Today, I drove Rita to the airport at 7.15 am.

I know, I know. I must like her or something.

Anyway, I was very pleased with myself until a moment ago when I became infuriated that my mouse wasn't working. I thumped it on the mouse pad several times and then it rang.

It was, turns out, my mobile phone.

Productivity levels = awesome.

So Rita and Stewart and I are united again.

Our two hour meeting turned into a three hour meeting and Stew and I left Rita - slightly overcaffinated - in a cafe in North Fitzroy, whereupon she began another meeting with someone else. Stew had two massive mochas in quick succession and is now speaking in tongues. I have a brain ache, a stomach ache, a back ache, and, thanks to a late night, a condition I have diagnosed as "droop eye".

Standing There united will never be defeated * except for maybe sometimes.

In other news...

We have many alert readers here at the Standing There Diary. One particularly alert reader deserves a specific mention, however, not merely because she managed to spend a day in the Olympic village disguised as an albino Tongan (seriously) but also because she has emailed me a wombat-related-fact of the utmost importance. Given my time at Bundanon and obsession with all things wombat-related, I am particularly grateful to know this fact, and I share it with you now as a service to the public.

Wombats are the only creatures who poo squares.

Have a nice weekend. xxx

This weekend, there's a Standing There reunion.

That means Rita and Stew and I will be hitting various coffee shops in inner urban Melbourne and discussing everything from scripts to videos to the now rather cliched question of whether or not turning up to Bundanon uninvited and setting up camp would, after a time, constitute adverse posession thereby enabling us to live there forever by law.

Looking forward to it, especially the nice chai and seeing Rita again.

Look, I know this has nothing to do with anything but sometimes the comedy just writes itself.

Check this out.

My favourite bit is the last line: "It remains unclear why Gracie put her head in the gap".

Poor Gracie.

Dear Australian television industry,

"Innovative" means new and interesting and unique. It doesn't mean "based on a show we bought from overseas". So when you say "we're looking for bold and innovative ideas", I think perhaps what you mean is "We're looking for rehashed ideas that have worked somewhere else".

I understand it's a difficult distinction, but I thought I'd tell you in case you found out through someone else. That might be embarrassing.

Any other questions, give me a call.

I'm just sitting around writing.

If Life were a database, you would currently find me under "Vicissitudes of life, activities pertaining to".

In law, which I studied in order to understand the ways in which the world doesn't quite work no matter how hard people try, the word "vicissitudes" is used to describe the unquantifiable, unpredictable events that occur in life by chance. In a budget, they'd be called contingencies. It's a way of trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Like, how much should we compensate this woman for her injury? Well, how much does she earn? Wow, that's quite a lot. So she's a highly-paid business executive then, is she? Good for her. Now, she's still young enough to have a child, so let's factor in five years of her not earning any money whatsoever. There you go lady, have a nice life!

There are many presumptions made, as you can imagine, about how your life is likely to pan out. I often wondered what a court of law would decide the vicissiitudes of my life would be. Personally, I find them quite hard to predict.

The other day, for instance, I was in a parked car, waiting for someone. It's interesting how people don't look into parked cars. They walk past picking their noses or having loud conversations, and nobody looks at the huge chunk of metal with the person sitting inside it. Some of them even slide their fingers along the bonnet.

One guy, in Adidas tracksuit pants and a long-sleeved top, walked briskly past my car towards the rubbish bin I had parked in front of. I waited to see what he was putting in the bin. He was carrying a plastic bag full of shopping. He put it on the ground. He took out a litre of no frills long-life skim milk. He opened it. He put the tab from under the lid in the rubbish bin. He reached back into the bag and produced a white bread sandwich wrapped in gladwrap. Had he bought it? Had he prepared it earlier? Had someone else prepared it for him?

He put the sandwich on the plastic, on the rubbish bin, next to the milk. He didn't notice me. He noticed other people, peered at them through his thick glasses. Hungry, organised, pedantic, he alternated the drink and the sandwich, the drink, the sandwich, all the time watching the people crossing the street, walking past the bin, chatting in the shopfront. Having a private moment, lunch on the rubbish bin, right in the middle of a thoroughfare. He touched his glasses at odd intervals, a gesture I associated with a professor, a smart kid, somebody Trying His Best.

