I went back to my old work today (Tough Love on Triple M) to talk on radio about the two comedy shows I'm directing. For those of you who don't know Tough Love, click here.

It was so fun to be back there, actually. Someone should write a book about radio. It is just such a funny universe. You know how sometimes you listen to the radio and you wonder what sort of people actually take time out of their days to call a radio station?

Well, turns out, all kinds of people do exactly that. Part of my job used to be putting people on air for talkback. I used to get calls from (literally) brain surgeons (that happened twice), truck drivers (that happened more than twice) and one time I got a call from a guy who kept suddenly talking about stocks and shares so his boss wouldn't get suspicious that he was calling a national radio show. When we put him to air, he quite unashamedly put us on hold. A nation waited, listening to a couple of bars of Fur Elise, desperate to hear the end of his story.

So it was good to be back, and wasn't it quite the contrast to Radio National, where (as Mick correctly surmised) there aren't quite so many bomber jackets as one tends to find at Triple M.

Check out the show I was working on at the ABC (The Deep End) here. The eight hour day story mentioned below is available here.

It was interesting working there, although I have to admit that the ABC building at Southbank in Melbourne is very confusing for someone like myself. All the floors are identical. The studios, the bathrooms, the visitors' waiting rooms... Identical.

Which is why I accidentally walked in on a full orchestra rehearsing a quite reverent movement of something by Bach for ABC Classic FM. See? Not the sort of thing you walk in on at Triple M. More likely to walk in on a sales meeting where an executive is up on a table roleplaying his favourite animal (true story).

So, radio is unpredictable (see for example Judith Lucy's show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival) but then so is any job really. One time I worked at the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University and part of my job was processing applications for Special Consideration. One person wrote on his form that he needed an extension because he was "tired on account of being part of a medical experiment".

All in a day's work.

A week is a long time in politics, and we all know the personal is political, so a week is a long time in any context really.

In what might be described as irony, one of the stories I've been producing for Radio national this week is about the estblishment of the eight hour day. A hundred and fifty years ago today, after the industrial revolution in Britain (and the Gold Rush in Bendigo), a bunch of construction workers who were building the law quadrangle at Melbourne University downed their tools and marched through the city, picking up fellow workers from other sites and making their point in the centre of the city. The rest of the western world eventually followed by example. Followed. Melbourne. That was how the eight hour day - and Mars commercials - were established: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest and 8 hours of play.

Which of course is why workers' rights are so enormously respected today.

Now, this all feels very close to home for me because:

1. I studied in the Law Quadrangle. In fact, it was the stones in the law quadrangle, laid by the very stonemasons who started all this ratbaggery, that I rested my bike on when I rushed to the Law Faculty to hand in my essays at three minutes to five on the due date.

2. The eight hour day is being celebrated by the deliciously historical people in at the Trades Hall in Melbourne, which is where Yianni's comedy festival gig is (where they call you comrade and give you a free beer when you've just performed a show).

3. Our office in at Radio National is opposite Damien's office. Damien runs the Law Report. I work for the Victoria Law Foundation, which is running Law Week. Also, I'm doing a story on the comedy festival which I've been working at every night, I'm doing a story on the history of protest (in which I feature) and I'm doing a story about writing theatre shows and not being able to get them on in any theatres unless you do the whole thing yourself (which, I dunno, DESCRIBES MY LIFE). So. Maybe if I stayed at Radio National, next week I'd be doing a story on people who come from Eltham and cut their finger almost completely off in grade four and who used to be vegetarian and aren't anymore.

The eight hour day. I wish!

Both of the shows I'm directing in the Comedy Festival, Yianni's Head and Penny Tangey in Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, have opened with their pre-Easter preview shows.

The Peter Cook bar was abuzz with highly strung comedians on the first night of the festival. Each of them had a story about something that went wrong. Projectors changed their minds half way through shows, CD players didn't work, audiences wandered into venues far too early to discover the punchline standing on stage, half dressed in a chicken costume and swearing at the front of house staff.

Yianni and Penny were not without drama. Yianni's show suddenly had to have a new ending, due to the fact that the slides he was supposed to respond to did not appear on the slide screen. Thankfully, this proved to be much more amusing than the original ending. We've now changed the show accordingly.

Penny's show went well, apart from the fact that about eighty percent of her audience accidentally lined up in Will Anderson's queue and didn't show up to Penny's until about a third of the way through. Distracting for Penny? Yes. Disconcerting for the audience? Hell yeah. Mind you, it's funny to think that some of Penny's crowd might have actually made it through to be seated in Will Anderson's audience and left an hour later, rather baffled as to where exactly the maths references were.

As I said to everyone I spoke to, hey, it could have been so much worse.

