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- Written by Garry
And so the New Year has rolled around. A year for finally sending down some roots. A year for laying the foundations for making something semi-permanent (or least, slightly less piecemeal) of myself. A year for getting around to some of those ambitions that never really made sense without a stable base of operations.
And a year for getting over the old black layout and … basically renovating my entire blog. Fear not (or alternatively… be appropriately afraid); I’ll still be documenting my adventures in ecumenical mischief with the same unjustifiable arrogance as ever. I just can’t really claim to be far from home anymore. That ship has sailed. And then come back.
This is also a year for doing something about the black hole of financial disasters that was 2009. I’ve set out budgets, planned my repayments and got everything categorised in nice neat boxes. This was an entirely unnatural process for me, so used to flying by the seat of my pants and touching the ground only long enough to take stock of my next leap and, on occasion, to repair the seat of my pants.
I was feeling so unreasonably proud of myself that I must have upset the universe somehow. It seems to be an immutable fact of life that just when it looks like I can sort myself into some sort of rhythm and make some sort of progress, the universe bowls me a googly.
I was piloting the GSS Tarrdis home after celebrating New Year’s Eve in town. I had almost reached the outskirts of Palmerston and was reflecting on what a good run home I’d had. Not another car on the road, no pounding monsoonal downpours and no bastard in a four wheel drive tailgating me all the way along the highway. I didn’t even come across a breathalyser, despite us all having been assured by the police that they were going to check every single driver on New Year’s Eve. Darwin doesn’t have that many roads in and out, but apparently they couldn’t quite cover both of them. No sooner had I thought this than I ran headlong into a subspace anomaly.
Okay, it wasn’t so much a rift in space-time as it was some sort of animal. At the time, I believed it to be a dog, but closer inspection of the dent in my car suggested it may have been a hippo. Either way, there wasn’t much left of it after it stepped into my headlights as I approached at 100 km/h. I take some comfort in the knowledge that it was certainly killed instantly, and probably literally didn’t know what hit it. Shaken, but not stirred, I continued home.
The next day, I inspected the damage. There was dented panelling where I had hit the buffalo and some of the undercarriage had been bent out of shape. I thought it looked nasty, but she would hold up until I took her in for her first service. I hopped in to drive to the supermarket. There was a nasty buzzing sound coming from the bonnet, but I figured that was the dented panelling vibrating. Then the check oil light came on. I decided at that point that I should probably take her into the mechanic on Monday. I drove out of the carport and she stalled. I started her up again and decided to take an experimental lap around the block before I braved the main road. She stalled twice more, before giving up altogether just as I got back to the front gate of our complex. She bluntly refused to start again, so I coasted to a stop and parked on the side of the road outside our unit.
Monday morning I called the Ford service centre and had the Tarrdis towed in to start the fun. The mechanic was a little confused as to what I was doing there, since the receptionist hadn’t filled out the job folder properly, so I explained that I had hit an elephant and torn an oil line somewhere, among other things. I left the car in his capable (I hope) hands and caught a bus in to Casuarina to speak with the insurance folk.
I’m pretty sure the girl at AAMI is thoroughly sick of me. I must have been in to see her half a dozen times at least while trying to get the documentation for my loan sorted out, which wasn’t that long ago. She had a strange look in her eye as I approached. I couldn’t decipher whether it was a look that said “Oh good grief, what is it now?” or one that said “Hmm… perhaps he’ll bring me flowers this time.” Maybe both. She was a little surprised that I was making a claim so soon after having bought the car, but I explained that I had run into a brachiosaurus on my way home from New Year’s and she started processing the claim for me.
Meanwhile, the mechanics had finished their diagnostic tests on my car. Apparently the collision tore the oil filter off and crushed the radiator against the body of the engine. All involved were suitably impressed that I had successfully made it home without the whole thing bursting into flames.
Unfortunately, the protocol of these situations is that the insurance assessor then travels to the workshop to inspect the damage and approve the plans of the mechanics to repair it. The mechanics can’t touch the car until they get approval from the assessor. A week later I’m still waiting to hear back from this mysterious and apparently prohibitively busy assessor. I was going to wait until I heard back before posting this so I could present the full saga in one instalment, but it’s now Saturday and I’m once again stranded in Palmerston for the weekend and it’s raining outside and I’m bored, so I decided to start blogging to keep the tedium at bay for a few minutes more by sharing it with you.
