Why, when you're about to take time off work for three and half weeks to write and think and plan and produce...

Why, when you're about to take four days to drive up to Nowra from Melbourne...

Why, when the film festival is in its final week and you've just spent seventy extra bucks on tickets...

Why, four days before your birthday...

Why, when you've been working full time and you could have been sick AT ANY POINT DURING THAT TIME...

Does your head decide to infest itself with throaty, snotty I-need-to-lie-down-and-be-useless-now style illness?

Why?

PS Yes I am aware there are wars and famines and that I have a cold and a job and a writers residency and that I should pipe down and stop being such a drama queen but shoosh please. This is clearly some kind of law of nature and it is my job as a writer to report it. 

PPS. I saw a really good film last night at MIFF. Boy A. Apart from a few mental Japanese films (huzzah!) it's been mostly doccos that have piqued my interest, but I can't get Boy A out of my head. Look out for a release.

Place someone in front of a coffee machine and give them an amusing or inexplicable T shirt and they instantly become cool and borderline attractive.

True or false?

Am currently taking a survey.

2:1 in the office this afternoon in favour of cute and cool. Someone from our coffee place was seen out of context and appeared, devastatingly, to be normal, borderline unattractive.

Am thinking of other contexts in which this is the case. Certain bars? Bookshops? Some may say behind microphones and under lights but I have significant experience to indicate this is a delusion and should be ignored with every fibre in one's body. Maybe that's the case with bars too. And cafes. Or just maybe... it's the case with cool.

Profound. I just had a coffee.

On the side of my bottle of carbonated water, a description of the springs from which the water is sourced:

"Often under snow in winter, the area is surrounded by huge granite boulders unique in the Australian bush. It is a haven for wildlife including the native platypus."

A platypus, this is what they are telling me, weed in my drink.

Seen a couple of days ago in the middle of the traffic in Rathdowne Street, contemporary Melbourne, trotting past the park: two horses dragging a carriage.

Bloke sitting in carriage.

Bloke using a personal organiser.

Head down, scribbling with a stylus. Not once looking out the window of ye olde carriage at ye worlde.

I'm thinking of hiring a carriage and getting in it with my laptop. Just to make people wonder.

Today, I was going to the Law Talking Job and I decided I needed to look slightly respectable but I was going out to dinner after work with my friend Annabelle and, what with the weather over the last few days, I might become completely freezing.

I don't know if that 80% of heat through the head thing is true but I decided the only thing for it was to take a beanie to work in my handbag.

My friend Annabelle is an emaculate dresser and utterly, disgustingly gorgeous, and so ramming a beanie down over my head that completely clashed with my work clothes would not be good.

So what did I do? I built my outfit around my beanie. My beanie is a lovely deep brown. I wore a brown pashmina, a brown jacket, a maroon top and black legs.

I just looked in my bag. I forgot my beanie.

It's at home on the bench.

I built my outfit around my beanie and I left my beanie at home.

This is, and I'm not sure how, a metaphor. For something. About me being hopeless, surely. Or, you know, left out in the cold due to my own incompetance and despite careful planning.

My beanie is a metaphor. A brown, benched, lonely metaphor, sitting at home wishing it was hanging with its friends Mister Pashmina and Mrs Brown-Coat. I don't know where that leaves me but needless to say: eighty percent colder.

Have a nice weekend!

When you run, which I do on a treadmill in a gym (unromantic, I know, but I am less able to fool myself that I have run twenty ks and am close to breaking world records etc) what goes through your head?

I know some people run in order to not think at all. That doesn't seem to happen to me. I have to think. I have to think or I stop running. Lately, I have realised that not only do I have to think but I have to have a soundtrack.

I don't really care what my soundtrack is, although it's probably best that it's fast-paced, somewhat melodic and, most importantly, heroic. This is because, when I run, I am in fact winning something. I am winning a race of some kind, or perhaps I am just impressing a local selector with my innate natural athletic ability (a selector in what, you may ask. A selector in short-distance treadmill gym-running? A selector in international frisbee championships SUBSECTION: long distance? A selector in lifting 4kg weights and going all red in the face?). It matters not. I am in their sights. I am on their radar. The AIS wants me, in my scuff-bottomed tracksuit pants and free Jetstar earphones. They are desparate for a writer with a part-time job and a gym routine that peaks at twice a week (I've just bought new runners) petering out in the quieter months to what my friend Finn calls Donating To A Gym.

They say writers need to be obsessive. I am not obsessive all the time, though. That's the annoying thing about my obsessive behaviour. It has no consistency. I don't obsess about cleaning, or eating, or rising at a certain time of day (particularly that one). I obsess with no apparent pattern at all.

