The Melbourne International Comedy Festival Guide came out on Friday with Melbourne's Age newspaper. For those of you not in Melbourne, you can check out the program here, with the added bonus of not having to read The Age.

Last week, in preparation for the festival, I went to a comedy gig every night. It really does take the romance out of the experience. Not that comedy is terribly romantic. (Romance can be pretty funny though. I still have, in my room, a home-made necklace from a "boyfriend" in high school. When I say necklace, what I really mean is a short length of hose on a piece of string with "I *heart* LORIN" written on it in white-out.)

So, romance is funny. Comedy, well, sometimes it's funny.

When it's almost midnight and some idiot you've never heard of is up there telling another poof joke disguised as an accidental slip up... Not so funny.

Just saying.

The Comedy Festival is pretty huge. Choose wisely.

In other news, Rita and I had a meeting this morning with some people who don’t exist. We met with this cool company called Eskimo (click here) who do everything from graphic design to DVD authoring. An Australian telecommunications company that shall remain nameless but which (if you believe their TV ads) is run by a whole lot of yawning rhinos and screeching baboons, was attempting to convince them over the telephone that they didn’t exist and that they probably never had.

Despite the obvious setbacks associated with their not existing, however, the meeting was fruitful and we’re now busy with film things again. We’re also working towards a cast and crew screening in the week beginning May 15. That’s 2006, for those of you who think you’re clever.

And no, that’s not a promise. Shut up.

Sometimes I think my friends are mocking me.

Here I am, limping through the final stages of a short film I'm doing for nothing, and all of a sudden I'm getting the distinct impression that other people's lives are not actually taken up discussing dropped frames, colour palettes and mistakes in the closing credits.

Much to my joy and somewhat to my befuddlement, I have recently attended the following events:

1) The wedding of my old school friend who should in my opinion still be getting chucked out of our info tech class for bad behaviour (nothing to do with me).

2) The wedding of a couple of friends from university, who (when I picture them) I always imagine in a student union meeting, eating vegan chocolate cake out of a recycled serviette.

3) The engagement of one of my oldest and dearest friends from school, whose crowning achievement so far in life has in my opinion been her uncanny ability to - after just moments of meeting someone - determine how many siblings he or she has, and in what order.

4) A dinner to celebrate my sister's graduation and the beginning of her training as a lawyer. That's just obscene because she should clearly still be seven and I should be eleven and we should be playing that fun game I invented called "Let's Clean Lorin's Room".

5) I have also discovered that some very amusing (married) friends of mine are pregnant. More precisely, she is pregnant. He is just grinning. And occasionally breaking into a white hot sweat.

So what is going on, precisely? Why have people suddenly started abandoning their reliable and, I can only imagine, stimulating posts as class clowns, sibling guessers, room cleaners, and student politicians? Have they not noticed that I trudge heroically on, doing the same sort of stuff I was doing when I first met them? Have they no respect?

Anyway, congratulations to all of them and if anyone CARES ANYMORE... our DVD is getting closer and our cast and crew screening will hopefully happen before the birth of any offspring resulting from the above disgusting list of life-changing events.

Meanwhile, I have an announcement to make. The pressure has overwhelmed me. Mum, Dad, I want you to sit down...

I'm thinking of buying a new bike helmet.

The Commonwealth Games is starting next week in Melbourne. The Commonwealth Games and a festival called Moomba, and there's the Port Fairy Folk Festival this weekend and then after the Commonwealth Games there's the Grand Prix and then there's the Comedy Festival (see below) and then there's Law Week (starring yours truly behind the scenes). There's the Melbourne Arts Festival, the Fringe Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, and there's also this little thing we in Melbourne like to call the footy season. After that it's Christmas.

We're trying to organise a cast and crew screening of our film. How does next August suit everyone?

So we're preparing to make our DVD now. Six years ago, I didn't have a DVD player. Now I'm finally getting with the times and guess what? DVDs are yesterday's news.

Yes, apparently in three years we'll all be downloading movies that are cheaper, better quality, and legal, and watching them on our trusty old TVs. I'm trying to imagine how somehow this will benefit the creative teams that make the movies in the first place.

Hopefully it will be really democratic and grassroots and will open the market right up and enable people with no connections and lots of skill to make movies about things people genuinely care about.

Just kidding. As if that's going to happen.

In legal contracts relating to the broadcasting and distribution of television or film projects, there's this section that covers "future technologies". How cheeky is that? It's saying "we have the first right of refusal to broadcast this film in whatever form we like even those that aren't even invented yet".

Imagine if you could do that in real life. Assert rights in relation to situations that didn't yet exist. It would certainly make breaking up eaier.

In other news, I missed the dreadfully unexciting Oscars last night because I was at a gig in St Kilda. Penny Tangey was doing an excerpt from her show, Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp. She's really good. Did I mention that?