I suppose it is somewhat appropriate in this, the season of new starts, that here I am; right back where I started from.
Insert yet to be determined, classy yet quirky new sign off line here.
Garry with 2 Rs
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It’s been far too long since I celebrated New Year in Darwin. It’s always an event marked with excitement, sobriety, flair and sophistication. This year was no exception. A group of mates and I had arranged to car pool into town with Macca, who doesn’t drink. It’s always a good standing plan to have a non-resentful designated driver onside.
So there we were, cruising townwards along Tiger Brennan Drive; me, Macca, Davo, Obi-wan and Brian. We weren’t really looking for an overly wild night. We were just heading into the foreshore to catch the fireworks, before possibly grabbing some celebratory brews at one of the local pubs to toast the New Year and indeed new decade with style. Or at least what passes for style in our social group.
The foreshore, of course, was packed. Fortunately we were able to grab a spot on top of a hastily constructed Taj Mahal which some of the local girl guides had built as a fund raiser for a new stealth bomber or something.
The fireworks were pretty good. Obviously it wasn’t quite the same as watching a wall of fire undulate off the Sydney Harbour Bridge or celebrating the destruction of the dalek fleet deep within the Medusa Cascade, but for Macca, Davo and Brian this was just as good as it ever got. And the looks on their faces was enough to keep Obi-wan and I smiling. Davo said it was like someone had set the whole harbour on fire.
It was the first time any of us had been out to town with a fictional character for years. Davo claimed to have been on a blind date with Lady Macbeth a few months back, but we were pretty sure he was full of it. I had forgotten how prejudiced some of the local people could be towards people of non-reality background. We were constantly aware of the looks from people, and the whispers behind hands. Fortunately no-one made too much of a deal out of it, and Obi-wan didn’t seem to mind.
It wasn’t until we stopped in at a bar on Mitchell Street that we had any real trouble. One particularly drunk man from Karama started declaring to everyone how happy he was that the new year had come, how awesome the fireworks display had been and how much better off the world would be when we finally got all the stinking fictional folk out of our country. Obi-wan pleaded with us to ignore him, but it was more than Brian could stand. He grabbed a nearby claymore and brandished it menacingly, asking the drunkard if he felt like he was a real man, just because he was real and a man.
Unfortunately for Brian, the drunkard had brought fourteen of his friends, all armed with pictures of bears holding sharks. Fortunately for Brian, none of them felt like starting any trouble once Obi-wan started swinging his lightsaber in destructive arcs of pure energy. There are some things you don’t mess with, even if you don’t think they’re real.
After that, the night got much more light-hearted. We had a few more drinks at a different bar, Davo managed to convince a European backpacker to give him her phone number. He tried calling it a few days later, but no-one was home (possibly because she’s still in Australia). I got roped into playing tuba for an impromptu Edinburgh Tattoo that some guys put together on Mindil Beach.
Happy New Year!
Far from home
Garry with 2 Rs
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I was having a drink with some friends the other night, and one girl was telling me about another friend of hers who had gone all “Christian boy weird” on her. I did my best to appear sagely and comforting by nodding my head with sympathetic understanding. Fortunately another girl who was party to the conversation was a little more honest than me, and immediately chirped in to ask her what the hell she was talking about.
Christian boy weird, it turns out, refers to the awkward social over-correction that frequently occurs when a young Christian guy and girl notice they’ve hung out with each other too many times in quick succession to call it coincidence. Whether they want to or not, eventually at least one of them will become aware of the unspoken Question: “What’s going on here?”
Now, if it’s the girl who first becomes aware of the Question, she will use her inherent female adeptness for relational understanding and correctly (in most cases) conclude “Probably nothing”.
However if it’s the guy who stumbles across the Question first, he will usually use his inherent male uselessness at all things interpersonal and immediately pose himself a series of subordinate questions, each of which becomes successively harder to express without violating subjacency rules:
“What do I want to be going on here?”
“What does she want to be going on here?”
“What does she think I want to be going on here?”
“What does she want me to want to be going on here?”
“What do I want her to think I want to be going on here?”
As you can see, this quickly results in an endless syntacto-semantic feedback loop (yep, that’s totally a legitimate technical linguistic term), which causes the analysis to time out and come to a screeching halt. At this point it is immediately supplanted by the other traditional male relational response: Panic.
