Lately, I have been swooning. In the real sense of the word. I fainted. Twice in as many days.

Never having fainted in my life before, and in the absence of having just met Johnny Depp or being told by Mister Darcy that he ardently admires me, I decided this was a habit in need of further investigation.

So I went to a Victorian public hospital. Wow.

Turns out, there's a nursing dispute. Turns out, Victorian nurses are paid less than any other nurses in the country. Significantly. Which is no wonder. They barely do anything to help the community. Check it out, here are some edited highlights of what went down during the thirteen hours I was in emergency at the hospital:

1. Two hallucinating, violent, screaming, presumably ice-affected patients had to be subdued. Their abusive, terrifying screams could be heard throughout the corridors. The staff looked exhausted.

2. An elderly man with renal failure and a tumour sat alone waiting until his tummy was empty enough for further tests. He was looked after by a nurse who had to excuse himself several times because nobody else was available to resuscitate other patients. Despite this, he and the old man had a few in-jokes by the end of the night and I felt less bad for him being there alone.

3. A woman who had chased her attacker down a dark alleyway was being followed everywhere by two policewomen who asked questions about what kind of needle her attacker used to stab her with. The woman was worried, shaking, and also possibly a little bit stoned. When describing chasing the man down the street, she got the giggles. My boyfriend is going to think I'm such an idiot, she said.

4. A student whose mother had flown over from China to support her during her exams was desperate for something for her tonsilitis. She was already on antibiotics. It needs to go away, she explained, because of my exams. She had waited for nine hours to see a doctor. She was so stressed she couldn't sit down.

5. A guy had fallen up the stairs with a broken leg in a cast. He described it as excruciatingly painful. The male nurse had to shave him in order to access the leg. It was embarrassing, so the nurse offered to shave a smiley face and the patient said he'd probably prefer Batman. The nurse had to rush off to find a heart monitor, but he agreed that the patient was definitely a batman kind of guy.

6. A woman, disembarking a tram, had broken her foot. Her friend, who there to support her and who was studying law, read about the Nuremberg trials in the waiting room. A woman with kidney problems groaned. Nuremberg "puts things in perspective", said the law girl, unconvincingly.

7. At almost six in the morning, a girl who has been moaning in pain has to face up to a needle. The nurse gets her to relax. Genuinely terrified, she begs him not to inject her. He talks her down. She relaxes. She feels better. He changes shifts, informing the next nurse of every single detail of the patients in their care.

8. Back in the waiting room, when I was looking worse, the triage nurse brought me a glass of milk and a pain killer and tucked my hair behind my ear. She apologised for the wait and told me how far up the queue I was. She was verbally abused by several people. She was wearing a badge saying Fund Nursing Properly.

Today, after sleeping off the night I had without sleep the night before, I wrote a letter to my local member, the health minister, and the Premier. Victorian nurses are the lowest paid in the country. The nurse I mention here has a three year postgrad degree and is paid less than a first year nurse in NSW who has never been in a hospital. Without proper ratios and incentives for nurses, hospitals will have to run like the one I was at the other night - in total lock-down, no ambulances allowed in, with people being treated in chairs, in areas not designated for treatment.

People who are sick are desperate, sometimes angry, sometimes terrified, sometimes weeping, sometimes violent. Nurses are doing real work with real consequences and from my brief window into the system today, they're doing it bloody well.

Of course, if I had the money or the inclination, I could have paid a whole lot of money and gone to a private hospital, where I would have been out in mere hours, rather than an entire night. Because that makes sense.

If you care, go here.

If you work at St Vincent's, thank you.

Here's a tip from years of nerdy library attendance: if you want to have a really productive day in the library, go in on a Friday. For some reason, which I'm sure someone somewhere has figured out, libraries are almost completely deserted on Fridays. You could fire a cannon through the main room and you wouldn't so much as graze anyone on the elbow.

Other days, it's stacks on, everyone fighting for a seat, hundreds of people rushing about with their mobile phones, talking to their friends, dropping things, crossly standing in the "15 minute" internet queue (it's never fifteen minutes) and the old favourite: a hilarious ringtone chimes ostentatiously, followed by a fountain of guffaws.

I suppose it's the students. When I was a student, Friday was like the weekend. You spent most of it intending to get your essay done and ended up going to the movies or bumping into someone from your politics tute sitting in the sun with a beer. Several times I went to the wrong party in a street in Carlton and ended up having a lovely time with an entirely different group of people, some of whom I even recognised from uni. I always yearned, back in those days, for weekends without the essay guilt. I yearned for a five day a week, nine to five, ordinary, normal job. Possibly because I knew I would never have one.

