The Sydney Writers' Festival is over. I am trying in my own way to cope, but I won't pretend it's easy.

I've been walking around all day in my new shoes, blistering up for the plane ride home. Art galleries are interesting, but paintings don't have question and answer sessions, and they aren't cantankerous and opinionated and hilarious and they don't sign themselves for you in the foyer afterwards.

Coming home tomorrow with a whole lot of scribbled notes on the backs of envelopes. Hopefully I'll have something sensible to say by then.

So I'm feeling a lot better, flu wise, and guess what?

Still haven't packed.

Sometimes there's something comforting about being reliably hopeless.

I'll be back in Melbourne on Tuesday, so talk amongst yourselves while I'm gone - feel free to go and check out the Sydney Writers' Festival website so you can imagine me swanning about being well-informed and three degrees warmer than I would be in Melbourne.

Or not. Depends on how incredibly out of my depth I really am. Tune in for updates.

Three more sleeps until the Sydney Writers' Festival!

I haven't read nearly enough. That is to say, I've read stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with the writers who are speaking at the Festival, which means that I'll be completely lost at question time unless someone discusses Richard Feynman, Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard or either of the Bridget Jones Diaries (and if anyone is losing respect for me right now, I have a pre-prepared and mutlilayered thesis on this topic which I DEFY anyone to contradict with authority).

So yeah, all I have to do is pack, which, given I cleaned my bedroom in the same way geologists meticulously carbondate layers of rock on the weekend, is hopefully going to be easier than it would have been.

Before then, I'm going to a whole lot of cool Law Week stuff, getting a haircut, getting my pants taken up, doing my dry cleaning, finishing some Standing There Productions stuff, reading up on the Writers' Festival, getting a flu injection, claiming back my eye doctor money on medicare, getting health insurance, taking up yoga, and starting my own charity.

Either that or I'll do nothing and then pack on Friday morning.

I saw two shows this weekend.

The first was at Melbourne University, and it was a musical about working, called Working. I know! How clever!

Seriously though, it was really fun and there were some beautiful voices on stage (embodied by people, you understand) so I enjoyed it, which, given I was completely starving and totally knackered on account of my having dressed up as a judge at seven thirty that morning, was somewhat of a surprise. It starred Reuben and Margaret, who had also dressed as judges that morning, who were (and you'll have to see a couple of posts below for this reference) really quite lawsome.

Then, last night, after the day from hell and with half a mind to stay home and watch crap on TV, I dragged myself to the theatre again. Not only did I drag myself to the theatre. I dragged myself to a show I had heard described as "experimental" and "absurdist" and which had written on the door of the theatre, "WARNING: SHOW CONTAINS SMOKING, FIREARMS, AND ADULT THEMES". Wicked, I thought to myself. The trifecta.

And not only that. I went by myself.

The reason I made myself go to this show even though I felt like a clump of oatmeal, is that it's on at a brand new theatre called The Black Lung, which is in Smith Street, Fitzroy (see here) and which is run by a bunch of people I know who are all very clever and very interesting and who also make me laugh. Anyone who decides to start their own theatre deserves at least the price of my ticket (which was ten dollars by the way - which should be the price of ALL theatre in Melbourne and which is why I find it endlessly amusing that the MTC runs all these "investigative sessions" where they ask random selections of "young people" why none of them go to the theatre. But I digress). So I knew that these people were smart and interested in making different stuff, and so I made myself go even though it was experimental and absurd and I felt like the most experimental and absurd thing I felt like doing was going to bed without brushing my teeth.

Anyway. It was called Avast, and somehow they managed to have it make sense but contain no cohesive narrative whatsoever. In that sense, it was genuinely insane. I was sitting on the edge of the room where I could see the audience reaction, which at times was half the point. The woman next to me was a pysch nurse who expressed her genuine concern for one or two of the performers' mental health. The guy on the other side of me was prone to a donkey-like laugh that would set off whole sections of the audience, and one or two members of the cast.