Not that anyone else would notice anyway. But I've figured it out: the one determining factor in charge of my obsessive bursts of activity is my imagination. If I need to clean the house, I make the decision to clean the house, decide that I am the sort of person who cleans houses (because that is important and I yield to no man in my desire for hygeine and presentation) and I then turn on the radio and clean for hours. Sometimes days. I get the toothbrush and clean the tiny unreachable bits in the laundry sink. I alphabetise the DVDs. I will not rest until I have become the kind of person who has a clean house from top to bottom and I will never again be a messy person because I have learned my lesson. I have also, most of the time, learned other things too (if you listen to News Radio while you clean, you often learn the same thing over and over again).

With my writing, I avoid, avoid, avoid, obsess. I will NOT stop writing once I've started unless I am ALREADY SUPPOSED TO BE WHERE I AM GOING THAT EVENING. I get resentful that someone has invited me out. I get resentful that I can't get on with my writing. How dare people not let me get on with my writing. The fact that I spent the greater part of the morning writing silly emails and buggering about online is a sore disappointment to me, because when I am obsessed with something, I cannot picture myself ever not being obsessed with that thing ever again. When I'm cleaning, I cannot imagine ever leaving a pair of shoes on the bedroom floor. When I'm obsessively writing, I can't imagine ever going outside. So much to do, so little time. Head down, focus, eat and sleep later. Like, maybe, Friday.

When I say these obsessive moments are driven by imagination, it's not as though I'm imagining an Olympic Writing Selector picking me out from a lineup of writers. I'm not even picturing (like with the cleaning) that this will make me a better person. In fact, writing is one of the purest forms of imaginative obsessing, because it's not the act of writing into which the imagination projects creativity, it's into the writing itself.

So you look at a blank page, or a blank screen, and you're off.

Or, in the case of me, today, you think maybe the focus of your obsession might have to be the gym routine after all. Just as soon as you've downloaded a few ridiculously upbeat songs onto your iPod and put on your bouncy new runners.

 Sometimes I have an existential moment. 

My most notable existential moment was when I was in a job interview attempting to convince myself (and the people interviewing me) that I was interested in being a corporate lawyer. The corporate law firm was one of the most famous Corporate Law Firms in Melbourne, with all that the capitalisation implies. The existential moment came when they asked me whether I would be able to practice being a lawyer at this particular Corporate Law Firm given there were several references to "social justice and the arts" on my CV and this implied that I would sometimes want to do what was morally comfortable, rather than what was required in the best interests of my client. Perhaps they didn't say it like that. Perhaps they said that I might sometimes want to do what I believe is right in a situation, rather than what was required in the best interests of my client.

I had thought about this a lot and I was in fact fluent in Lawyer Speak, having studied law for six years and being interested in many aspects of it, but also having a fair bit of "social justice and the arts" stuff on my CV and having, as the interviewers correctly surmised, a conscience. I answered the question in a way that I hoped was true to myself but told them I could do a job if required of me and in the best interests of a client, since in an adversarial system, everyone needs fair representation or else we would probably just set fire to people who were suspected of committing crimes. Or words to that effect. 

It was after the next question that I had my big existential moment. One of the panel asked me how I would feel about a situation where my client was a well-resourced defendant in an asbestos case and "the best outcome would be achieved if the case stalled". In other words, how would I feel about waiting until a plaintiff who suffered from asbestosis DIED so that my client wouldn't have to make a payout.

This was when I had my existential moment. I still don't know if the Corporate Law Firm meant for me to answer that I would be outraged or whether it would have preferred an answer such as "Whatever it takes, captain, where do I sign?" and in fact I don't even remember what I said.

I do remember: looking out the window of the very tall building, down at the city below. Looking at a bus making a right hand turn. Looking at the right indicator on the bus flicking on and off. Thinking about the  bus driver, in the bus, waiting for a break in the traffic so he can turn. Wondering if he was having a bad day, or a good day. Thinking about how fascinating it is that he and I are living in the same city, connected by the same air, and that we may never meet. He does not have the life of an asbestosis victim in his hands. He the lives of a bus full of people in his hands. We are one, we are many etc.

Wow.

Sorry, what was the question?

Anyway. I had one of those moments today. Watched a couple having an argument on one side of the road while a smacked-out bloke punched a street sign on the other. There but for the grace of whoever is in charge etc...

Good to think about, sometimes. Although, now that I have no idea who or what I am or how I fit in, I think I'd better go and have a coffee and talk to some human beings. Ones who call me by my name. Tends to help, just so you know.