Of course, now, I have The Guilt just as much as I used to, only without the satisfaction of being graded for the work I hand in, and without the student elections and the cheap Indian food after six in the evening.

So here I am on a Friday again, in a library, with a deadline hanging over my head and a cafe/bar outside where I bump into people I did politics tutes with. Honestly. Yesterday, I bumped into the friend from school with whom I first started a theatre company at Melbourne University. I remember the two of us filling out the forms, writing the dates of the play in our diary and thinking, "Well, we did it - what next?"

She's a writer now. She's been doing her PhD. The deadline's hanging over her and she really should be getting it finished, she said, as a friend sidled up to her and ordered them both a coffee.

I'd already had mine, so I had to go back inside and fight for a seat in the library.

I have always thought there is a word missing in the English language. I don't know if there's a word for it in other languages or not, but I feel there should be a word that describes the sudden sensation or recognition that a lot of time has passed and many things have happened but CONVERSELY AND SIMULTANEOUSLY that not a lot has changed and time feels compacted - as if we were just here and we left for a moment because one of us needed a drink and then when we came back, eight years had passed.

Perhaps I haven't expressed that properly, but the feeling of time having passed both slowly and quickly is a sensation I have quite often as I get older, particularly as I go through all my old routines, such as sitting in a library after a coffee with a friend and trying to refocus on what "really" matters.

It's not going well.

Getting up in the morning like a normal person is not going well.

Yesterday, I arose at seven in the morning, had a coffee down the road, rode my bicycle into the city, lay in the sun while reading in preparation and waiting for the library to open, went into the library, and promptly failed to have an idea.

For an entire day.

Not one, solitary idea.

Or, not a good one, at least.

I worked hard, don't get me wrong, but to ABSOLUTELY NO AVAIL.

If I was my boss, I'd fire myself.

Hang on...

Now that Standing There Productions is in the business of developing children's television scripts and trying to turn them into children's television SHOWS, I have been studiously watching:

Degrassi Junior High
Round The Twist
Press Gang
and whatever else I can find on the telly when I'm pottering around doing something else.

Hence I was idly wondering today about the Degrassi legacy. How long did they milk that show for? How many different Degrassi schools were there? How many actors found their careers revived after the first Degrassi in order to launch the next generation?

The answer to most of those questions is: heaps.

Joey Jeremiah, the pipsqueak bully with the skateboard from Degrassi Junior High, comes back as AN ADULT in Degrassi The Next Generation. Check him out here and at his very Joey-friendly website (Joey would surely approve of "patmeup.com") here. Apparently, Adult Joey has an on-again, off-again relationship with Adult Caitlin. Also starring in Degrassi Next Generation are Snake and Spike, who are (I do believe) married. Degrassi: Next Generation is definitely my next DVD purchase, and it's even work related!

What seems disappointing, from looking at the photographs of Degrassi: Next Generation, is that it LOOKS like other TV shows. Everyone's a hottie. Nobody's dowdy or fat or squinty or pimply. Nobody hunches. Nobody even has outrageous hair, worn with aplomb in the original series by Spike, the likes of whom I had never seen roaming my school, but I certainly wouldn't have minded if she did. It's a shame everybody looks the same in Next Generation, since the utopia of Degrassi really was a lovely place to imagine. Where everyone was normal, with the possible exception of the "hot" girl, Stephanie, who was (we all knew deep down) a bit of a tool.

Now, she's a jazz musician. Check it.

Anyway, look, obviously today is a day for thinking about important things like Degrassi, because the news itself is too ludicrous for words. Hence I am interested only in Degrassi, and the following: Motorola has apparently invented battery chargers for mobile phones that are run by... guess what... riding a bicycle. Yes here it is. You ride your bike around and your phone is charged. Designed for African farmers apparently, although it doesn't explicitly rule out idiots who forget to take their mobile chargers with them to work.

I have worked as a script editor before on a few things unofficially and a few things officially (including the upcoming ABC TV show The Librarians, which is running some very exciting looking promos at the moment by the way, and you should all watch it).

Being a script editor is so much fun because you can work objectively and then leave. You can see the problems, suggest possible new directions, scrap things you don't like, and then walk away from the rubble you have created while someone else does the work.