Okay, so here's what happened: There was a guy in a washing machine with Ochre in his pants (of course) who told this other guy he was adopted and so the other guy pretended he was blind and then slipped during the fight scene and appeared to break his nose (brilliantly done). There was a guy who played a tin whistle and ran full-pelt into a closed door. There was a bloke in a mask who recited a speech until he was shouted down by the other actors. There was this couple in the audience who tried to leave because the woman was feeling sick and things were a little politically incorrect and quite crazy and claustrophobic and she was sobbing, sobbing, and her boyfriend was trying to leave but they were shouted at by one of the actors, who then apologised and called off the show and offered everyone their money back and then after people started leaving the theatre this woman in a full opera costume got up from behind a chair and sang an aria while simulating sex with the tin whistle guy.

And then everyone went for beers.

You've just got to love the theatre sometimes.

This has been my timetable this week:

Monday: work at Victoria Law Foundation, go out in evening to Arts Law Week event entitled "You Be The Judge," which is all about sentencing laws and which is attended by members of the public with various agendas and which makes me think it should be compulsory for people in law schools to sit through such discussions (ie discussions about what happens to the offenders the lawyers help convict, and what the public thinks of the legal system). Also very interesting to see the people who run the legal system defend it (very impressively in this case).

Tuesday: boring.

Wednesday: Victoria Law Foundation in the afternoon (after a most unproductive morning in which it was proposed by me that I get up early, go to gym and get lots of work done, but which was overruled by me so that I did virtually nothing, got cross with myself and went to work). After work, went to a play reading for Arts Law Week, which happened to star everyone's TV favourite Bud Tingwell, and... my sister. Bud was good I guess, but he was clearly threatened by the stage-stealing performance of my sister, who had only two lines (both of them in the first half) and who was as excited as I was by the fact that the catering at interval was provided by the CWA.

Thursday: Unproductive morning followed by self-induced fury (see Wednesday). Afternoon: go to Victoria Law Foundation, get wig and gown in order to dress as judge and stand in street at seven thirty Friday morning advertising law week because haven't found anyone else to do it, make phone calls, rush out. Go to eye doctor, who renders me temporarily visually impaired so that cannot read either of the two books I am reading (breaching the one book rule), and cannot even guess at the sudoko, which Stewart smugly completes while I sit by and tell him my pupils are being diluted. ("With what?" he asks). Specialist tells me he's never seen healthier eyes in his life, sees me for five minutes, charges me nearly two hundred dollars and tells me to wear sunglasses for six hours. After blindly stumbling home to parents' house to return and borrow things, I go to a Centre of Contemporary Photography exhibition, get in the car, go home. Pass out.

Today: Wake up at OBSCENE O'CLOCK (possibly a quarter to). Get ready to spend morning dressed up like judge in front of streams of people getting off train at Flagstaff Station, most of whom I went to Law School with and are in some cases only a decade or so away from being dressed as judges themselves, step outside to find it is DARK and there is a fog so thick you can barely see you sister who you are going to work with because she often gets up this early and thinks nothing of it and in fact is going to gym before work and pilates in her lunch break. Go and stand outside Flagstaff Station. Call out things about law week, not thinking to be quite as hilarious as the other two people working on Parliament Station, who later reveal that their spruiking campaign is based on the phrase: "Law Week - It's Lawsome!" After spruiking, spend rest of day at Law Foundation, drive stuff around Melbourne returning it, get home, go with Rita to musical at Melbourne University (it's called "Working" - should be interesting) then go to drinks, other drinks, other drinks, possible other drinks, and then home. Collapse, pass out etc.

Tomorrow? Production meeting at 9.30am. Possibility of Rita being late and Lorin being later: somewhere in the high 90% range.

In Penny's show, Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, Kathy Smith talks about finding Horsham on Google Earth (she's a teensy bit of a nerd).