When he finished, he folded the gladwrap and posted it into the bin. He finished the litre of skim milk and posted that too. He cleared his throat, touched his glasses in the direction of a man walking a rather large dog, and walked in the opposite direction.

If the court ever needed to, I daresay it would be fair enough of them to factor in great chunks of time during which I would be well expected to sit around in parked cars watching people watching other people, thus detracting from my life's value.

Interesting set of priorities we live to, isn't it.

Every year, I write something here about tax deductions for artists.

Now, the way it works, so far as my non-existent accounting experience allows me to understand, is that if you use it for work, you get a tax deduction. So, if you write, you get a tax deduction for your new macbook pro and any subsequent extensions of warranty, which incidentally you should remember to buy (unlike some of us who are idiots and who will regret this later). If you work in film, your movie tickets are tax deductible. If you work in theatre, Kafka novels and ill-advised affairs with people who are not your girlfriend are presumably tax deductible, and if you work in a bank, well, now, I hope you have a career to fall back on.

(Sorry, but it's not often I get to feel clever about not having selected a career involving financial expertise and forethought).

But I digress. My proposal, on these pages and, well, in pubs at around tax time, is that for a writer, one's main job is observation. It is remiss, I honestly believe this, not to listen in to a conversation in a cafe or a train or, say, a hospital, if you're a writer. If you are visiting your grandma, for instance, and the nurses' staff room is next to the room your grandma shares with three bewildered men in pyjamas, you are duty-bound to listen to the shouty argument between the nursing staff. You are also well-advised to tune in to the subsequent debriefing session between the less senior nurses upon the departure of the most shouty. To not listen would be like skipping a lecture, or not reading a book that's going to be on the exam.

I have perfected the laid-back stance of "I'm not really listening, I'm unaccountably interested in this piece of wood", while simultaneously being quite frozen on the spot, lest I miss a vital detail, such as one of the nurses guessing how long it would be until the senior, shouty person either left the hospital or died. Conclusions regarding shouty lady's robust health due to "not having taken a toll on her body at all" are especially important for the files I have stored in my brain for future reference. I cannot remember my bank account details, but I can remember entire conversations between people I have never met.

There have been several examples of this in my life recently, including yesterday, when I was walking to a workshop at the Arts Centre for my law-talking job and I heard a familiar noise. A familiar tune I couldn't quite put my finger on. All I knew was, although the tune wasn't unpleasant to listen to, I didn't like how it made me feel. After a couple of moments of concentrating on where the sound was coming from, I realised it was coming from the girl walking alongside me. It was coming from her backpack. It was her phone, loudly singing her alarm. She was wearing headphones and had no idea her alarm was screaming at her to (presumably) get out of bed. People everywhere were narrowing their eyes, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. She continued, oblivious, blaring loudly from the lump on her back.

It wasn't so much the fact that she was blaring that made her interesting, although I enjoyed the suggestion that but for a different set of circumstances she would, now, be waking from a heavy sleep and pausing the alarm for a few moments' reprieve. It was the effect this was having on the people around her that made the incident intruiging. United (once they figured out what was going on) in a knowing, nodding pleasure, her fellow commuters looked for co-conspirators in the naughty giggle at the expense of someone foolish. Someone we all knew, but for the grace of a slightly different morning routine, could be us.

This small observation, worthy of nothing on paper, indicates many things about human behaviour, about character, about time and the individual pursuit of happiness and hence story and subtext. It's a metaphor, it's symbolism, it's a theme. It's human versus technology, time versus youth, the individual versus society, good versus evil. It's just the stuff of every day life, but in the right hands (not mine perhaps, on a Tuesday evening, but I imagine Kafka would make a good fist of it) it's a mirror against which we see ourselves, even if we are bankers, who have other things on our minds right now. Even then, we can read or watch or listen to something that leads us outside of our usual contexts and into a contemplation of the way the world works. Our imagination is stimulated. You see? It's a service to the public. It could be built into the health system, so positive is its potential effect.

Now, where was I?

Oh yes.

Ergo, I should get a tax deduction for living.

Thank you very much and goodnight.