At least, that's how it felt from the perspective of BEING a script editor.

Now, for our children's TV script we're writing, we are working with our own script editor and I have realised something. A script editors is, quite simply, the best thing since sliced bread. Or indeed bread of any kind. The best thing since yeast.

You know that game where you have to say which permanent member of staff you would employ if you could - you know, most people say masseur or chef or butler or whatever?

Script editor. For sure. Not even a contest. Not even if the chef was Jamie Oliver and the masseur was Johnny Depp.

I'm sorry Johnny, that was a lovely audition, it really was, but you see I can only employ one staff member so I'm afraid you'll have to go. Do take one of Jamie's crab bisques on your way out won't you.

Poor Johnny. He never had a chance.

As a writer, and as a human being, I am not a morning person.

Mornings for me have always been eerie, sickly, befuddling continents, shifting at about 10am into a new geography involving the tender preparation and cautious, careful consumption of earl grey tea.

People who get up in the morning are often people I admire, people I aspire to be more like. My grandfather, ex army, several hundred years old, gets up at the crack of dawn and marches through fields and villages, cities and towns, other dimensional realms etc returning in time for two pieces of charcoal covered in honey, and tea. My routine inherited only the tea. It seems to me that if only I could manage the getting up early part of the routine, I might also live to be a hundred, marching through fields and villages and getting my photograph in the local newspaper for riding a Harley Davidson motorbike at the age of ninety-one (seriously, check this out).

Among my peers, too, I am surrounded. Rita Walsh, Standing There producer (also my boss) gets up half an hour after she goes to bed, runs the Melbourne marathon because she "might as well give it a go”, and never forgets anything, with the notable exception of how long she has paid for parking. When we worked together in an office, years ago, I would turn up to work, stumble through the day and marvel at Rita’s machine-like efficiency. She was like Industrial Era Europe - all shiny pistons and fast-moving conveyor belts. At about three in the afternoon, however, Rits would drop like a marionette and I would emerge, hero-like, from a thick fog, finally ready to conquer all the things Rita hadn’t already done. This usually meant it was my job to get Rita a coffee, put the phones on voicemail, and go home.

The problem is though, Rita has adapted. Like a sea creature growing legs and striding up the shore towards a future splitting the atom and having opposable thumbs and so forth, Rita now works until quite late at night. I, on the other hand, remain back in the dark ages.

So this morning, we began Operation Make Lorin More Productive on Monday Mornings. It’s not a name we’ve run past our marketing and communications manager yet, but you get the idea. I need to write to schedule now. That means not at midnight.

I was outside, vertical, walking to a meeting with Rita, at seven thirty this morning. Things actually happen at that time. The sun hits a different part of your face. Old ladies - the same ones who would put doilies out when a guest was coming - stand outside in their front gardens frowning as they hose the geraniums, squinting at you in their puffy high-fire-danger dressing gowns, hair already in curlers. When I got to the meeting, I had to excuse myself and squeeze past a seagull who was scooping the top off a puddle of morning water with its orange beak.

It’s only taken a day, but I’m already a morning person.

When I got to the State Library, I was proud to be among the library nerds I usually curse who stand out the front like people queuing for grand final tickets, waiting for the library to open so they can go in and achieve more by midday than the rest of us would achieve in a week.

Yeah, I’m one of those guys now. You just watch.

I have always thought it would be nice to be an "artist in residence", if only because it might make me feel slightly more legitimate in applying for my Melbourne Festival Artist Pass, but also because it sounds romantic.

Which is why it is particularly delightful that Standing There Productions has been granted a residency at Australian artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd's property, Bundanon (which you can see here) in New South Wales, for a month yet to be determined in 2008.

We're pretty excited about having, as Virginia Woolf would say, a room of our own. Bundanon has provided inspiration for many Australian artists since the Boyds, who believed that "nobody should own a landscape" and therefore donated their property to Australian artists for the rest of time.

How cool is that? Pretty cool cats, dem Boyds, as it turns out.

Although... living for a month in a peaceful and inspiring landscape will be a challenge. Suddenly I'll be having nobody to blame but myself, and possibly Rita and Stew.

Which is fine. They totally had it coming.

PS. Proof that one woman's heaven is another's hell: I told my housemate about the residency and she said, patiently, wanting to understand, "So, it's kind of like... jail?"

Hm. Kind of. In a good way. A jail with a view.