In the library when you are trying to write and someone is talking extremely loudly and it turns out to be the librarian, it is best to listen to:

1. Rachmaninov

2. The superman theme

3. My friend Liam

It is surprising how quickly the librarian becomes an actor in a wordless drama of my own making. Huzzah! Thwarted by music!

Working in a library is an interesting experience. For example:

- A girl just answered her loudly ringing phone right next to a sign that had QUIET ROOM written on it. Underneath that it said, "This room is a designated quiet area for silent work and study. Please switch your mobile phones to silent. Phone calls and conversations can occur in other rooms of the Library. Thank you for your cooperation".

I am sitting with some State Library regulars. It's like Cheers, for us. Where everybody knows your name. Well, not your name exactly, but there's a fair bit of genial nodding that goes on. We waited for a while and let Loudy Talky Girl alone in case she wanted to quickly tell the person to call her back in five. After a while, she got louder. The regulars exchanged looks. Almost as one, we turned around and looked sternly at her. I gestured towards the sign as though perhaps it was positioned inconveniently and she couldn't quite see it.

She waved at us crossly and left.

All she was doing was reading an MX anyway. Hardly even deserved to BE here.

Peehee!

- Another girl, earlier, was sitting back from her study, peering into her mobile phone. It took me a while to figure out that she had the camera function turned on and was using it as a mirror. My phone doesn't allow me to do that, thank heavens, but when I walked past her I realised she was looking at herself critically in the phone-as-camera-as-mirror device. She was beautiful. She looked completely revolted. After a while she stood up and left. I wanted to tell her she looked lovely, but it didn't seem to be something she would necessarily believe. I wondered if it was her own appearance that made her decide to leave, or was she going anyway.

- At 12.12pm, a man wobbled in to the arts reading room. "Anyone here know where the toilets are?" he slurred. We pointed him in the right direction and he went the opposite way. He was as drunk as a skunk.

- A bloke in the Arts Reading Room, a regular like myself, sits for a great part of the day conducting with one hand while he listens to music.

It takes, as they say, all types. Although those with loudly ringing mobile phones and Loudy Talkie Voices may take themselves elsewhere please, lest they face the pious wrath of the superior regulars. Like those people at swimming pools who grunt furiously at you when you're swimming too slowly in a lane marked Fast, we are your greatest critic. Approach with caution.

Dear The State Library of Victoria,

I heart you.

I heart your new slapdash cafe that you've thrown together in what was essentially the locker room. I heart that it's cheap and unpretentious and doesn't sell anything "on a bed of lettuce" or "drizzled in oil". I heart that it sells nutella and banana sandwiches and can all be packed away at the end of the day as if it wasn't there in the first place.

I heart that there were two girls eating their own food out of a lunchbox (they were sharing) in your little locker room cafe and you didn't go and arrest them or anything.

I heart that there is still a posh cafe and bar next door where you have to go if you're after a chai or a beer or something drizzled in something else.

I heart the boys who work there and I particularly heart the girl who works there who always looks like she's had a massive night out but she could probably surf a wave or run a marathon if you just gave her the right sort of lycra.

I heart the new system that discriminates against people who make noise by subdividing everyone into categories.

I heart that one of the quiet rooms is the arts room.

I heart that the arts room obviously used to be the outside bit of the library and there is an enormous downpipe that makes a racket when it's raining.

I heart the queue for the free internet that includes a sign at the front of it saying there are more free internet computers in the back room. I heart this particularly because the back room is always virtually empty whereas people in the free internet queue in the front room are confronting internet users for "CLEARLY HAVING BEEN HERE FOR SEVENTEEN MINUTES".

I heart the chess room. Chess!

I even heart your ridiculously early closing time on a Friday night because I am obliged to go outside and experience other people, and dinner, and drinks, and this means my primary experience of the outside world does not consist of a downpipe belting out a banjo-like arythmic overture to the quiet arts room, and me.

It's good to be back.

It's raining in Melbourne. It really is quite miraculous to see water falling out of the sky.

Not only that but the State Library's roof has a leak.

A two metre square section has been roped off with one of those "CAUTION WET FLOOR" signs with the man slipping amusingly over onto his arse inside a triangle. There is also a motley collection of buckets, an old shirt and a collection of (self-appointed? One can't tell) experts with clipboards, peering up at the very high roof, which reveals nothing other than that it is a roof and that presumably it contains a hole.

If it were an episode summary in a TV guide, it would say:

"A major storm hits town and the library cracks a leak. Hilarity ensues".

It's definitely the most excitement I've seen in here since the year twelves left.

My study habits, such as they are, were established over a decade ago in year twelve, altered slightly at university to incorporate a cafe that served beer and nachos and contained like-minded procastinators and a pool table, and honed in recent years on account of the age-old adage of self-employment (taught to me originally by my year ten maths teacher) that "the only person you're letting down is yourself".

The two things I now require in order to write are:

1. No distractions.

2. Inspiration to work.

The former is a source of constant frustration on account of my zero tolerance policy for libraries not being (as yet) universal law. Sure, it may be difficult to police a zero tolerance gaffa-tape-over-the-mouth policy across the board without running into trouble with civil libertarians and so forth but SURELY IT IS WORTH IT SO SOMEONE... ANYONE... CAN GET SOME WORK DONE.

Anyway, at the moment, I have to trick myself.

The library has internet. I have to make myself go outside to the cafe and have a cup of tea while I write things without the internet. Never has so much work been done as when I'm having a "break" from my work.

Looks like the internet might be the next thing to go. Right after the beers and the nachos.

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?