Anyway, so now everyone in my house is sitting around looking up stuff on Google Earth. We've found my old house in Boston, and the place down the road from there where I used to get cheesecake icecream (seriously), and the place where I used to chuck a frisbee with a guy called Jim who I once told a joke to about a war veteran and then turned out his dad was a war veteran and the joke wasn't very funny and that was a bummer because it's the only joke I've ever remembered. We've found Boston College (and the Boston College football field which is the size of some island nations in the Pacific) and the resevoir I used to walk around to get to college every morning. We've found my house in Melbourne. We've found the university and I remembered how I used to play hockey and wondered what's happened to that part of my brain (what does it do now?).

Anyway, now it's getting silly. We tried to Google Earth Paris Hilton's house.

So I've decided I'm going to read some more of my book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, because in his spare time while he was studying at college, he worked out that if a trail of ants came into the cupboard of his room while he was studying, he could circumvent their trail to the cupboard and redirect it back outside, via a pile of sugar, merely by making individual chair lift things for each ant and redirecting them all for an hour, until all the other ants followed. It's got to do with the little trails of acid they leave around the place.

That is what he did in his spare time.

Actually, now that I think about it, he's exactly the kind of person who would spend hours on Google Earth. Possibly not looking up Paris Hilton's house.

In our defence, we were only looking it up because we thought she probably had a pool we could see from the air.

Because that's a good excuse.

I'm frankly still coming down from the screening of the film the other night, which was right up there with the most exciting moments Standing There Productions has had this year (squeezing in just above the time I cleaned my room so comprehensively that I could see my desk for a whole day and a half). But in other news:

Nearly finished Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, which is getting really juicy now that his love of science has driven him to work on a little old thing called the nuclear bomb. But I must confess that I broke the rule of never dallying from one book, and I read two articles about Alan Bennett (in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books) which means that I now feel more or less entitled to discuss him as if we've been acquaintances for years. When David Lodge, in the NYRB article, started criticising Bennett's diary entry of September 11, I found myself thinking, "Oh dear, David, your problem is, you just don't understand Alan". It's just like when I was watching the winter Olympics and I actually called out furiously in my own loungeroom, "Oh I can't believe she thought she could do that during a 360 turn". Massive expert, me.

Today I've been working in the Victoria Law Foundation, trying to help organise Law Week. I was trying to find some funny quotes or jokes about law. Problem was, they had to NOT be offensive to lawyers, which of course left me with things that sound like bumper stickers. "Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal" etc.

So anyway, thankfully along the way I found the following statements from the snorty-laugh-inducing Dave Barry (go here) who is also the man who established the rule that you should never comment on a woman's pregnancy until you actually see a baby coming out of her (in case she has put on weight, rather than become pregnant). Anyway, here's Dave:

"Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world".

Also:

"Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear"

Finally, I greatly enjoy the following as a sage commentary on American party politics:

"The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club".

... If you want to genuinely laugh as well as quite inexplicably wanting all of a sudden to watch the entire of series one of 24, go to his blog entries on TV. Most amusing.

Did I mention we had fun at the screening? Pictures up soon.

Last night was the cast and crew screening of our film, I Could Be Anybody. We cheated and invited a rowdy bunch of friends and supporters as well. It was a brilliant night, with lots of drinkies and (it gets a bit gourmet here) iced vo vos. Seriously. Are we not the PEAK of cuisine?

There were three screenings of the film, due to the fact that there were too many bums and not enough seats, so we got to witness various different audience reactions to a film previously only ever watched by two people at a time (usually the same two people). Until yesterday, I Could Be Anybody had only been watched in its finished form by Rita, me, Stew, the DVD angels at Eskimo Productions, targeted family members, and my housemates. Prior to that, in its more raw form, it had been watched by half a dozen other people, from Fez the sound magician to Marcus the colour-fiddling guy. So in a sense, this was the "outing" of our short film.

The screening was at a gorgeous little theatrette called the Erwin Rado cinema (see here) and thanks to everyone who turned up, helped out, and assisted in eradicating our surplus of tick tock biscuits, iced vo vos, and snake lollies.

Photos will be up on our site just as soon as we've broken into the producer's car (where her keys are currently secured), located the camera, re-acquired basic motor skills, and managed to get home without hurting ourselves.

