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.

I read in the newspaper this morning that parents and teachers are concerned about broadband internet being available in classrooms because it might prove detrimental to learning.

You reckon?

Here are the top ten things that distract me from getting any writing done. Ever. In order:

1. The internet generally. So pregnant with possibilities. So educational. So easy to write off as "research" or "inspiration".

2. Email. Combined with The Guilt of not writing is The Secondary Guilt of not getting back to amusing friends you do not deserve in the first place on account of points 1 - 10.

3. Facebook. So boring, so uninspiring, and yet so constantly in need of being checked just in case someone has set their status to "____ is pregnant" or similar.

4. Text messages and social life - or, more recently, deterrence of social life. The preventing of a social life in order that I may proceed further as an antisocial writer locked in a hermitage, all of which is proved redundant on account of numbers 1 - 10.

5. Bills, rent, going shopping, getting haircuts (once a year if being particularly diligent) - all of which I do with a great deal of resentment because I am not writing. Which I don't do much anyway, as you can see from points 1 - 10.

6. Cleaning and organising things because deadlines are pending. EG cleaning computer keyboards with toothbrushes or organising books according to Dewey Decimal Classification system. (I'm just kidding, obviously. My books are alphabetised into sections. You borrow one and you may need to fill out a form.)

7. Writing here on this very site - see those extra long entries recently? I was supposed to be doing something on those days. I was supposed to be really cracking the back of my work on those days. Those days were days that had been carefully put aside for the creating of new and exciting Standing There Productions projects. Yup. Sure did have a lot to do on those days.

8. Youtube. Particularly Japanese gameshows. Also political speeches. See "research", above.

9. Doing paid work, getting excercise, doing anything really that can fit neatly on the "virtuous" side of the ledger rather than the "YOU ARE BETRAYING YOURSELF" side of the ledger.

10. Watching DVDs and films. See reference to "research", above.

So yes, look, if I were a student I'd be arguing for broadband in the classroom, but for crying out loud, they already watch The Simpsons on their iPods when they're supposed to be learning about fractions. For the sake of the children, ban the internet!

PS. Thanks to Paul and Rits for their favourite MIFF lists. We must have gone to three separate film festivals. Can't wait to see the general releases when they come out. I see in the paper today that MIFF met its budget, which it won't reveal. That must be nice for them! I SPENT MINE! God, next year, let's remember to PACK SANDWICHES, guys.

Too many deadlines to see enough films.

Too many films plus too many deadlines = too little time to eat and get giggles with friends.

Too much of The Guilt to entirely enjoy the deadlines or the films or the friends.

What happened to my gay abandon?

Why am I again confronting the dual parts of my personality: the obsessive antisocial nerd versus the social hedonist? Why can't they both just get along?

Films I've seen so far:

The Happiest Day of His Life - short film purporting to subvert gender stereotypes but actually just relying on them. It's a shame. It was a good idea and I do think the phrase "dick-whipped" should be introduced to society.

The Armstrongs - a documentary about a small business that actually had me groaning aloud and crawling around in my chair, much like I do when I watch shows like "The Office", which this was disarmingly similar to, although this was real. Hilarious and depressing at the same time. Probably my favourite so far.

Ex-Drummer - a really well conceived, well-shot, entirely hideous film that made me quite ill. I'm still not sure if it was sending things up or celebrating them.

Yo - well acted by possibly the nicest, kindest, sweetest-looking actor on earth. Kind of been done before though, story-wise. There's something about the subtly and the slow reveals in films at MIFF though, which make the story not always the point. Which, coming from me, is usually an insult.

Anyhoo. The Guilt, The Guilt. I'm off. Seeing Teeth tonight with a collection of my favourite people on earth.

For someone with such a heady concentration of inner turmoil, my life really isn't that bad.

Recently, due to various factors beyond my control, I have missed two deadlines.