Here are some edited highlights from my experience in live entertainment:

1. Primary school production, Sleeping Beauty
I was in grade five, playing a character with a cockney accent (which I retrospectively realise must have been because one of the teachers realised I had watched a lot of Dickens movies). Anyway, the fairies in the Sleeping Beauty were played by boys (a joke in itself of course, enjoyed no more by anyone else than by the boys themselves). They were each given stockings, a leotard, and a wand made out of cardboard.

Every woman knows that negotiating a leotard - particularly with the stockings underneath - is quite a complex little game when one is young and one really needs to go to the toilet. I don't want to drag this out unnecessarily. Suffice to say that one of the boy fairies performed a miserable little dance on opening night with poo all over his tights and dropping off him onto the stage.

2. Primary School Production, The Wizard of Oz
I played a munchkin, whose job it was to describe in an over-dramatic and long-winded way, the circumstances wherein the house had fallen on the wicked witch. (I now realise of course that partly this was a joke in itself. As the show wore on, the descriptions became more ridiculous and verbose. Everybody knows typecasting is funny).
My other job was to accidentally knock the hat off the Mayor, played by a boy called Lucas. Lucas was the tallest boy in the world. One night, he actually had to bob down so that I could knock his hat off, because my previous eight attempts had really dragged the whole show to a standstill.

3. Secondary school production, Three Sisters.
I was playing Irina in Three Sisters and Rory was playing the doctor. Rory somehow made me senseless with giggles. Three Sisters is a play by a Russian dramatist called Chekhov. It's not cool to become hysterical with snorty giggles in a Chekhov play. Well, the director didn't think so anyway.

4. The Really Useless Theatre Company, The Max Factor.
In the middle of The Max Factor, the lights went out. I was sitting next to Lawrence Leung, in the audience, and he still has little crescent moons on his arm from when I reached over and grabbed him in order to prevent myself from screaming and running from the theatre. After what seemed like several hours, the lights came up but they were tinged with a violent red. The play suddenly had all these evil undertones. As did I.

5. Standing There Productions, People Watching.
People shouldn't go out and party the night before a show. That is all I am prepared to say on this point.

6. Tough Love, Triple M. When you're in charge of reading out the best of the year's emails sent in by listeners to a national audience and you realise - on air - that what you've brought upstairs is not the listener emails but the article you printed out about a chip that's being sold on ebay because it looks like Mary Magdalene, you have to make sure you remember to breathe.

I've just realised this list could go on forever. Why anyone would work in a nine to five job is beyond me. Imagine the glamour of stuttering your way through some made up emails on radio, or slipping on your own poo in a fairy costume on stage. What a fabulous career choice.

Tomorrow is the opening night of the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

What does that mean? Well, it means that the comedians who have been working very hard for months preparing their shows for the festival all go out until five in the morning to the opening night party and contract various strains of the flu.

That, and it means cheap tickets until after Easter. Go here and check out the "local heroes".

Meanwhile, tell me if you think this is a good start to a week:

SUNDAY: Drive to Yianni's - Arrive late - Work for several hours - Leave late - Arrive home late to print out tech script for Penny's trial gig - Freak out while printer has existential crisis - Recruit Stewart to fix printer - Leave Stewart alone in house with printer - Drive a hundred and fifty metres to Glitch Bar - Dodge the issue rather unconvincingly when Penny says, "Lorin where's the tech script?" - Receive call from Stewart with a diagnosis re printer being "buggered" - Assume Emergency Position: call Rita - Recruit Stewart to film Penny's gig - Stewart arrives, hugely impressed by my contribution to his evening - Rita arrives, saves universe by providing tech script just before gig starts - Penny's gig completely hilarious - After Penny's gig, Yianni's gig - Recruit Stewart to film Yianni's gig - Stewart starving as has not eaten due to various distractions involving computers and filming - Stewart orders pizza - Lorin orders noodles, eats noodles and pizza, regrets not going to gym more - Mel calls with news that she has just completed a marathon - Lorin eats last piece of pizza - Yianni's gig finishes - Convince Stewart to drive to parents' house to transfer film from camera to DVD - Stewart asks during drive to parents' house whether Lorin has the requisite cable for transfer of film to DVD - Lorin assures Stewart she does - Lorin does not - Return camera to Tim - Return home Find toilet blocked and flooding - Recruit Stewart to help - Look at Stewart's face - Get completely weak with giggles - Fix toilet - Go to bed.

MONDAY: Get up one hour early and walk to work at Law Foundation (inspired by marathon and pizza) - Work all day on sending out stuff about Law Week and various other things - Receive phone calls from professional people on useless phone that does not work and hangs up on people constantly - Completely fail to finish mail-out on time - Manage to be last person out of building - Buy extremely annoying, broken card that sings only half a song, for Stewart's birthday - Walk to Stewart's Birthday drinks - Engage with actual people - Walk home - Go to bed.