Looking forward to the festival, although I usually get sick right in the middle of it. I'm sick at the moment, actually. I went for a swim with Mel Howlett (Standing There Captain of Industry) and we were running late to the movies so I didn't get changed. Not a very good idea to go to the movies in your bathers, just quietly. My throat hurts.

So, in conclusion, instead of taking out an option relating to future technologies, I am hereby taking out an option in relation to the prevention of future stupid decisions. That way, I won't stay up late, go to the movies with bathers on, or hang out in smoky bars all month during the comedy festival. Because I've made a deal with myself that includes future unforseen possible behavioural mishaps.

Excellent. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Well, the film year is really kicking in. Tropfest was in the news this week for more than just the usual "would you believe young people make films using their home computers" angle. Sensational claims and counter-claims about lying and cheating, cancelled festivals and drenched celebrities... it's all very tinsel town. Funny that the boring, plodding world of unfunded and underexposed short films suddenly becomes a cute news story for half a day. And then Thorpie gets a "mystery illness". Talk about a headline from heaven.

The same is true about the comedy festival. I was looking at the program the other day (don't bother - the best shows will be advertised right here. I have a feeling they'll be Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, Yianni's Head, and anything involving Lawrence Leung or Sammy J) when it
suddenly struck me that most comedians spend the whole rest of the year doing gigs in pubs, trying to amuse half-pissed barflies who are attempting to pick each other up before last drinks. Then suddenly there's a festival in their honour. From poor and unrewarded to "Here, have the town hall".

You've just got to love the way the world works sometimes.

Working in the law world a little lately, I've been reminded of the concept of "status". The legal system of course is very hierarchical (a concept which contradicts almost every central theme of the Western Legal System, except for maybe the central theme of the enormous pay cheque).

I've always thought the legal system's status structure is enormously open to parody. Someone pops a wig on and suddenly everyone's shouting at him in a court room politely. Like in Parliament, when some bloke leans across to the other side of the house and spits, "Will the honourable member please go jump up himself with an armful of chairs".

But it's not like that in the art world. It's "everyone's presumed talentless until proven famous" or something. And then when you get famous everyone says "Yeah that's great. Well done. Man. What a dick".

So, the fact that we don't have a structured system of status in the arts means that we're completely confused whenever we come across status of any kind. So, famous comes to mean important, which means talented, which means arsehole.

I love my job.

This year, I've been living with doctors. I've also lived with a lawyer and an engineer. Now I'm living with another lawyer and someone who works in HR.

Normal people. People whose jobs have structure and purpose.

And they're not boring, either. They're interesting. They build (literally) bridges. Not in a "build a bridge and get over it" kind of a way, or a "bridges to a network of artistic communities" kind of a way - they literally build bridges. Well, the engineer does. The other ones do things like, you know, deliver babies. Bring people into the world. That kind of stuff. The others appear in court. One of them employs people.

I don't even employ myself. I'm what's called freelance.

Wikipedia defines a freelancer as "a self-employed person working in a profession or trade in which full-time employment is also common. The word's etymology derives from the medieval term for a mercenary, a "free lance," which literally described a knight who was not attached to any particular lord, and could be hired for a given task".

Well, it's true in a way. I'm not attached to any particular lord. Not in my professional life. In that sense, I guess I'm kind of my own lord, which is nice.

It's the "working in a profession or trade at any given task" aspect that makes freelance sound rather like work-whoring. Sometimes, when I go home to find doctors who've saved lives and engineers who've constructed bridges, it does make me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my time. The other day, I was negotiating orange juice prices (no, really) at one of my paid jobs, when Rita called asking did I know the German translation of "I Could Be Anybody". Not exactly your average day in the office.

I suppose it could be described as "mercenary" though.

I'm thinking of writing "mercenary" as my profession on my tax forms. Or at the very least on my passport. Although the other option is, I could just write, "own lord". I'd be in some good company there.

So we’ve been trying to work out what the title of our film is in various different languages, because we’re thinking we might send it to people overseas. It’s arguably fairly presumptuous to believe that the French would be interested in je pourrais être quiconque, but we don’t care because it sounds posh. And anyway it’s true: je pourrais etre quiconque. You can’t deny it.

I think Melbourne and Fitzroy will look way cool to the French anyway. And the Germans. Sure, they’ve got that French tower, and those German beers. But we’ve got Flinders Street Station and nice cheap bottles of wine without labels on them, and trams that pose difficult lighting questions in post production. How can they not think to themselves, “C’est vrai! Je pourrais être quiconque! En Australie!” We’re probably injecting billions of dollars into the Australian tourism industry as we speak.

By the way, Melanie Howlett (one of the Standing There captains of industry) is way clever. She and Nick Jaffe are our official translators. Does anyone out there know Russian? Not much snow in je pourrais être quiconque, but there’s a possibility that in the opening scene someone is having a vodka.

Surely that's what's known in marketing as an "angle". Russia, here we come!