Car insurance, home insurance, credit cards, banks, careers, whitegoods, cameras, mobile phone plans, Internet plans, life insurance, investments, superannuation plans, home loans - so many of each, and how to choose the right one? Pages and pages of fine print, comparing apples with carpet day after day. How is it that everyone seems to know the ins and outs of phone plans except me? Do they really sit down and read contract after contract on those long, hot summer afternoons? Lemonade and phone contracts after croquet, oh yes please.

And home loans, good God they confuse me.

I would like one home loan, please.

Fixed or variable?

Which is better?

They both are. Which one?

Variable, please.

Or would you like a split loan?

A what?

It's where we divide up your loan and do different things with each bit.

OK, do that.

So what percentage fixed? How much variable?

What? I don't know. Ten?

Ten what?

Ten fixed ... bits? Does it need to be fixed? What's wrong with it anyway?

Let's go with fifty-fifty.

OK. Make that happen. Where do I sign?

No, wait, we need to establish the term of the loan. Also, since we're establishing a split loan, we need to agree on the term of the fixed portion separately.

Look, you've already cut up my loan. If you're going to play with its carcass now I might take my business elsewhere.

Ha ha, no, how about we go with thirty years variable and a five-year fixed after which we renegotiate or simply allow it to roll into the variable portion of the loan before we stuff it into a time capsule and shoot it into the greater cosmos?

Yes FINE oh please stop.

No, wait, there's more yet. Lavender or ylang-ylang?

What?

If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? If a train leaves Liverpool at 12pm travelling west, what is the Planck constant? If Jesus is the answer, WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

And on and on and on. And that's leaving out the part where they take a swab of your inner cheek, strip you nude, smear you with ink and roll you across an enormous roll of paper to get your full body print. If they don't know what an ink-blot of your arse looks like, they can't possibly lend you a cent.

By the time they return you, nude and quivering, to your home loan application forms you've already decided to live up a tree instead. What's good enough for my simian ancestors, you reason, is good enough for me. I shall learn to peel bananas with my feet and articulate myself with a series of emphatic shrieks while others like me dine on my insectoid parasites.

Interestingly, that description works equally well for:

a. A monkey, and

b. An art installation by Yoko Ono.

I forget my point but whatever it was, I meant it.

I am so very tired.

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Things that made me happy today:

- Learning that there is a hotel within a 10-minute drive of my home that has trivia on Wednesdays and live stand-up on Thursdays. That anything actually happens this far from the inner-Sydney hub, in this outer-suburbs Total Event Void, is amazing. However, the thought of what kind of crowds may present themselves at such events is another matter entirely.

- Red wine and Indian take-away with garlic naan for dinner this evening.

- The fact that my digestive system has finally come to grips with the reality that I eat porridge instead of Weet-Bix for breakfast now. It got ugly for a while there. Sitting alone in my car, the soundscape was often like The Q*bert Conversation Hour.