I’ve been doing some critical introspection just recently; re-evaluating who I am and what direction my life is taking. It all came to a head the other night as I was …

The next phrase is supposed to be something like ‘glancing over some old photos from college’ or ‘speaking to an old friend who has just returned from a soul-cleansing pilgrimage to South America’ or ‘reading from the book of Jeremiah’, but it isn’t. Sorry for the confusion.

… watching Doctor Who. I was watching David Tennant regenerate into Matt Smith and reflecting on the unfair advantages the Doctor has.

If I want to reinvent myself, I have to have money and a new job and some way of keeping myself afloat while I readjust. It’s not enough to just say “I want to be an opthamologist now" and go do it. There’s always some stupid practical consideration in the way, usually in the form of dollar signs or obstinate people. It would be so much easier if I could just stand in the middle of my spaceship, strike a dramatic pose and wait for my head to catch on fire.

If I were a newly regenerated Time Lord, I think this would be the part of the episode where I double over, grab my stomach, wince, cough up some sparkly orange light and say “Oh no… my regeneration… it’s… going wrong,” before passing out to let the other characters squirm for a while, returning to full health at the last minute to save the day with a quick flick of the sonic screwdriver.

When I got back from Europe all full of vision and enthusiasm, I had huge ideas about finally having the stable base of operations I would need to do all the things left on my to-do list that had been taking second place to “travel through Europe.” But then I bunged up my car, discovered that my job was less than salubrious, came face to face with the harsh reality of how much credit cards suck and failed miserably to assign myself to a worship band. I’ve been home in Darwin since November, but I haven’t played a single Sunday morning service since leaving Adelaide. That might sound like a petty or self important complaint, but given that “worship musician” is one of the only terms by which I ever feel comfortable defining my own personality, it’s clear that somewhere in the last seven months or so something has gone horribly wrong.

So I’ve decided it’s time to start doing things a little differently. Tonight I’m joining some church friends in a battle of the bands at Palmerston markets. It’s time to let the old rock star version of Garry out of the cage again, not to mention giving Samantha a chance to cut loose. I’ve also auditioned for a local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. God only knows what will happen if I get to be in that. I have plans to co-write and possibly appear in a short film to be shot in July and a renewed enthusiasm for finally getting my first novel finished.

And at Woodroffe oval last Tuesday, for the first time in recorded history, I batted for a full 15 minutes in the nets and didn’t get bowled once. I have a thumping great bruise on my stomach to show for it, and another one on the back of my leg. Things are looking up, as long as I don’t take my shirt off.

Actually, I could probably just take that last sentence and assign it to a folder marked ‘general wisdom’.

I’m going to be travelling to remote communities with work again for the next couple of weeks, so the next post might be a while coming. But it will totally be worth the wait.

That’s all folks.

Garry with 2 Rs

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