Last night I saw Inside Man, the Spike Lee film. For an Anthony Lane review, see here. It's the first non-live entertainment I've seen since Kokoda, which felt live because Simon was in it. So it was good to just sit there and imbibe. Never thought I'd be grateful to be sitting in front of an American movie that I don't have to think too hard about, but I was definitely grateful that the people in the film didn't know they were playing to an audience of two.

Anyway, I have to get on with it. I've had all day to get further through my list of "things that need to be done by Thursday night's film screening". So far, I've emailed a lot of people with various different problems, I've panicked about how we're going to seat ninety-five RSVPd guests into a sixty seat theatre, and I've remained fairly consistently informed on the situation of the miners in Tasmania who have managed to get out of a small cage under ground after two weeks and are now going to a friend's funeral. Just in case I thought any of the above was of any import whatsoever.

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?

Today is the first Sunday for four weeks that I haven't had to cram everything in before a seven thirty show. It's the first day of no comedy festival shows whatsoever.

So I got up at two this afternoon, after a rather colourful night at the festival club, and I thought very seriously about getting some of the work done that Rita and I had scheduled in for Sunday. Then I got dressed in what clothes I could find that weren't held together by cigarette smoke and rain (it's been a very healthy couple of weeks) and I went for a walk. Which was quite adventurous, considering the other option was staying in bed.

In other news, Sammy J, the guy who plays the Young Liberal in I Could Be Anybody, was awarded Best Newcomer last night at the comedy festival, which is enormously exciting and he should be sent to the congratulatorium (along with Tim Stitz, who is already there. They can have cups of tea together by the fire and talk about what to do next).

Also, I went to the Victorian College of the Arts graduation ceremony the other night. I was outraged that I had to pay thirty dollars to go and watch someone walk up on stage and collect a piece of paper. I would now like to retract that outrage. It was quite brilliant, with bits of film, music, dance, and performing that really made me wonder (once again) what life would have been like for me if I'd gone to art school.

Ben Hjorth, who played Oliver in our play, People Watching, led the most astonishing chant from the back of Hamer Hall in Melbourne. The people who did Men of Steel at the comedy festival performed some of their hilarious food-fight puppet comedy (a genre consisting, I should think, only of them) and the kids from the school of dance made me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my body (walking? sitting around? Pathetic!). Then, hours into the ceremony, a shambles of musicians appeared onto the stage and played some awe-inspiring stuff (and I'm leaving out the actors and the film makers because I'm far more interested in watching things I don't know anything about). So there. Pretty excellent stuff. Stew graduated (and surprised everyone a little when he took a polariod of the actual moment he shook hands with the Vice Chancellor) and then my friend Simon graduated, as did our 1st AD from I Could Be Anybody, Eva Tandy (who was whooped with considerable gusto by the rather reserved audience). I'm very lucky to know these people.

Anyway, I have to go and fall asleep over my new book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman. Yay for learning things from other people.

There are some Ani Difranco lyrics that go like this:

They say goldfish
Have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time

... which is not necessarily a song about how bad my memory is, but it is yet to be conclusively determined that it isn't a song about how bad my memory is.

Why do I forget things? Why have I carried a letter, hand-written, addressed and with a stamp on the envelope, everywhere I've been since February? Why haven't I posted it? It's a nice letter, it talks about my plans for the year, about the weather being too hot and about the Christmas dinner starting to wear off.

Why did I carefully fill out the Women's Health Survey I get sent every couple of years, and then leave it on my desk for four months? Why go to the trouble of filling in all the little boxes (DEFINITELY, LESS DEFINITE, NOT SURE, PROBABLY NOT, NEVER) and then leave those medically significant answers lying face down against an old program for the Astor Theatre and a postcard from someone in Noosa?

I don't know why I do these things. Sometimes I think I should do yoga and sudokus and cryptic crosswords and low impact weight training so my mind becomes a steel trap for facts and bits of information like where I'm actually going and what I'm doing on the 96 tram when in fact the plan was for me to get on the 86 tram and pick up my car and drive it home.

Which is of course why I find myself asking all these questions. I find it deeply depressing that I can't even remember the correct procedure for getting myself home of an evening. Tonight, I was supposed to go to the car. I forgot about the car and went home. The reason for this? Well, because I was distracted, of course. Why? Because I was doing a sudoku so my mind would be sharper and I wouldn't forget things.

Don't you think that's cruel?

