Lately, I have been swooning. In the real sense of the word. I fainted. Twice in as many days.

Never having fainted in my life before, and in the absence of having just met Johnny Depp or being told by Mister Darcy that he ardently admires me, I decided this was a habit in need of further investigation.

So I went to a Victorian public hospital. Wow.

Turns out, there's a nursing dispute. Turns out, Victorian nurses are paid less than any other nurses in the country. Significantly. Which is no wonder. They barely do anything to help the community. Check it out, here are some edited highlights of what went down during the thirteen hours I was in emergency at the hospital:

1. Two hallucinating, violent, screaming, presumably ice-affected patients had to be subdued. Their abusive, terrifying screams could be heard throughout the corridors. The staff looked exhausted.

2. An elderly man with renal failure and a tumour sat alone waiting until his tummy was empty enough for further tests. He was looked after by a nurse who had to excuse himself several times because nobody else was available to resuscitate other patients. Despite this, he and the old man had a few in-jokes by the end of the night and I felt less bad for him being there alone.

3. A woman who had chased her attacker down a dark alleyway was being followed everywhere by two policewomen who asked questions about what kind of needle her attacker used to stab her with. The woman was worried, shaking, and also possibly a little bit stoned. When describing chasing the man down the street, she got the giggles. My boyfriend is going to think I'm such an idiot, she said.

4. A student whose mother had flown over from China to support her during her exams was desperate for something for her tonsilitis. She was already on antibiotics. It needs to go away, she explained, because of my exams. She had waited for nine hours to see a doctor. She was so stressed she couldn't sit down.

5. A guy had fallen up the stairs with a broken leg in a cast. He described it as excruciatingly painful. The male nurse had to shave him in order to access the leg. It was embarrassing, so the nurse offered to shave a smiley face and the patient said he'd probably prefer Batman. The nurse had to rush off to find a heart monitor, but he agreed that the patient was definitely a batman kind of guy.

6. A woman, disembarking a tram, had broken her foot. Her friend, who there to support her and who was studying law, read about the Nuremberg trials in the waiting room. A woman with kidney problems groaned. Nuremberg "puts things in perspective", said the law girl, unconvincingly.

7. At almost six in the morning, a girl who has been moaning in pain has to face up to a needle. The nurse gets her to relax. Genuinely terrified, she begs him not to inject her. He talks her down. She relaxes. She feels better. He changes shifts, informing the next nurse of every single detail of the patients in their care.

8. Back in the waiting room, when I was looking worse, the triage nurse brought me a glass of milk and a pain killer and tucked my hair behind my ear. She apologised for the wait and told me how far up the queue I was. She was verbally abused by several people. She was wearing a badge saying Fund Nursing Properly.

Today, after sleeping off the night I had without sleep the night before, I wrote a letter to my local member, the health minister, and the Premier. Victorian nurses are the lowest paid in the country. The nurse I mention here has a three year postgrad degree and is paid less than a first year nurse in NSW who has never been in a hospital. Without proper ratios and incentives for nurses, hospitals will have to run like the one I was at the other night - in total lock-down, no ambulances allowed in, with people being treated in chairs, in areas not designated for treatment.

People who are sick are desperate, sometimes angry, sometimes terrified, sometimes weeping, sometimes violent. Nurses are doing real work with real consequences and from my brief window into the system today, they're doing it bloody well.

Of course, if I had the money or the inclination, I could have paid a whole lot of money and gone to a private hospital, where I would have been out in mere hours, rather than an entire night. Because that makes sense.

If you care, go here.

If you work at St Vincent's, thank you.

I know I've said it before, but there's nothing like a deadline.

Fake deadlines, real deadlines, as long as there's someone you're letting down if you don't make it, or as long as there's a definite end point beyond which you can't continue, it will work.

Par example, each day I know I have to get out of the library at a certain time. When the announcement comes over the loudspeaker saying that we need to get out because they're closing, I know there's half an hour left. I reckon my best work is thanks to that guy. If that guy could make threatening announcements all day, I'd be as prolific as Bryce Courtney. And possibly as unrelaxed.

Another very real deadline: the AC power on my laptop isn't working for some reason. I have forty minutes left before it goes to sleep.

