Driving down Smith Street today to get to the post office, I saw a monk getting a parking ticket.

Smith Street is quite a "colourful" street in Melbourne. In fact, I once had to go to the magistrates court and make a statement in relation to some of the more colourful behaviour going on there in the early hours of a Sunday morning (a bloke was trying to glass another bloke because he'd found him in his house, removing certain items and placing them in a large rubbish bag, presumably without prior permission). Smith Street has a Cash Converters, a money-loaning shop, a TAB, and eight billion cafes, many of them vegetarian and quite a few of them requiring you to ask for a key to use the toilets.

Anyway. So I'm in Smith Street and I see this monk. It's not terribly surprising to see a Franciscan monk in Smith Street because they live around there somewhere (in a converted warehouse loft? In a terrace house with peace flags out the front? Who's to know?). Still, it's never exactly par for the course to run into a monk, is it. So I do notice him, solitary, walking away from the post office, in long, brown robes and sandals. And he goes to a little red Holden and he unlocks the driver's door.

You know that moment when you're half in and half out of your car and you see a parking ticket under the wiper and you just freeze?

Monks do that too!

I could see him spot it - a bastard parking ticket from the bastard council on the windscreen of his car - and he sat with the door half open just staring at it for about five seconds.

Then he calmly reached around and removed it, placed it on the seat next to him, and resumed whatever it is monks do on a Tuesday afternoon.

I was very impressed. No rage. No horror. No walking around the car and checking for chalk marks. No inspecting the ticket machine and gestering furiously in case the inspector could still see him and realise the error of his ways. Nothing!

I bet the monks pay for it, though. I bet it doesn't come out of his monk wage.

PS Melbourne had the spookiest weather today. Yesterday was the coldest day since August tenth last year, and the planes were grounded and the air was like pea soup. Today, it was that but with the added weirdness of some really spooky light and a huge orange sunset, like in a breakfast cereal advertisement. Thought everyone else should know - if anyone wants to shoot a horror film in the next four days, I'd get yourselves down here.

So I've finished the Hemon book, Nowhere Man. It was beautiful but I got lost near the end.

I think maybe I need to read in a vacuum. In a room with no sound, ample light, blinkers on the side of my head and nothing else whatsoever to read.

I'm testing that theory by reading my next book, Tourism (see Writers' Festival post) in the bath.

Yes, I know, extremely exciting weekend. It's been top notch.

It's a weekend measured by what I didn't do:

1. Unpack from previous weekend in Sydney (partly lazy, partly nostalgic)
2. Go to gym (again, nostalgic reasons - why break such a familiar pattern?)
3. Go to the St Kilda Short Film Festival
4. Go to the theatre
5. Do any of the things on the Rita "To Do List" (Sorry Rits)
6. Go to fun-sounding party with fun people in fun street not far from own house
7. Resist temptation to watch dreadful, schmaltzy Dianne Keaton movie with housemates.

Good on me.

Here's looking forward to another productive week...

From my office window in Melbourne, where I work sometimes at Victoria Law Foundation, there is a cool view of a section of the inner city, featuring a rooftop car park, just below us.

There was a guy there this morning engaging in a comical, solitary wrestling match with some oversized cardboard he was for some reason transporting from the back of his car onto a trolley, and which he then wheeled, crooked and uncertain, out of the car park and down into the street, muttering to himself and having the odd, brief but pointed word to a renegade portion of cardboard.

It was a self-contained, private moment in this little guy's day (he was little, you see, because I was five floors above him and he was struggling with something bigger than himself).

It made me think of all the private little battles I have with myself every day, each of them characterised by the inward-looking, quiet muttering of a person who is not being watched.

Except, probably, I am being watched from the fifth floor of a nearby office building by someone who is gazing outside because she can't think of another word for "access".

Just saying. You're being watched. Oh yes you are.

Since we shot our film late last year, two of the people involved have become married and are now pregnant (details sketchy as to whether this happened on set), three people have left or are leaving to go overseas, almost everyone has changed jobs, and one of the crew members has been recruited into the German army.

Just thought we should have a bit of a look at ourselves.

Usually, and I think this is maybe part of why I like to write, I really love people. Or, I love listening to them and watching them and working out what makes them like they are. Sometimes, if someone is being a jerk on the train or acting like a princess in a cafe, I'm quite interested in watching everything play itself out. Even if they're being rude to me. It often doesn't annoy me, or whatever. It kind of fascinates me and I stop whatever I'm doing (including having a conversation) and instantly cling like a sea creature to the little personality performance that's going on within ear shot.

But then, sometimes, people just thoroughly, comprehensively, overwhelmingly bother me. And what bothers me most about people who bother me is that they're bothering me at all, because I know (from my eavesdropping work) that people are just a complex mix of ego and emotion and doubt and self-conscious, conflicted, angry confusion about the rest of the world.

As a writer, I know this, and I also know that any biases, weaknesses or peculiarities in my own character are exactly the elements that lead me to respond to people the way I do, and so my own anger or annoyance at other people is actually more to do with me than to do with them.

