALT + TABs later and I still haven't finished it but I've read several Joanna Murray-Smith plays, two brilliant scripts by Tom Stoppard and the beginning of a book called Boyhood by Coetzee. I also started a book by Will Self but I lost it down the back of the bed somewhere and I wasn't sure I didn't resent and despise it anyway, so at least this way I don't have to find out.

I do feel so guilty about these books I don't finish. It's a form of infidelity, not unlike when you have to turn off a CD in the middle of a really intense bit where the singer is belting out a particularly complicated couple of bars of climax and you have to rush out of the house but you know you're not paying enough respect to Aretha, or Buckley, or more likely if I'm being honest, Ben Folds.

Anyway, point being, book-wise, I am turning over a new leaf. Last night, after visiting Penny's and Yianni's shows (yay for them by the way, they're selling out)... I went home.

Yes! Home. Not to the Festival Club. Not to a Kitson gig or to support one of the local heroes or to a bar to hang out with people I don't see enough of anymore. I went home, I had a bath and I finished Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Yay for Tom Stoppard being clever about British snobbery and writing good characters for women and being a little bit obscure and making you wish you'd studied history right the way through university.

So, I'm on my way. For a lovely take on the reading of books, check out this. Nick Hornby, writer of things like About a Boy, writes a column about what he reads versus what he plans to read every month. Depressingly, he reads more than I do and complains about not reading much and being a philistine. But all that will change now I'm sure and I will become the sort of person Nick Hornby wishes he could be. Or not. We'll see how that one pans out.

Last, ALT + TAB, a dig at The Age, which I realise is a dead horse, but COME ON. Yesterday, they (the Melbourne newspaper that sponsors the comedy festival) ran reviews of Ross Noble (who so desperately needs a good review), two people with national TV shows, and two Americans.

Good. Excellent. So people know what the things they won't be able to get into because they're SOLD OUT are going to be like. What a service to the community.