Tuesday
Get up, write notes on gigs - Email notes to Penny - Call Yianni with notes - Get off phone to Yianni several hours later - Get dressed - Rush to Law Foundation - Finish mail-out - Rush home for brief moment on way to Trades Hall - Use moment to pour cup of tea because not eating properly and need something - Pour tea into huge urn thing with lid on it to take to rehearsal - Carry folder, laptop, huge urn, bag, extra clothes - Reach for door - Hurl urn of tea through air, watch it bounce - Tea all over walls, floor, furniture, self - Tea very hot - Shout expletives - Recruit Stewart's help - Stewart gets weak with giggles - Take offence at Stewart's mockery - Assume Emergency Position: call Rita - Arrive late to gig - Set up in theatre - Order baked potato with lentils in attempt to be healthy at meal break - Scoop lentils out of raw potato and choke on cheap cheese - Finish rehearsal - Go home without dropping by old friend's going away party - Feel crap about being bad friend - Go to sleep.

And today, well today has been going well. It's my lunch break now and I have to go to the bank, go to Half Tix, go to the shops, eat lunch, and post this.

Tonight is Yianni's preview. Come along for cheap tickets. You might get to see me spill something.

I started work on Monday at eight thirty in the morning. It's now 1am on Tuesday and I've just arrived home. I didn't have a lunch break really, and I won't be paid for most of it. The working conditions are shockingly bad, but thankfully my relationship with myself is not such that I'm subject to the new IR laws, so I'm only fooling myself. Being your own boss can be confusing.

So I was thinking, in the car on the way home, that my bed was like the ribbon at the end of a marathon that has NINE WORLD OF SPORTS written across it. The finish line, I suppose that's called. Anyway, so I'm stumbling towards the finish line and my hair smells of ciggies and I've seen a billion comedians in a week and my eyelids are drooping and I really need someone to stand by the side of the road with a water bottle that I can grab on my way past and hurl all over myself in exhausted relief... but I get nothing. And then when I get home, there's an obstacle course at the end of the marathon because I haven't cleaned my room in years because everyone knows you can't work from half eight in the morning until one the next day and have a clean room unless you work as a cleaner, and so finally I get to the finish line and collapse, like a real marathon runner except without the over-excited family and friends screeching hysterically and draping me in a flag. (Mum and Dad were busy).

So, as if to further highlight my metaphorical struggle, the thought came to me all of a sudden that Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, is actually running a marathon. A real marathon. An actual one. With her legs. And I guess her lungs. And the rest of her body anyway shut up the point is she's running a race that STARTS AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING ON A SUNDAY (9 April for those counting) and it goes for 42.295 kms.

Although she has told me that if she "feels liks it", she's allowed to just keep running until she's run fifty ks and she'll be able to tell her friends she ran an "ultra marathon" as opposed to a shitty old normal 42 km marathon at seven in the morning on a Sunday. In Canberra.

Anyway, so now my metaphorical marathon of a day seems somewhat less energetic. Mine was probably more of a "long distance walk". No lifting your feet completely off the ground or you'll get disqualified by a little guy in a suit.

I dunno. Shut up. It's half past one in the morning. Leave me alone.

So, on Sunday I was sitting in Rita's kitchen having cups of tea with Yianni and talking about whether it's legal to send a human head through the mail, and then today I've been working at Radio National organising a story about how the Smithsonian has decided to start a hip hop collection. On Friday, I'm organising a whole lot of performers to wander around central Melbourne in late May, dressed as judges and telling lawyer jokes. And to think I find it difficult describing to people what I do for a living.

You know how google does targeted advertisements? I'm sure my profile goes like this: "We've done several search profiles and we're not sure what the hell is going on. Web user seems to have a lot of time on hands. Web user may be dangerous".

In the past, strictly work-related, I've searched for:

1. "Neighbours plot lines," when researching for the book I helped write about the history of the TV show neighbours. (Of particular note here is the rather specialised research I did about the episode that featured a dream sequence where Bouncer the dog dreams he's getting married to a sheep dog called Rosie, who saved him in a previous episode from certain death in a perilous storm water drain incident). Seriously.

2. "Boy bands" and particularly "the sexual and gender politics of boy bands" (there is an excellent PHD thesis somewhere online about this)... all in aid of some research I was doing for the Molloy Boy film, BoyTown. It was interesting how many boy band lyrics involved sheltering people from inclement weather. Also much use of the phrase "my girl" in film clips unpopulated by females of any kind.

3. "News Stories: sexually aroused animals". Yes, yes. It's true. I worked in commercial radio.

Now shoosh. I'm going outside into the sunshine. Thankfully, you don't have to type "breath of fresh air" into google. It just happens.

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.