So, you'll have to excuse me while I write a novel. A short one.

Here's a tip from years of nerdy library attendance: if you want to have a really productive day in the library, go in on a Friday. For some reason, which I'm sure someone somewhere has figured out, libraries are almost completely deserted on Fridays. You could fire a cannon through the main room and you wouldn't so much as graze anyone on the elbow.

Other days, it's stacks on, everyone fighting for a seat, hundreds of people rushing about with their mobile phones, talking to their friends, dropping things, crossly standing in the "15 minute" internet queue (it's never fifteen minutes) and the old favourite: a hilarious ringtone chimes ostentatiously, followed by a fountain of guffaws.

I suppose it's the students. When I was a student, Friday was like the weekend. You spent most of it intending to get your essay done and ended up going to the movies or bumping into someone from your politics tute sitting in the sun with a beer. Several times I went to the wrong party in a street in Carlton and ended up having a lovely time with an entirely different group of people, some of whom I even recognised from uni. I always yearned, back in those days, for weekends without the essay guilt. I yearned for a five day a week, nine to five, ordinary, normal job. Possibly because I knew I would never have one.

Of course, now, I have The Guilt just as much as I used to, only without the satisfaction of being graded for the work I hand in, and without the student elections and the cheap Indian food after six in the evening.

So here I am on a Friday again, in a library, with a deadline hanging over my head and a cafe/bar outside where I bump into people I did politics tutes with. Honestly. Yesterday, I bumped into the friend from school with whom I first started a theatre company at Melbourne University. I remember the two of us filling out the forms, writing the dates of the play in our diary and thinking, "Well, we did it - what next?"

She's a writer now. She's been doing her PhD. The deadline's hanging over her and she really should be getting it finished, she said, as a friend sidled up to her and ordered them both a coffee.

I'd already had mine, so I had to go back inside and fight for a seat in the library.

I have always thought there is a word missing in the English language. I don't know if there's a word for it in other languages or not, but I feel there should be a word that describes the sudden sensation or recognition that a lot of time has passed and many things have happened but CONVERSELY AND SIMULTANEOUSLY that not a lot has changed and time feels compacted - as if we were just here and we left for a moment because one of us needed a drink and then when we came back, eight years had passed.

Perhaps I haven't expressed that properly, but the feeling of time having passed both slowly and quickly is a sensation I have quite often as I get older, particularly as I go through all my old routines, such as sitting in a library after a coffee with a friend and trying to refocus on what "really" matters.

The problem with having a regime (which I currently do) that attempts in some way to emulate those infuriatingly prolific writers who get up early in the morning, run a couple of hundred ks, go to the market where they know everyone's first name, do the gardening, visit the infirm and then return to their desks by seven with a fresh page and clear mind... is that SOME THINGS CAN'T HAPPEN.

You can't:

- expect not to forget your keys when you are busy packing a pre-made lunch into your bag, putting the washing on, and saying thanks and farewell to the German man in your shower (fixing the tiles). (Fixing the tiles is not a euphemism).

- expect to be able to read or watch films or see your friends. Ever. Several of mine are not speaking to me, which is a shame but does cut down on the list of people I need to get back to about things.

- avoid far ranging and un-premediated fits of white hot fury in relation to very small things such as where something is and why it isn't where you thought it might be, drivers who don't indicate, or indeed anything at all for instance air. Today, I stopped riding my bicycle in the middle of the street in order to shout at a small particle of a leaf which had blown into my eye.

This had better be a good script I'm writing, I tell you what.

PS. And I bought Alan Bennett's new book and everything. And it looks lovely. And it feels lovely in your hands. And then you fall asleep and wake up at 7am with a German man in your loungeroom asking if he can take his tools upstairs. Take them anywhere you like, you say through your explosion of slept-on hair. You're not Alan Bennett, so why should I mind?

It's not going well.

Getting up in the morning like a normal person is not going well.

Yesterday, I arose at seven in the morning, had a coffee down the road, rode my bicycle into the city, lay in the sun while reading in preparation and waiting for the library to open, went into the library, and promptly failed to have an idea.

For an entire day.

Not one, solitary idea.