There is something about the feeling of having missed a deadline which is a little bit like the Gwyneth Paltrow movie, Sliding Doors. All you have to do is slightly tweak the wikipedia plot description and you've got a version of my life every time I miss an opportunity that could have been something great, and could have been a complete disappointment. Like so:

Lorin's life splits into two parallel universes which run in tandem. In one universe, Lorin manages to get her proposal/application/script in on time, and in the other she misses it. In the former, her application isn't successful anyway and she finds out that someone she went to university with is staging a three part opera using sock puppets and a glockenspiel instead; she promptly flees the scene, and meets (and falls in love with) an entirely new concept she hasn't thought of yet. In the latter universe, she carries on oblivious in a miserable and constant struggle to coexist with The Guilt that constantly plagues her on account of missing her deadline.

Towards the end of both scenarios, she discovers she is pregnant with her respective partner's baby.

Okay, well, apart from that last bit. I don't have respective partners. But all that other stuff, that's totally how it is, man.

Imagine the life I could be leading. Imagine the life you could be leading. What are you doing just sitting there? Come ON! Get on with it!

We got our film festival tickets today (last day to get the early bird tickets, so hurry up kids)...

Last year, I saw about four films a day.

This year, I intend to beat my previous record. How I am going to afford this, given it will require me to take time off my already infrequent day job, is one of those "play-it-by-ear" kind of scenarios.

I realise this means that most of my year has so far been taken up with festivals. April and May were the comedy festival, June was the Sydney Writers' Festival, and July and August are the Melbourne Film Festival. How on earth I get anything else done is beyond me. Probably because getting anything done is also beyond me. I can feel The Guilt creeping sneakily back into the cracks between my debt and my lack of time to do anything productive on account of my debt.

The circle, the circle of life, as The Lion King would say.

Speaking of wasting time you don' t have enough of, here is an exciting opportunity in this excellent area of study:

Looks like our friend Dave Eggers is writing about films for The New Yorker. With Anthony Lane! Oh to be a fly on that wall. Read this.

I know I am.

Today I had a day off.

No work, no Standing There Productions stuff, no gym, none of The Guilt.

I spent a few hours with my cousin who is over from WA and we had a beer and I had a curry and he had a club sandwich and our phones had no reception in the cafe we were in. Life is so simple when you take away the context.

Then, my friend, who has virtually the same head as me, got her hair cut with a fringe. It looks way cool. Now I have to decide whether I mind being a copycat from Ballarat (while looking heaps cool) or whether I would prefer to remain slightly uncool but retain my integrity. Tough call. Uncool, I think, is possibly the best option when you take into account my finances.

Anyway, my out-of-context day off has finished now, and I'm looking at all the work I've got to do, and I'm considering going to the movies to see my boyfriend (Johnny Depp) in his latest pirate movie, but methinks The Guilt is taking over again. Since I've been home I've put on a load of washing, done the dishes, and paid an overdue bill. Clearly The Guilt is trying its best to make me a model human being.

Keep trying, Guilt. Maybe we'll meet each other halfway.

So I went for a run today, against the instructions of my body and also my mind, both of whom have decided they rather enjoy having cups of tea and sitting in warm rooms thinking about how satellites work (seriously though, how do they work?)...

Anyway, although my brain and my body disagreed, and my shoes punished me because they are well past retirement age and would much rather be at home near the end of my bed being tripped over when I am getting ready for work, my Greater Sense Of Things combined with The Guilt meant that I decided a run was in order.

I ran around princess park, or prinny, as the fit people call it. As I came back around to the Carlton Cemetery side, I looked across the green oval and saw the following, all happening at once:

- the sun, sinking shyly behind a residential college, acting as though it wasn't responsible for the huge orange and black clouds moving with purpose in the foreground.
- rain coming in from the city.
- trams, lit up little boxes with heads in them, tearing towards Brunswick.
- people turning on the lights in their cars as they drove through the dusk.
- a car beeping at an Italian man, crossing too slowly on the parade.
- in the foreground, a dozen enormously tall African men leaping over a soccer ball.
- up ahead, looking to see if I was watching, far too many anglo boys playing aussie rules in their undies (look at us! How daring! Undies! Aren't we crazy!)

And to my right, a cemetery.

Another thing that happens when you finish a full time project: you realise you've been missing out on stuff. HEAPS of stuff.

Also, you realise how easy it is to get a stitch and a blister in your foot when you haven't walked more than a hundred metres since April.

Oh my lordy. Anyone got any dencorub?