So tomorrow night is our cast and crew screening in Fitzroy. I'm reminded again of how bizarre my life is when I find myself asking questions using words I don't understand to people I barely know, the answers to which could well determine what it is people actually see when they come to see our film.

Did you know, for instance, that there are heaps of different ways to watch a film on a TV? There are heaps of different DVD players and heaps of different sorts of TVs and projectors and there are things called "modes" and "formats" and WHY WASN'T ALL THIS SORTED OUT IN A MEETING SOMETIME IN THE LATE EIGHTIES?

I was watching our film today in my loungeroom when it ocurred to me that I must have lost quite a lot of weight since I was in that film. I was thinking, "Hang on, is this a movie about a fat girl? Is this a comment on the representation of women in the media?" I mean, I was reeeeally wide. Then (with considerable relief) I realised I was in "wide" mode.

Mental note: remember not to put film in wide mode tomorrow night. Actors may take offence.

Reading update: Sydney Writers' Festival fast approaching and I'm a fraction (geddit?) of the way through Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, which is a book full of deliciously outdated expressions and vast overuse of the exclamation mark. It's also fascinating because it's about a guy who treats every moment in life as an opportunity for an experiment (social or scientific). Including dreams. He decides he wants to work out what dreams are like, so in his own dreams he sits there going, "ah, this bit of my dream is clever. See what my subconscious is doing there? That's most intriguing".

This is my favourite bit so far, which is an aside during a description of the kinds of things he would argue with fellow students about at university:

"I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something that they didn't believe - like the time we got into an argument as to whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that that wasn't the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head".

Of course you did. You had to.

Here's to nerds.

Where would we be without them?

Us. Where would you be without us?

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?

There are some Ani Difranco lyrics that go like this:

They say goldfish
Have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time

... which is not necessarily a song about how bad my memory is, but it is yet to be conclusively determined that it isn't a song about how bad my memory is.

Why do I forget things? Why have I carried a letter, hand-written, addressed and with a stamp on the envelope, everywhere I've been since February? Why haven't I posted it? It's a nice letter, it talks about my plans for the year, about the weather being too hot and about the Christmas dinner starting to wear off.

Why did I carefully fill out the Women's Health Survey I get sent every couple of years, and then leave it on my desk for four months? Why go to the trouble of filling in all the little boxes (DEFINITELY, LESS DEFINITE, NOT SURE, PROBABLY NOT, NEVER) and then leave those medically significant answers lying face down against an old program for the Astor Theatre and a postcard from someone in Noosa?

I don't know why I do these things. Sometimes I think I should do yoga and sudokus and cryptic crosswords and low impact weight training so my mind becomes a steel trap for facts and bits of information like where I'm actually going and what I'm doing on the 96 tram when in fact the plan was for me to get on the 86 tram and pick up my car and drive it home.

Which is of course why I find myself asking all these questions. I find it deeply depressing that I can't even remember the correct procedure for getting myself home of an evening. Tonight, I was supposed to go to the car. I forgot about the car and went home. The reason for this? Well, because I was distracted, of course. Why? Because I was doing a sudoku so my mind would be sharper and I wouldn't forget things.

Don't you think that's cruel?

So my book reading project is going well.

Last night I finished the enormous tome that is Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, which (nerdishly) I read from cover to cover as though I was reading a novel. It's really fragments from his diary and stories about his life, cobbled together when he thought (and his doctors thought) he was probably dying.

One of the best things I discovered about him was the stance he took in relation to Oxford University, the university he attended and apparently loved. He was, however, horrified when they set up "The Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications". When asked to attend a charity event, and later to accept an honorary degree at the university, Bennett wrote back to them and suggested "that if the university thinks it's appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch's money, perhaps they ought to approach Sadam Hussein to found a chair in peace studies".

I wish I could be offered lots of important-sounding honours so that I could wittily and pointedly turn them down.

So that's two books (one play and one autobiography) as well as two essays by Cooke and now almost half of an extract from a James Kelman book (yes I know, extracts shouldn't count, but this is the information age so I'm doing well to even maintained my concentration throughout this paragraph. I bet you skimmed).

You did so.