By way of explaining my much lamented departure from these pages (thanks for all the mail. My secretary will endeavour to address each of you individually) here are some dot points:

1. It's official: we are putting together a show for the 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The show is called Greatness Thrust Upon Them and it will be performed in the utterly gorgeous Trades Hall precinct, in the Old Council Chambers. Every time I go to the Old Council Chambers I feel the history of the room creaking all around me. Our show is about history. Arguably all shows are about history, apart from a show I saw in second year university in a carpark, which appeared to be about a woman living on a futuristic planet with a bad case of hives and nothing but a feather boa and an eggbeater with which to pass away the hours. And they were long hours. But I digress.

2. I've been locked away writing our kids' TV episode draft with our script editor, Doug McLeod. It has been a priceless experience and I now have separation anxiety and no idea how I'm going to ever write anything including a shopping list or a birthday card without Doug's help ever again. *Hyperventillates into a paper bag*.

3. Obviously the script for our comedy festival show is some way off completion but we had to submit our image and our show description for the comedy festival guide this week. Submitting an image when you don't have a cast, and a summary of a show you haven't finished writing is an interesting exercise in issue-avoidance. Saying nothing while purporting to say something extremely interesting is a fine art reserved in normal circumstances for print journalism and teenagers.

4. Look, I have skills too. I can do stuff. Just because everyone else knows how to use photoshop to the maximum degree of hilarity doesn't mean I don't throw a mean frisbee or make an excellent cup of tea. Just because everyone else spends their spare time replacing Britney's head with Graham's from the accounts department doesn't mean I've been wasting my time. Just because it took me an entire day of googling things like "rasterise" and calling Stew in Thailand to find out what a dpi was and how come 100mm kept reverting to 98.2mm before I could do a simple thing like colour in the tie on a famous photo DOES NOT MEAN I AM A STUPID PERSON. It does, however, mean that Stew was boarding a boat in Thailand while saying "go to the dropdown menu". It also means that our image was handed in just in the nick of time.

5. I spent two days last week in Warrnambool with my law-talking-job, including a particularly enjoyable evening in my hotel room drinking vile cups of tea with UHT millk and putting the finishing touches on the episode draft until midnight. Still, it was an interesting trip. The Law Foundation is running an educational and community programme in rural areas (hence my previous trip to Mildura) so it's interesting work and I wouldn't mind living by the sea, if it somehow was made compulsory.

So those are my dot points to excuse my absence. Not really much point making them dot points if the only reason they are dot points is because they are preceded by numbers, but shoosh, I tried. I am writing this from my office (the library) and I am flanked on one side by a ball of phlegm surrounded by a sniffing human being and on the other side by a quite crazy lady singing and laughing and occasionally talking in tongues.

It is nice to be home.

I'm in the library again on a Friday with about four other people - yay for the reliability of lazy people!

I am sitting next to a rather alarming oversized rubbish bin labeled as follows:

"DISASTER BIN (for emergency use only)."

I am hoping its location is a coincidence. I am also hoping it doesn't need to come out on the weekend. Fingers crossed.

Also, I voted today. I know, I know, jumping the gun does mean I don't get the heady anthropological experience of standing in line with my fellow human beings smelling sausages and sneering at the Family First candidates. HOWEVER I did get to vote in a venue called The Comedy Theatre, which is an experience I found rather appropriate, given the state of things. Check this out.

Voting, as we all know, feels like the only thing any of us can do to change anything, and even then some of us are a bit skeptical that it will change anything other than which people are saying the same things on the TV over and over again without actually addressing any of the questions they're being asked. But voting today I remembered that it's a powerful thing, voting and then walking away down the street with not a care in the world. In some countries, people are killed for less.

Favourite bit of the ballot: the Senate paper on which you can vote either above the line for the WHAT WOMEN WANT party, or below the line for their candidates. It looks like this:

WHAT WOMEN WANT
__________________

LOVE

THOMPSON

... I don't know who Thompson is but I'm disappointed they couldn't find a candidate called CUP OF TEA or A BIT OF HELP AROUND THE HOUSE or something. Anyway shut up carry on. I'm getting nervous, can you tell?

I have been missing from these pages over the past few days because I have been getting a lot of work done. The reasons for this are:

1. I have a scary deadline. An actual one. Written into a contract.

2. The year twelve exams have finished and hence there are not trillions of hysterically amused, breathlessly begossiped eighteen-year-olds answering obnoxiously ringing phones and looking daggers at me for asking them to keep it down. Also apparently not so many people in the over twenty age group wear clippy-noise-making heels or have ring tones that wolf whistle loudly, causing a ripple of untold hilarity through the studiously unstudious masses.

I'm sorry. I know it's a generalisation, but honestly, the difference between then and now (grey haired and bespectacled family history nerds and people using free internet and doing PhDs) is quite remarkable. I'm not saying I'd be interested in hanging with the family history nerds at a party, but (and this is where the year twelves have been tragically misled) the library is not a party and therefore I am on the side of the boring studious folk. You can tell this because I give lectures on this point repetitively in the manner of one of my parents discussing loud restaurants, the existence of mobile phones, or P plate drivers on freeways.

