I know I've been absent from these pages for a couple of days but this has just inspired me to make myself known: CHECK IT OUT.

In the State Library today, the following hard work is being done:

- Year twelve exam study.
- Fitful REM sleep beneath school blazers, jumpers, other peoples' pencil cases.
- Bidding on eBay (one gentleman appears to be in search of a phone, another a laptop).
- Discussion in relation to year twelve exams.
- Discussion in relation to OMIGOD SHE TOTALLY DID NOT SAY THAT. TELL ME SHE DIDN'T SAY THAT.
- The tracing of a woman's long lost sister who possibly moved to Sydney in 1923. Seriously.
- A script for a children's TV show. Sort of.

No matter what you're working on, someone in the State Library is working harder and someone in the State Library is not working at all. This is one true statement about life from which I don't think I'll ever back down.

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.

Being a bookish nerd means that the library is a wonderful place to work, because you're surrounded by people learning things, reading things, TALKING LOUDLY (I hate the year twelve exams, PLEASE MAKE THEM STOP) and falling asleep in cubicles surrounded by thousands of dollars of technological equipment.

But it can be a tiny bit distracting. You have to keep focussed. For example, on the way to the top level of the library, standing out prominently among the other books is a book entitled BRUNEL. An old friend of mine used to live in a street of the same name, and this BRUNEL book always strikes me as addressing a topic about which I know nothing and could learn more. The temptation to grab the fat book by its spine and read about Brunel is almost overwhelming, but so far I haven't given in to my nerdier (and more procrastinatorial) instincts and I remain ignorant. I have deduced, by the size of the book and its font, as well as the fact that there is a street named after him, that Brunel was some kind of British General in one of the wars.

There is an entire section of the library dedicated to cooking, which is often frequented (I am not making this up) by people in white hats with black aprons covered in flour. This makes me wonder about the eating establishments in Melbourne. Do they not have cook books? Are they double-checking whether the dish they're cooking has oregano in it? Are they, like the main character in Ratatouille, actually fraudulent chefs with no qualifications, getting by on instinct and the recipes they come across in the library?

Anyway, you can see what I am battling with here. The ability to be THIS distracted by the word Brunel on the spine of a book.

Perhaps our TV series will be about Brunel. And chefs. And the idiots sitting next to me who are looking up rude words in the dictionary instead of studying for their exam, about which they speak with genuine fear in between reading the definition of the word "buttock". Which is, and I remember this myself, the funniest thing ever.

I am officially a grumpy old nerd.

I have noticed a pattern over the past month. It goes like this:

1. Become extremely excited about development funding from Australian Children's Television Foundation.
2. Vow that this is the start of a new era.
3. Vow that era will be characterised by early rising (Operation Getting Out of Bed Like a Normal Person) and organisation.
4. Recruit frightening producer (Rita Walsh) to call me at eight in the mornings on Mondays with bit list of things to do.
5. Enlist others to meet me for morning coffees by way of introducing personal obligations into already onerous routine.
6. Rise early every day until it feels quite normal.
7. Become over-zealous and introduce morning runs and home made lunches to routine.
8. Contract bizarre virus called Croup, usually only contracted by babies.
9. Collapse and return to slacker life of haphazard work practices.
10. Become well again, repeat steps 1-7.
11. Contract bizarre virus without a name, the symptom of which is collapsing like a marionette in a Punch N Judy show.
12. Collapse and return to slacker life of haphazard work practices.

THEREFORE it is with some trepidation that I await Rita's 8am phone call on Monday, which will mark the beginning, once again, of step 1.

What's next on the "obscure virus" agenda? Scurvy? Consumption?

Possibly I should take Dee's advice from a previous post and just go with my usual rhythms. Problem is, that would involve me working in the wee hours of the morning and sleeping through the day, which is useful to nobody except me, and in fact it's not even useful to me.

Scurvy it is. Brace yourselves.

Today, having returned my heart monitor to the crippled hospital system from whence it came, I am like a new woman. Less bionic, for starters.

Being sick, even if only melodramatically and without reason, makes you think about being healthy and climbing mountains on the weekend and drinking carrot juice and doing yoga that makes you barely break a sweat into your crisp white yoga outfit while eating yoghurt and almonds and wearing moisturising cream that makes your skin glow and sharing a joke with someone just off camera who has just said something amusing yet flattering. You know, like on the low fat margarine posters on bus stops.

You watch, it's all going to be different now. Either that, or I'm going to succumb to The Guilt and become a slave again to the written word (and the internet) (and Twinings).

Did you watch The Librarians on the ABC last night? Did you press pause over my name in the credits?

No? Just me then?

Carry on.

You may have noticed (all two of you) that I have been missing for a while from these pages, after the rather dramatic declaration that I was collapsing for no reason and had spent the night in hospital.

Well, look, I'm a dramatist. It's what I do.

It is true that I've spent the past week or so falling over, stumbling sideways into walls, breaking glasses, dropping things almost constantly, and swooning like a drunk, legally blind, seasick toddler. But that's just how I roll. The doctors think I have a "mystery virus", which should come as no surprise to anybody who knows me, since if I get sick, I really do make the most of it (see "dramatist", above). It is also apparently what doctors say when they don't know what the hell's wrong with you. When lawyers don't know what to do, they delay the case. Which is why...

In case I do not have a virus, the doctors have recommended that I wear a heart monitor for the day. As a result, I currently look like a rather relaxed individual with a bomb strapped to my chest. The heart monitor traces my heartbeats, so I have been instructed to do all the ordinary things I would do in a day. I am therefore wondering whether the heartbeats increase when I watch "cockatoo dancing to Justin Timberlake" on youtube, or when I receive alarming emails from Rita about how much work I have to do by Friday. I have to keep a journal of any unusual activities which might raise my heart beat, so I'm wondering if "going for a walk" is more important than "swearing at commercial radio". It strikes me, from listening to radio for an hour this arvo while I was walking around trying to make myself faint so that the heart monitor could record my heart beats as I did so, that commercial radio is (as my grandfather would say) chewing gum for the mind. Every now and then (amongst the commercials) there is a news break, which starts off with a featured commercial land then launches into thunderous music followed by a chirpy pre-pubescent lady on crack singing, "News Britney might be getting access to her kids and a soldier returns to Australia a hero. A little heavy on the ring-road, Monash chokas city-bound and it's eighteen degrees in Cheltenham".

Why have news breaks?

Honestly.

Anyway, as you can see, I've had a bit of time to think about these things and it seems to me that one should wear a heart monitor all the time, in order to know what to avoid. There are several people I am very glad I didn't run across in the street, for instance. And I'm really quite glad I didn't go and see Saw III.

Hoping this finds you well, and thanks for your concern. For those of you who didn't express concern, get yourselves a heart monitor and SEE IF YOURS IS WORKING AT ALL etc.

PS I just got "trick or treated". In Australia. By Australian children dressed in Disney costumes no doubt made in China.

I'm officially old and grumpy. That's probably what the heart monitor print-out will say. "You're old and grumpy. Get over it".