10 things you just know you will do when your theatre season at the comedy festival is over:
1. Gallop into a headwind on a beach somewhere.
2. Fill your days with physical activity and cultural richness, going home only to sleep the sleep of the just. Legs tired, brain tingling, face beaten by the wind.
3. Eat healthy, tasty, colourful, fresh, ludicrously cheap food from the market presented gorgeously on a wooden table, possibly by a fire. There is warm bread. Someone is laughing in another room.
4. Spend long nights delving into matters you never thought to put into words with friends you should see more of.
5. Pay your bills.
6. Read books, rather than building tall cities of them around your bed until they form a teetering metropolis oppressing you even as you sleep.
7. Call your grandparents, who are ancient and who deserve more from persons for whom they built cubbyhouses.
8. Dedicate yourself anew to tasks such as cleaning your car, your house, organising your health insurance, finding out whether you even have a superannuation account, and redirecting the ten kilograms of incorrectly addressed mail that forms a pile in your living room.
9. Purchase new shoes.
10. See more theatre.
Things you actually do when your theatre season at the festival is over:
1. Realise immediately that you have no money with which to take time off to go to the beach/enjoy fantasy life of bread and laughing/ pay bills. Amend this by working for everyone at once, including on weekends. Call failure to go to gym/ be in any way physical "listening to your body". Only cheating self etc.
2. Fill all your spare time involuntarily with a twitchy, dream-addled, drool-inducing, neck-hurty sleep. Awake unsatisfied, grumpy, and frustrated.
3. Instead of eating well and having time to purchase nice food, eat expensively and often, due to lack of preparation as a result of use of spare time (see point 2). When at home, eat stale crackers and cans of tuna. Spoil self with black tea. Weep. Repeat.
4. Grumpy semi-murderous mood, overworking and odd hours due to use of spare time (see point 2) mean no contact with friends except for random encounters in the street. When greeted by friends in the street, it is usual to turn bright red, stutter something about the state of one's tracksuit pants, completely fail to make sense, and scurry away like a frightened guinea pig.
5. Pay your bills.
6. Attempt to read books. Enact point 2.
7. Call your grandparents. Forget that grandparents are on strict timetables mostly consisting of eating at the few times of the day during which you are either working or enacting point 2. Apologise. Enact point 2.
8. Completely fail to do any of the menial tasks you have been looking forward do, although the shambolic collection of unfinished tasks is - much like the book towers in your bedroom - a metaphor and you know it and everyone else knows it and you are a living cliche. You might as well take up smoking and become Russian.
9. Hate shoe shopping at the best of times. This time, look at shoes in shop windows. Consider trying them on. Feel pain of current shoes jabbing you with their nasty pointy little shoe fingers. Thought of trying on shoes oppresses you physically. Fail to purchase shoes. See metaphor above.
10. Note thriving theatrical pulsing heart of Melbourne. Repeat point 2.
... Nothing if not consistent.
Also, because I want you to know there is hope: I am going away with work tomorrow and will back on Wednesday in order to see a Hayloft theatre show - something I am really looking forward to.
After that, I might even have a break. Huzzah!
* repeats point 2 *