Poetry from the pen of someone who knows about my computer skills and who doesn't know Nick from a bar of soap but who hasn't let that stop him, let me introduce our next poem in the poetry-slam.

'Twas an Internet Butler named Nick,
Went abroad on account of his dick,
Who had promised he'd find,
Women who'd blow his mind,
'Cos his accent was Aussie and thick.

But his mates at home were all dark,
Especially our friend Lorin Clarke,
Her few skills in I.T,
Could not be called mighty,
And relied on Nick's trustworthy spark.

But on the eve of this comedy fest,
Let's remember how much we've been blessed,
We'd not have this site,
Nor poems this shite,
If it weren't for Nick's generous bequest.

(Now, Nick, there is slim possibility this is libellous. I know some very good lawyers but I must say I kind of like any poet who refers to me as "dark". So many layers of meaning).

Big kudos to our new Mystery poet. See you at the Comedy Festival, you bawdy wordsmith.

A couple of diary entries ago, I declared that if someone could write a rhyming couplet about the comedy festival and the fact that the Internet Butler, our friend Nick, has gone overseas... I would give them comedy festival tickets.

Since then, the following submissions have been received:

We're sad for Nick, our funny friend
Whose time with us is soon to end.

... which is so good I can imagine studying it for year twelve English... And then there's the pitch-perfect and painstainkly true:

Comedy is funny but won't stop us grieving
For Nick our friend, who is leaving.

Now, I understand that a lot of you don't know what a rhyming couplet is, and a lot of you don't know Nick and a lot of you have never heard of the Comedy Festival. However, everyone can write poems.

Write me some and ye shall be rewarded.

If you don't want to be acknowledged, just go to the Contact Us page. I promise I won't tell.

Bad poetry is not encouraged but will be patiently tolerated and nurtured at the highest possible standard by our staff. In other words, bring on the poetry: good, bad or otherwise.

Last night I had a dream that I sent a text message to a friend of mine telling him how great he was. I remember thinking, "Oh! I must tell him" and then scrolling through the phone to find his number.

These sorts of things have been happening in my subconscious more and more lately. When my grandma moved house, she told me her new phone number and I absent-mindedly wrote it down on a piece of paper. That night, in my dream, I was inundated with questions about grandma's phone number, so I recited it several times and I've never forgotten it since.

This is very pleasing to me, because I can't remember anything, least of all numbers. However, from the reliable assortment of "dream dictionaries" online, I'm told that to dream about having telephonic contact with someone you know signifies "an issue that you need to
confront with that person". More alarming, "this issue may have to do with letting go some part of yourself". I wonder which part. Sounds expensive.

Anyway, the whole reason I raise this (a dangerous move given that the two most boring conversational topics in the world are other people's pets and other people's dreams) is that I would like to remember something useful in a dream, that I can't forget later. Not that
Grandma's phone number and the fact that Simon is a great guy aren't useful facts, but frankly I could have either remembered them or looked them up without the help of my subconscious.

So, if I could please dream each of my pin numbers, in relation to what it is they allow me to access, and also what I need to get from the supermarket the day before I go so that when I get home I don't suddenly remember that I actually went out to get toilet paper and came back with
some onions, twenty dollars worth of antipasto and a bath towel.

Ok. Enough about dreams. Have I told you about my dog?

Tonight, after a gig at Trades Hall, the great old workers' building in the middle of Melbourne, Yianni and I went to find my car.

Yianni, for those of you who haven't been doing your set reading, is one of the people I'm directing in the Melbourne Comedy Festival. We met when we were both training to not be lawyers together at Melbourne University Law School (breeding ground of some of the best people who aren't lawyers in Australia).

Anyway. We've worked something out, Yianni and I.

Six or seven years of working together on law exams, comedy festivals, and huge essays about section 52 of The Trades Practices Act... We've worked out that the best things happen in the car.

We are... and I'm by no means exaggerating... the funniest two people on EARTH when we're alone together in a car, parked outside a building we've just come out of or are about to go into.

Tonight, after Yianni did a small spot in the lineup at Trades Hall, he followed me out to my car and we prattled on uselessly as we walked to the carpark. Then, suddenly, inside the car, we came alive! We were brilliantly original, bitingly clever, and touchingly sensitive to every nuance of human behaviour. We were truthful, and honest, and yes sometimes that makes people vulnerable but you know what? In the car, vulnerable is okay. Vulnerable means strong but also accidentally completely hilarious. It means insightful and kind. Generous but tough.

The Ford people, when they made my car, I bet they were watching Oprah.

Anyway, so my point is, come and see Yianni's show, but if you know what's good for you, come and get in the car with us afterwards.

You can even use some of my lip balm and try and make the radio work.

The rule is though, once there's condensation from too much talking, it's time for us all to go home.

I started work on Monday at eight thirty in the morning. It's now 1am on Tuesday and I've just arrived home. I didn't have a lunch break really, and I won't be paid for most of it. The working conditions are shockingly bad, but thankfully my relationship with myself is not such that I'm subject to the new IR laws, so I'm only fooling myself. Being your own boss can be confusing.