Off to the comedy festival again tonight and it does rather make me wonder what the hell I'm going to do when this thing finishes. For those of you not from Melbourne, there is a month long festival called the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which is cruelly robbing me of any sleep and which is responsible for a higher than usual incidence of the flu for this time of year.

Kathy Smith Goes To Maths Camp was reviewed yesterday in the online UK Chortle, here.

See also here, which as you know is my favourite newspaper.

Also, I received an Alan Bennett DVD in the mail today, which was a present from myself. God I'm ace.

Also saw Kokoda on the weekend, a film starring our friend Simon Stone who was pretty much unrecognisable (ie he was wearing shorts) and who I really did not want to see dying in a tent. I then met up with him about ten minutes later at the comedy festival and was most relieved to see he wasn't wearing army issue shorts, he wasn't covered in mud, and he appeared not be bleeding to death.

The movie is definitely worth seeing. Although I missed a lot of it due to the fact that my hands were covering my face and I was muttering "Simon's going to die".

Thankfully, I can at least give away the real life ending: Simon doesn't die. He comes to the comedy festival with me and Stewart and Katie-Jean and we go to dinner in the city and the meal takes an hour and ten minutes to arrive so I complain to the staff and we get the entire meal plus drinks for free.

Yay for me being the hero of the story. Who knew Kokoda had such a modern twist at the end?

So my book reading project is going well.

Last night I finished the enormous tome that is Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, which (nerdishly) I read from cover to cover as though I was reading a novel. It's really fragments from his diary and stories about his life, cobbled together when he thought (and his doctors thought) he was probably dying.

One of the best things I discovered about him was the stance he took in relation to Oxford University, the university he attended and apparently loved. He was, however, horrified when they set up "The Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications". When asked to attend a charity event, and later to accept an honorary degree at the university, Bennett wrote back to them and suggested "that if the university thinks it's appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch's money, perhaps they ought to approach Sadam Hussein to found a chair in peace studies".

I wish I could be offered lots of important-sounding honours so that I could wittily and pointedly turn them down.

So that's two books (one play and one autobiography) as well as two essays by Cooke and now almost half of an extract from a James Kelman book (yes I know, extracts shouldn't count, but this is the information age so I'm doing well to even maintained my concentration throughout this paragraph. I bet you skimmed).

You did so.

I'm grouchy today.

Check out this review by Helen Razer in the online version of The Age, or as we here have come to call it, The Dead Horse.

The show she reviews is called I Know What You Did Last Monday. I haven't seen the show and I don't know any of the people in it, but what Helen Razer hysterically raves about here is that these are first time performers who have misjudged what comedy is and who look nervous and unsure of themselves.

So the only newspaper allowed to report on the comedy festival has kicked the teeth out of some twelve year olds in the playground. Meanwhile, if you'd like to read eight hundred boring quotes about the nature of comedy, go your hardest. Also, lots of four star reviews of a bunch of comedians from America and Australians with their own TV shows.

Where is the analysis of the pumped up misogynists I've seen at this festival doing rape jokes and poof jokes and being laughed at because they're confident and they got four stars in The Dead Horse and the audience doesn't want to feel uncool...?

At the comedy festival, they announced the nominations for a couple of awards the other night.

The two awards they announced were The Barry Award and The Golden Gibbo. The Barry is the official comedy festival award for best show.

This is the funniest thing in the festival. It's positively Kafkaesque. Check it out: the award for best show in the comedy festival is judged by a group of people who do not go to all the shows in the comedy festival.

That's how it works. Say you're doing a show in the festival, and all you want is a positive review. If you get a positive review, you get what's called "a vibe". If you've got "a vibe", then the judges for the Barry Award get along to your show and decide whether or not to nominate you for an award.

Isn't that hilarious? Imagine pretending that's a merit-based decision. "I'm the teacher who will be teaching this class, but only the popular kids will actually be graded".

So anyway, you ready for a shock? Not one woman nominated for The Barry Award. Huge surprise - you could have knocked me over with a cock joke.

The Golden Gibbo is great, recognises really different stuff.

It would be nice, though, if the mainstream award, The Barry, recognised (say) Judith Lucy, whose apparently brilliant and brave show about working in commercial radio, I Failed, is selling out every night. Popular, mainstream, funny... but not shortlisted.

If all this was a play, it would appear dreadfully over-written, really repetitive, and not very funny at all. What a shame.