Things you see when you wander through your old university to get a fragment of a beer bottle removed from your bike wheel and to use the library:

1. Religious groups, everywhere. When did this happen? What brought this on? The answer is probably VSU, but I do not recall even the POTENTIAL for people with T shirts tucked into their jeans to talk loudly about Christ outside the library back in my day.

2. A couple breaking up on the "break up" bench nobody otherwise sits on outside what used to be the law library.
Him: What, and you can't understand why I'm angry?
Her: Yes, I understand. I told you I understand. You don't see how your behaviour effects people when you drink.
Him: I can, but I was angry.
Her: No, because if you could see, you'd stop doing it.
Him: Oh my God. (Spins around to see if there's an audience. Discovers there is, in the form of a protest)...

3. ... The "protest" consists of a crowd of (I'm not exaggerating) six people with a megaphone and a banner saying "Stop The Melbourne Model". Someone shouts through a megaphone, "Wake up, People!" A dude wearing boat shoes sails past on a scooter eating a free sausage from the commerce BBQ and looks disgusted. Some things never change.

4. Meanwhile, a pizza is being delivered to someone on the other side of campus by the pizza shop, which has purchased (from our clever friend at unibicycles) huge three-wheeler bikes with which to transport pizza anywhere across campus.

5. The library is equally full of people researching the psychological consequences of genocide and people looking at facebook while drinking coffee they have snuck into the library under their jackets.

6. It's my grandma's birthday so I call her from the downstairs phone I always used to call her from. She recognises the background noise almost immediately.

Now I'm back online researching the Australian political system, the more broad-brush details of which I seem to have forgotten since studying it at the above esteemed institution. Tonight, off to the film festival to enter other worlds. Ones I've never been a part of.

Hey so check it out.

Seeking asylum in Canada, huh?

Everyone is stealing my ideas - and for those of you who didn't see For We Are Young And Free, just take it from me that we were shockingly prescient and very clever. And we probably need to go international with this. A Tony might be nice.

I often wonder what the tax department must think of me. Over the past two weeks, I have purchased the following tax deductable work-related items:

1 Book about literary women, which I've already read but some bastard borrowed it and never gave it back and it's a cracker. Ten bucks on the Readings bargain table, it's extremely well written by someone who used to write for The New Yorker and I can't remember what it's called but I recommend it if you want to know about Ayn Rand or Gertrude Stein in a way that makes you feel like you went to school with them.

1 CD of Maya Angelou reading I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (cos she speaks good).

1 Dawson's Creek DVD (for listening to the infernal but sometimes funny dialogue and attempting not to shout through everything Katie Holmes says).

1 Degrassi Junior High DVD (for listening to the dialogue, checking how clunky the "themes" are, and revisiting my early crush on Joey Jeremiah).

1 Flight of the Navigator DVD (oh my childhood self wriggles with delight).

1 Full pass to the Melbourne International Film Festival, including tickets to a documentary about the American health system and a female revenge fantasy comedy horror.

1 uni-ball fine liner (green).

1 ticket to "Knocked Up" (shut up, I needed a break from the highbrow intellectualism not reflected anywhere in this list).

1 ticket to "Blades of Glory" (again, it was a weekend break - what are you, the thought police?).

And some costs brought about by an upcoming trip for the law talking job.

So, a Will Ferrell film and the Romanian goat herding documentaries of MIFF... together at last. My kind of universe.

In other news: I finished my book, Vernon God Little, which of course everyone else in the known universe has already read. Guess what, world? I liked it, too! Really well written, funny as hell, smart and thought-wrangling. I do like a thought wrangle.

He's won the booker prize and now he's been praised by me. DPC Pierre must be pinching himself.

Having checked out the wikipedia page on the book, I am even more proud of finishing it on account of the fact that 35% of all Britons polled who read it did not finish it. Slackers.

Oh, the other thing I claimed on tax: expensive internet. Better go and use it to do some actual work.

Anybody who has heard my ringtone knows the depth of my obsession with the '90s TV show, Press Gang.

Well, guess what, Press Gang nerds? There's talk of a relaunch!

Oh, heady days.

Bit of a heads up, to those of you living in Melbourne...

It's raining outside. Or, in my case, it's raining inside.

Weather is always such a conversation in Melbourne, due to its erratic nature, and I must confess to having had a rather less productive day than usual on account of it. Riding your bike to the library is not such a delicious prospect when staying home in front of the heater is an option. You can still write, right? Right. And I will, when I get these other nine million things done.

My bike looks inviting, as always, but the prospect of riding home in the sleet, with wet handlebars, a wet bike seat, and drenched hair is a little unappealing, even for me (someone who does not normally have any objections to unattractive public displays such as going out for lunch in a tracksuit).

So, it's an inside day. I'm glad I'm not a postie.

Wow. Just when you think you're on top of things, someone goes and bees clever.

Thank you to the very dedicated Daniel, who has made my life approximately nine thousand times more liveable by creating this, which I hereby propose the Melbourne Film Festival PAY HIM to turn into a website.

Excellent work.

So far I have only booked two films, which is hoplessly slack of me, but I will make up for it in the watching, oh yes I will.

I have noticed lately that I am FINALLY experiencing the "post show slump", which until now I thought I had escaped.

I think every autobiography or biography of a writer has the word "antisocial" somewhere in the index. For someone who is usually very social, the post-show slump and period of reinvention after having written something and before writing the next thing must be a very surprising period for the writer's friends (if the writer still has friends, having inflicted this period on many of them over a period of years).

My mobile phone is broken. Normally, this would have been fixed immediately. Thus far, I have had a broken phone for three weeks. This is both a metaphor for my inability to fix things, and the side effect of my belief that the grumpy introspection of this post-show slump period should not be inflicted on anyone.

Having said that, the only way to fix the post show slump is to swim against the tide. Bring on the friends, I say, and possibly a new haircut.

Each year, my head explodes when the Melbourne International Film Festival Guide comes out. It really does literally explode, clear off my shoulders.

And today is the day.

THANK YOU to whoever at the film festival listened to the requests for everything to be listed on the same page. I know I, for one, filled out hundreds of individual response slips with responses like PLEASE LIST THINGS PROPERLY, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD written on them in red pen. Last year, it was like a computer game. It was like a quest. It was a feat of mental gymnastics just to get to the movie in time.

If you look closely at this photo, you can see "PLEASE FIX FESTIVAL PROGRAMME" written in red pen. This is one of the forty-seven versions of the same request that I wrote (literally - I saw forty-seven films and I filled in a form for each of them). Like so:

Which brings me to the problem with having a full festival pass: it enables you to go to everything. And yes, if you go to twenty films over 19 days, you have justified the $300 ticket, BUT...

If someone says "Buy this credit card for three hundred bucks - now, go to your favourite shop. The credit card is unlimited."

What are you going to do?

You're going to go completely bezerk and buy as much stuff as you can. You'll be buying things in a size 24 JUST IN CASE YOU MEET SOMEONE who is a size 24.

So, you want to see EVERYTHING (with a few exceptions, the sight of which fill you with enormous relief) because you CAN.

Greed, I suppose, is what I'm describing. Film greed. One very time-consuming sin.

Let the games begin....