So how's this:

1. Three grant applications for three separate projects due in the next three weeks
2. One grant application due for Victoria Law Foundation in one week
3. Three weeks worth of film festival films to be watched, starting tomorrow
4. Under half the films actually booked on account of booking system being worst in universe
5. House out the back being sold, so people "inspecting" via side entrance, next to our house
6. Some "interested home buyers" have since broken our fence, stolen housemate's new bike
7. Housemate has flu
8. Housemate possibly not able to claim on expensive insurance policy
9. Freezing cold day
10. Heater suddenly and inexplicably broken
11. Attempts at turning on heater makes whole house smell like fire
12. Landlord coming over
13. Landlord possibly not as keen on weeds in front garden as we are
14. Kim Beazley is the leader of a political party
15. My grandma is in hospital
16. Plays, film scripts, and grant applications do not, apparently, write themselves.

Spewbags, as they say in the classics.

Days like this bring out the old me. The one who worked in commercial radio and desperately searched for stories with headlines such as Man Wins Bet, Loses Penis , because everybody knows the Middle East isn't funny, and the only other thing any of the listeners want to talk about is the fact that cars are piled up on the South Eastern and someone just cut them off in the stopping lane.

It's alarming how, two years later, I read a story like that and feel a flood of relief. There's the backbone, right there, of a two hour show. Thank God.

I reckon I could write down a dozen jokes off the back of that faster than I could name the continents.

And can I remember a single thing about Australian Constitutional Law or, say, the key battles in the Second World War that I spent all that time studying at university?

Nooooo.

I'm sure they weren't nearly as highlarious as the above story though. Nor as worthy of airtime.

Tune into FM radio tomorrow. If they're not taking calls on "The Stupidest Thing You've Done For a Bet" and discussing the potential reasons why someone would chop their dick off in a bar: "Further investigations found the man had just been propositioned by (insert unfortunate celebrity here)", I will be extremely disappointed.

I wonder if the people next door have some kind of surveillance system set up outside my house. It wouldn't be difficult, because the (empty) house next door towers over my living room (which is also my office) and there must be someone there with a camera, or at the very least a pair of binoculars, waiting for me to stop doing the "other" jobs on my list, pour myself a cup of tea, and settle down to write.

That must be what happens. Otherwise, how would they know the exact moment to turn on their noise making machine to the EXTREMELY LOUD setting and then shout over the top of it to each other in angry voices for hours on end about exactly what to do next?

Coldest morning since 2002 or something this morning. They reported in the paper that it was particularly chilly in a place called Coldstream. Well, honestly.

Up to part five of Crime and Punishment . Thought last night that in books such as this one there should be encouragements along the way ("nearly there!" and "the ending is worth it!" etc). Perhaps a graded system ("you are now 80% more likely to say something clever at a dinner party", or "congratulations, you are now 20 pages further into this book than most people").

I am going to be so smug when I finish this book.

Okay, so on a scale of one to a billion, how good is this Bleak House business on the ABC on Sunday nights?

Whoever wrote that must know what they're doing.

After watching Planet Earth with David Attenborough and not knowing whether I'm on the side of the snow leopard (who has to eat, you know) or the startled, dancing rock elk with the unwieldy horns and the slippy-slippy down the slope kind of lifestyle, I sit in front of Dickens, riveted and yet slightly distracted by the central question of what the hell is going on?

Unbearably good television. Especially if you like your television to be smarter than you are. Dickens and Sorkin being excellent examples. And, obviously, Everybody Loves Raymond was smarter than I was, because I just did not understand a single thing about that show.

Anyway, so this weekend I did not spend in the usual manner. I did not see a film or a play (not even a terrible one that I can spend the rest of the week complaining about). I read some of Crime and Punishment , but apart from that, I did nothing of interest in a cultural sense whatsoever.

Instead, I cashed in on the fact that Nerissa, one of the many friends of mine who found themselves cast in I Could Be Anybody , works at the Werribee Zoo.

So, in answer to the question "What did you do at work this week?" Nerissa is able to answer:

"I'm designing an enclosure for a critically endangered species of bandicoot".

In response to which I am able to say: "Er. Good. Well... I wrote... well actually... no... I didn't write... I started to write... this thing... for... Never mind. Are there any positions going in, you know, the canteen or something at the zoo at the moment?"

I often find other people's jobs interesting, but this one was an excellent one to be a beneficiary of. We drove around in a Safari jeep and made friends with all sorts of people, including a fairly grumpy hippo whose party trick was to poo through his rotating tail, so as to fan his excrement as far and wide as possible. Territorial, mainly, although arguably quite artistic too.

In conclusion, a hippo pooing through a rotating tail is approximately fifty times more interesting than mainstream theatre in Melbourne, and works on many levels metaphorically, too.

Give them an arts grant. And a festival. Please.

During my lunch break today I was looking at my CV because I'm giving it to someone so they can pay someone else to file it somewhere in alphabetical order. Don't you think CVs would be so much better if they were true representations of what you'd done in your life - of what you were good at, and bad at, and proud of, and regretted?

A CV is such an inaccurate record of someone's life. I don't care what your major was in university, answer this question: do you wash your cup in the office kitchen after your coffee or do you leave it in the sink and then pretend to hear your phone ringing in your office and scurry sneakily away? How do you waste your time? If the answer is, "I have long, drawn-out conversations with my co-workers about my children" then you're obviously quite a distinct personality type. If the answer is "I tend to email people I feel regretful about not catching up with" or "I usually drag out a task that involves walking somewhere, like, for instance, going to the post office", then you're obviously me... er, I mean, you're obviously another personality type altogether.

I think we should revamp the entire system. That's all I'm saying. It would make for much more functional workplaces and it would eradicate CV-only expressions such as "charged with overseeing the co-ordination of staff systems" (which is the sort of crap people used to write on their CVs when I worked in a job reading CVs. I figured out eventually that what they actually meant was "I was a secretary", when what it sounded like was "I ran the UN for a while just after I graduated"). Having been a secretary, I know that these two jobs are probably equally as demanding, but they are not the same thing.

Anyway. Have an excellent weekend, everyone. Be glad you're not the guy in the street outside my office who was driving a truck-load of dirt down a narrow laneway and the back of his truck fell off onto the road in the centre of the CBD. Now THAT is a bad day at the office.

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.

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?