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For some reason I’m half-watching this awful Mike Munro Chapelle Corby thing on Channel 9, and they’re running this zany ongoing phone poll about her guilt-slash-innocence.

Predictably enough, the innocent vote is steadily going up as the show progresses. It’s tracking how effectively it’s hypnotising its viewers, then telling them about it. Awesome.

Spiggeldy spog.

Just got in. Feel drained and overwhemingly sad. But once again it feels very nice to be home. And enormously weird that it feels like this is my home.

But it is. I have no home at home anymore. Canberra is an alien place with no home to go to which fills me with sadness.

Sad, sad; feel very sad. La la la. Sad, sad, sad.

Took lots of pictures. Spect I’ll post some tomorrow.

I wonder what this week will be like.

Something interesting is happening tomorrow evening.

I had unanswered emails dating back to February 22nd.

I feel so virtuous right now I could just die.

Around August last year, in response to one of my then-not-infrequent bouts of handwringing but-what-shall-I-doery, a friend and sometime mentor of sorts suggested that I should get my license, buy a kombi and go on a road trip around the country. I wasn’t sure about the roadtrip or the kombi, but the learning-to-drive idea seemed a good one. The hassles of getting around Melbourne on public transport sealed the deal; I got my Ls in February and have started taking lessons.

I had my third proper session out on the road yesterday. It’s very weird. I wonder to what extent it feels weird because of my age (28). Unsurprisingly, all of VicRoads‘ learner driver promo material is leveled squarely at a teen demographic.

In some ways it’s much easier than I’d expected, in some ways a lot harder. I’m starting to feel more comfortable on the roads but I still have great difficulty assimilating all the information you have to process simultaneously. Successfully co-ordinating the accelerator and the clutch is also proving a challenge. I stalled three times yesterday. I half wonder if I shouldn’t just learn on an automatic. But I’m jaundiced by my mother’s consistent assertion that they’re “not real cars”.

My instructor is this rather stern and incredibly worldweary old French guy called Moshe. He spends a disconcerting amount of time during our lessons playing with his Treo, but he’s always on hand to grab the steering wheel when I’m just about to kill a cyclist or slam on the breaks before I plough into the back of a police van. I like him.

Here’s a nice article by Suzanne Vega, of all people, about learning to drive on the streets of New York City at the age of 43.

It’s all good!

That is all.

I feel like I should kick this thing off with a manifesto-type statement, or by setting the scene with a bit of a background narrative, but it’s difficult to know how or where to start.

Like VUE victim Grastled Fallusson, I have invented so much fiction about myself that it’s hard to vouch for any version of my biography.

And that, I suppose, is what this is all about.