But MAN some people shit me. Usually it's people like the guy who was at my gym today, who was a bully. Usually it's bullies. Bullies or people who are unfair or people who are idiots pretending they're better than you, or they know more than you. Pulling rank, essentially. I don't think I could have been in the army.

Anyway. Guy at gym today, size of a house, enormous and sweaty and lifting heavy weights with a theatrical gusto not entirely necessary in the Council-run gym full of grey-haired people with "FIT FOR LIFE" t-shirts, and people like me wearing baggie trackies and runners they've had since year eleven. Anyway, so I'm doing this weight machine thing, and I slowly rest the weight to readjust my grip, and suddenly there's a huge sweaty fist on the machine in front of me, and I can hear someone speaking to me. I take my earphones off and look up this enormous body at this huge purple head saying, "I'll just push in here between sets".

He wanted to get on the machine. The machine I was on! I was so astonished that I said okay, and I got up. I thought maybe there was a rule. Then I thought about how maybe there were also rules that bullies with purple heads are not allowed to leave their weights lying around on the ground (as per the sign on the wall that says DO NOT EVER LEAVE WEIGHTS ON GROUND) and other rules that the purple-headed are not allowed to leave their lurid green and yellow sweaty beach towels all over the equipment while they steal other people's machines from under them. I thought about how maybe there was some kind of sub-rule about physical intimidation and general pig-headed arrogance. Then, just like that, I was furious.

So I got more furious. A woman pulled out in front of me in a red sports car because she knew I would slow down because I was in a Ford Laser. I looked horrified and she did a schoolyard what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it face, and I shouted into the hot Ford Laser for the next couple of hundred metres, eventually muttering myself into a silence as I parked my car.

I parked my car out the front of my house, which at the moment has a sign on it that says it's for sale. It's not for sale, the house out the back is for sale, but people are confused, and other people are wandering down the side of our house checking it out. The house out the back is built right behind our house and has a clear view of our living room and our backyard. I mentioned this to "James" - the real estate agent - who told me that it wasn't true and that in fact you couldn't see my house. I told him you could see my house from the living room. He said, "Oh yes, but not the bedroom".

I said, yes you can. If you open the window in the bedroom upstairs you can see right into my house.

He said you can't open the window.

I said you can.

He said you can't.

I said I just did.

He said I think you might be mistaken.

I said, what, about whether or not I opened a window?

He said, excuse me. He spoke to someone else. It was a woman with an American accent. She wondered if they'd had many people through the house today. James said not many. She said that's interesting. That might be because the open for inspection time listed in the newspaper is half an hour early.

He said, no it isn't.

She said, yes it is.

He said no it isn't.

She showed him the newspaper.

He cleared his throat.

She described the crowd that gathered at the advertised time. She used the words "angry mob".

I liked her.

I'm thinking maybe I stay inside this evening. A wanker ratio of 3:1 never bodes terribly well.

Today I had my eyes tested. I was seeing a fuzzy shape in my left eye.

I was trying to organise a bunch of people to dress up as judges and promote law week in the street at seven thirty tomorrow morning, and I had to rush in to get my eyes tested and then keep trying to work out who was coming when.

Problem is, when you get your eyes tested for blobby shapes, the people in white suits make your eyes numb. They put this anesthetic eye drop thing in your eye and you have to wear dark glasses and you can't drive a car (so just like a rock star - but imagine a Ford Laser instead of a stretched limo). So anyway, I had to get people to read my text messages, write my emails, and pretty much do everything for the next hour or so. It was nice really.

Except the end result is this: I'm going to dress up like a judge and go and stand out in the middle of King Street in Melbourne tomorrow morning at seven thirty.

Hopefully by then I'll be able to see.

In Penny's show, Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, Kathy Smith talks about finding Horsham on Google Earth (she's a teensy bit of a nerd).

Anyway, so now everyone in my house is sitting around looking up stuff on Google Earth. We've found my old house in Boston, and the place down the road from there where I used to get cheesecake icecream (seriously), and the place where I used to chuck a frisbee with a guy called Jim who I once told a joke to about a war veteran and then turned out his dad was a war veteran and the joke wasn't very funny and that was a bummer because it's the only joke I've ever remembered. We've found Boston College (and the Boston College football field which is the size of some island nations in the Pacific) and the resevoir I used to walk around to get to college every morning. We've found my house in Melbourne. We've found the university and I remembered how I used to play hockey and wondered what's happened to that part of my brain (what does it do now?).

Anyway, now it's getting silly. We tried to Google Earth Paris Hilton's house.

So I've decided I'm going to read some more of my book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, because in his spare time while he was studying at college, he worked out that if a trail of ants came into the cupboard of his room while he was studying, he could circumvent their trail to the cupboard and redirect it back outside, via a pile of sugar, merely by making individual chair lift things for each ant and redirecting them all for an hour, until all the other ants followed. It's got to do with the little trails of acid they leave around the place.

That is what he did in his spare time.

Actually, now that I think about it, he's exactly the kind of person who would spend hours on Google Earth. Possibly not looking up Paris Hilton's house.

In our defence, we were only looking it up because we thought she probably had a pool we could see from the air.

Because that's a good excuse.