3. I am trying the early rising thing again. Today I was at gym at half seven. Next week, if history is anything to go by, I will contract hooping cough, gout, a peg leg or similar.

4. I am trying to get a lot of work done before the weekend. Why? Because after the weekend, Australia will either be run by a conservative white man or it will be run by a conservative white man. If it continues to be run by the racist lying rodent who currently holds the title of conservative white man running the country, I will be leaving to live on Mars. So I'm trying to get my affairs in order in case that becomes the sad reality. In the event of the other conservative white man becoming the leader, I will be looking to my friend Mister Senate, which as all the year twelves "studying" in the library know, is a check and/or balance and/or platform for loonies and people like Brian Harradine to flirt with the electorate and then do what they were going to do in the first place. If nothing changes and/or things get worse or somehow similarly depressing, I am hoping a foxy fast-talking superhero will arrive to save the day, possibly with the liberal distribution of bubble wrap.

Sadly this weekend I am only voting once, due to my friends having sorted out their own political opinions since the early days when I used to receive three or four calls asking who to vote for. Don't worry, I explained the choices as objectively as I could. It wasn't my fault they were "bored" and wanted to know "what to write in the box and hurry up I'm next in line". Gone are the days those guys call. I like to think it's because I educated them about politics but I know the real reason is that most of them are teachers or health professionals who know how to vote because their jobs are on the line. Either way, I leave my phone on each time I vote but nobody ever texts me any questions. Mostly just statements, none of which I will repeat here.

Anyway, I'm going to make the most of the pre-election silence in this library and also in my brain. Until then, vote well, vote often, see you on the other side.

In the State Library today, the following hard work is being done:

- Year twelve exam study.
- Fitful REM sleep beneath school blazers, jumpers, other peoples' pencil cases.
- Bidding on eBay (one gentleman appears to be in search of a phone, another a laptop).
- Discussion in relation to year twelve exams.
- Discussion in relation to OMIGOD SHE TOTALLY DID NOT SAY THAT. TELL ME SHE DIDN'T SAY THAT.
- The tracing of a woman's long lost sister who possibly moved to Sydney in 1923. Seriously.
- A script for a children's TV show. Sort of.

No matter what you're working on, someone in the State Library is working harder and someone in the State Library is not working at all. This is one true statement about life from which I don't think I'll ever back down.

I've finally figured out what I've been doing wrong. Today, having virtually exterminated two chattering year twelve students (honestly, four hours and they didn't do five minutes work - the woman next to me said "hear, hear" and someone else's head popped over the partition and said "I agree!")... I don't feel good about being the person who tells people off in the library, I really don't. Although, if those girls are reading this, your response to "Why don't you girls just go to a cafe?" could have been better thought out than "Why don't YOU go to a cafe", a random selection of answers to which could include:

1) Because you're a poo poo head
2) Because I'll get boy germs
3) Ner ner nee ner ner, I'm telling Mum
or
4) Shut your face, stink-breath.

So I figured it out. On my way up to the gorgeous reading room with the partitions and the talking, I peered into the newspaper room and the genealogy room. Finally: grey haired silence broken only by people asking how to turn on the computers.

Of course, I have to be using the newspaper collection or the genealogy collection in order to be here, which is excellent because I usually refer to the newspaper anyway, but if I make even the slightest noise, I face the considerable wrath of those in the over sixty bracket, whose requirements for large print does not exclude an unshakable moral conviction, at the core of which is BE QUIET IN THE LIBRARY.

I think I just moved up a demographic. Or three.

Being a bookish nerd means that the library is a wonderful place to work, because you're surrounded by people learning things, reading things, TALKING LOUDLY (I hate the year twelve exams, PLEASE MAKE THEM STOP) and falling asleep in cubicles surrounded by thousands of dollars of technological equipment.

But it can be a tiny bit distracting. You have to keep focussed. For example, on the way to the top level of the library, standing out prominently among the other books is a book entitled BRUNEL. An old friend of mine used to live in a street of the same name, and this BRUNEL book always strikes me as addressing a topic about which I know nothing and could learn more. The temptation to grab the fat book by its spine and read about Brunel is almost overwhelming, but so far I haven't given in to my nerdier (and more procrastinatorial) instincts and I remain ignorant. I have deduced, by the size of the book and its font, as well as the fact that there is a street named after him, that Brunel was some kind of British General in one of the wars.

There is an entire section of the library dedicated to cooking, which is often frequented (I am not making this up) by people in white hats with black aprons covered in flour. This makes me wonder about the eating establishments in Melbourne. Do they not have cook books? Are they double-checking whether the dish they're cooking has oregano in it? Are they, like the main character in Ratatouille, actually fraudulent chefs with no qualifications, getting by on instinct and the recipes they come across in the library?

Anyway, you can see what I am battling with here. The ability to be THIS distracted by the word Brunel on the spine of a book.

Perhaps our TV series will be about Brunel. And chefs. And the idiots sitting next to me who are looking up rude words in the dictionary instead of studying for their exam, about which they speak with genuine fear in between reading the definition of the word "buttock". Which is, and I remember this myself, the funniest thing ever.

I am officially a grumpy old nerd.

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.