Or, not a good one, at least.

I worked hard, don't get me wrong, but to ABSOLUTELY NO AVAIL.

If I was my boss, I'd fire myself.

Hang on...

Today I am writing in the library again after another early morning start (in other words I arose at seven because there was a bloke coming to fix our shower). The early morning starts have been excellent for maximising the usefulness of my mornings, but have completely shattered my ability to function as a human being beyond lunch time.

I plod on, however, with weary eyes and a growing irritation at the world around me. I actually reprimanded a bloke in the library today (to be fair to me he was a total chump - speaking on the phone in the library at the top of your voice after receiving a call on a stupidly ring-toned phone is NOT okay just because you are hovering several metres away from the silent reading area. This is not how sound works. I am not a sound engineer but I have ascertained this fact through years of first hand research - and I happen to know that attempting to deny this fact makes you a giant chump).

On days like today, in order to wake myself up, I go outside to enjoy the sun on the lawn outside the library while I have a coffee or lunch. Outside this library, there is a proud bronze statue. For some time now, I have wondered about the spikes they put on the tops of statues these days in order to ward off the birds - have you seen them? - thin, mean little skewers designed to prevent birds from resting and covering the bronze head and shoulders of the anointed persona in the lurid white birdpoo-wigs all statues used to wear when I was a kid. Today, at lunch time, this suddenly appeared to me to be richly bizarre. To want a statue commemorating a long-gone hero, to desire to elevate him (or, if the statute is mythical, her) to a grand scale... even this desire seems pathetic. But do human beings then want to strip their favourite idol of all dignity by sticking spikes in his head, lest nature overpower us once again by crapping on what we consider to be life's significant leaders?

And how do the birds know not to go there? Have some of them been skewered and others of them heard about it? Or do they just see the spike and avoid the area? In some countries, statues secretly electrocute offending birds. Cleanest statues in the world, most fuzzy looking natural aviators. At least spikes give them a bit of a heads-up.

All in all, a lonely day spent with chumps and seagulls, but an educational one nonetheless. I've emerged with an anti-statue stance and I've come out (yet again) as being extremely anti-chump.

Now that Standing There Productions is in the business of developing children's television scripts and trying to turn them into children's television SHOWS, I have been studiously watching:

Degrassi Junior High
Round The Twist
Press Gang
and whatever else I can find on the telly when I'm pottering around doing something else.

Hence I was idly wondering today about the Degrassi legacy. How long did they milk that show for? How many different Degrassi schools were there? How many actors found their careers revived after the first Degrassi in order to launch the next generation?

The answer to most of those questions is: heaps.

Joey Jeremiah, the pipsqueak bully with the skateboard from Degrassi Junior High, comes back as AN ADULT in Degrassi The Next Generation. Check him out here and at his very Joey-friendly website (Joey would surely approve of "patmeup.com") here. Apparently, Adult Joey has an on-again, off-again relationship with Adult Caitlin. Also starring in Degrassi Next Generation are Snake and Spike, who are (I do believe) married. Degrassi: Next Generation is definitely my next DVD purchase, and it's even work related!

What seems disappointing, from looking at the photographs of Degrassi: Next Generation, is that it LOOKS like other TV shows. Everyone's a hottie. Nobody's dowdy or fat or squinty or pimply. Nobody hunches. Nobody even has outrageous hair, worn with aplomb in the original series by Spike, the likes of whom I had never seen roaming my school, but I certainly wouldn't have minded if she did. It's a shame everybody looks the same in Next Generation, since the utopia of Degrassi really was a lovely place to imagine. Where everyone was normal, with the possible exception of the "hot" girl, Stephanie, who was (we all knew deep down) a bit of a tool.

Now, she's a jazz musician. Check it.

Anyway, look, obviously today is a day for thinking about important things like Degrassi, because the news itself is too ludicrous for words. Hence I am interested only in Degrassi, and the following: Motorola has apparently invented battery chargers for mobile phones that are run by... guess what... riding a bicycle. Yes here it is. You ride your bike around and your phone is charged. Designed for African farmers apparently, although it doesn't explicitly rule out idiots who forget to take their mobile chargers with them to work.