So I was thinking, in the car on the way home, that my bed was like the ribbon at the end of a marathon that has NINE WORLD OF SPORTS written across it. The finish line, I suppose that's called. Anyway, so I'm stumbling towards the finish line and my hair smells of ciggies and I've seen a billion comedians in a week and my eyelids are drooping and I really need someone to stand by the side of the road with a water bottle that I can grab on my way past and hurl all over myself in exhausted relief... but I get nothing. And then when I get home, there's an obstacle course at the end of the marathon because I haven't cleaned my room in years because everyone knows you can't work from half eight in the morning until one the next day and have a clean room unless you work as a cleaner, and so finally I get to the finish line and collapse, like a real marathon runner except without the over-excited family and friends screeching hysterically and draping me in a flag. (Mum and Dad were busy).

So, as if to further highlight my metaphorical struggle, the thought came to me all of a sudden that Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, is actually running a marathon. A real marathon. An actual one. With her legs. And I guess her lungs. And the rest of her body anyway shut up the point is she's running a race that STARTS AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING ON A SUNDAY (9 April for those counting) and it goes for 42.295 kms.

Although she has told me that if she "feels liks it", she's allowed to just keep running until she's run fifty ks and she'll be able to tell her friends she ran an "ultra marathon" as opposed to a shitty old normal 42 km marathon at seven in the morning on a Sunday. In Canberra.

Anyway, so now my metaphorical marathon of a day seems somewhat less energetic. Mine was probably more of a "long distance walk". No lifting your feet completely off the ground or you'll get disqualified by a little guy in a suit.

I dunno. Shut up. It's half past one in the morning. Leave me alone.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival Guide came out on Friday with Melbourne's Age newspaper. For those of you not in Melbourne, you can check out the program here, with the added bonus of not having to read The Age.

Last week, in preparation for the festival, I went to a comedy gig every night. It really does take the romance out of the experience. Not that comedy is terribly romantic. (Romance can be pretty funny though. I still have, in my room, a home-made necklace from a "boyfriend" in high school. When I say necklace, what I really mean is a short length of hose on a piece of string with "I *heart* LORIN" written on it in white-out.)

So, romance is funny. Comedy, well, sometimes it's funny.

When it's almost midnight and some idiot you've never heard of is up there telling another poof joke disguised as an accidental slip up... Not so funny.

Just saying.

The Comedy Festival is pretty huge. Choose wisely.

In other news, Rita and I had a meeting this morning with some people who don’t exist. We met with this cool company called Eskimo (click here) who do everything from graphic design to DVD authoring. An Australian telecommunications company that shall remain nameless but which (if you believe their TV ads) is run by a whole lot of yawning rhinos and screeching baboons, was attempting to convince them over the telephone that they didn’t exist and that they probably never had.

Despite the obvious setbacks associated with their not existing, however, the meeting was fruitful and we’re now busy with film things again. We’re also working towards a cast and crew screening in the week beginning May 15. That’s 2006, for those of you who think you’re clever.

And no, that’s not a promise. Shut up.

Last night I got heckled at a comedy gig.

No, I wasn't on stage. I was in the audience. Yianni was on stage. He's the one who heckled me.

I love working with comedians.

To be fair, I kind of had it coming. I'm working on my reputation as a hard-arse director who doesn't let anyone get away with anything. Except for a public heckling. He's allowed to get away with that because he has to have an outlet for the pent up rage and frustration of being subjected to my forensic precision day after day in the pursuit of a better final product.

I like to think of Yianni as a ballerina and me as the artistic director with the big stick and the limp from that injury years ago that put an end to my brilliant career in dance.

But there’s no need to tell Yianni that, if you see him.

Now, if life were a Shakespeare play at the moment, it would definitely be a tragicomedy. All this face-achingly ridiculous comedy that I’m going to night after night at various different venues around Melbourne, juxtaposed against a couple of really quite tragic events. Namely the departure of Nick Jaffe, the brilliantly named (it was him, not me) Internet Butler for Standing There Productions.

Nick, who we originally knew through Stewart, our Director of Photography, from Art School, volunteered to help out on our film, I Could Be Anybody. Turned out, he was nearly everybody. I can’t remember what credit we ended up giving him, but there wasn’t a credit that said “nearly everything”, so we just short-changed him completely.

Anyway. Nick is leaving us to live in Germany. We’re trying not to take it personally. I went to his going away party the other night and someone accidentally burned a hole in my neck with a cigarette. A lasting scar to remind me of the metaphorical hole left in Standing There Productions now that Nick can only provide his Internet Butlering service from overseas.

Nick, we will miss you. Probably more than we’ll give you credit for. As usual.

As for the other “tragedies” in life at the moment, well they’ve been eclipsed now. I can’t remember them. Probably just things like me wearing brown with black. But needless to say Shakespeare would find a way of weaving it all in to the Comedy Festival/Nick leaving subplots in a way that was both poignant and naughty.

But I’m not Shakespeare. So, in summary: comedy is funny and it’s sad that Nick is leaving. Turn it into a rhyming couplet and I’ll get you a free ticket to the Comedy Festival.