Now the process up to this point probably isn’t unique to Christian circles; this could be true of young people hanging out in pubs all over the country. The CBW part starts when the guy stops panicking (a process taking between five minutes and five days, depending on the guy) and decides on a course of action. A normal single guy will generally just go with the flow and see what happens. A young Christian single guy, on the other hand, believes himself to bear the responsibility for lovingly making sure no-one is going to find themselves in a position to get hurt (believing Christian girls to be incapable of such feats of self-preservation).
He’s also cognizant of the huge risks associated with erring too far the other way by ignoring the Question and hoping it goes away. That ends up in an unholy mess that no-one ever wants to go through twice. It’s the all too familiar scene where the two young Christians in Question are out with a group of friends, and a well intentioned mate of the guy leans in and asks,
“So what’s going with you and Samantha* then?” The guy smiles disarmingly and says,
“Nothing’s going on. We’re just friends.” The girl overhears this remark and runs from the room in floods of tears, knocking over three bar stools and a glass collector on the way out, owing to not being able to see with her fingers in her eyes. The male onlookers mutter to themselves in perplexity, while the female onlookers stare daggers at the guy for his flagrant insensitivity. The guy realises his mistake far too late and goes after her to start the damage control. She sees him coming and, in a fit of impassioned rage, throws an unused photo frame at him, which whistles past his left temple and embeds itself in a nearby Carpentaria palm.
Oh boy, if I had a dollar for every time that’s happened to me.
So to avoid potentially causing irreparable damage to an otherwise perfectly functional friendship (not to mention the poor palm tree), the guy will over-correct the other way and go Christian boy weird. He averts the risks involved in continuing to hang out with the girl by ceasing to hang out with the girl altogether. While this defuses the threat of having to dodge ornamental projectiles, it does tend to leave the girl either wondering what she’s done wrong, or shaking her head and saying “Oh good grief, not again,” depending on how well accustomed she is to Christian boy relational ineptitude.
Of course, what you’ve just read isn’t exactly the explanation I got from my friend in the bar. Her explanation was a little more concise, a little less sexist and not so well punctuated. We’d also had a couple drinks by this stage, so the whole conversation was slightly less cohesive (if you can believe that).
But she did leave me with the rather troubling question of how many girls I’ve gone CBW on in my time. I muttered off some nonsense excuse about being reasonably weird to start with, but it does make me wonder what I would learn if I could see myself through other people's eyes for a while.
And whether maybe, just maybe, I might sometimes over think these things.
Far from home
Garry with 2 Rs
*Samantha isn’t her real name. It couldn’t be, since this whole example is made up. But even her hypothetical name isn’t Samantha.
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It’s probably time I stopped mucking around and got on to the real issue at hand. Now that I’m back home in Darwin and looking at setting myself up here more or less permanently, is there really any way I can get away with continuing to call my blog Far From Home?
It has occurred to me that I could just make one big spiritual metaphor out of the whole thing. I could try to convince you that, while all this time you thought I was having a whinge about being stuck in Adelaide, I was really being super-duper pious and reflecting on going to Heaven one day. Or for the more post-modern thinker, maybe I was meditating on the intrinsic human divide between the perfect society we long to create, and reality of the world we currently live in.
No, I don’t think that would work either. The other possibility is to keep the name and just write it off to irony. While that certainly wouldn’t be a first for me, it does some seem a little… soft.
Or…
In another shameless display of popularism and attention seeking, I could leave it over to you. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think should happen:
A) Change the name (you would be then be obliged to suggest a new one)
B) Keep the title (and, by extension, the sign off) and just declare the whole thing an ironic symbol of… something or other.
Now, I am well aware that the only people who ever comment on this blog are Kirribilli Kim, my sister and occasionally Dylan Malloch. So if the only suggestions I get are from you three, then obviously it doesn’t count. I’ll declare it invalid and irrelevant as apparently I only have three readers anyway. So yes, in effect this is just a flagrant and shameless drive to get more comments.
Please please please: I must have more attention.
Far from home (perhaps for the last time)
Garry with 2 Rs
P.S. Merry Christmas
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One of the things I had forgotten about my beloved home town is how abysmal the public transport situation is. Even on weekdays during peak hour, the buses are just a little too infrequent to be really classified as useful. And if you’re living out in Palmerston, you’re pretty much grounded unless you’re content to wait for forty or more minutes in order to get anywhere, especially on the weekends.
Yeah. Basically anyone in Darwin who can own a car does. And after a week of getting up at a quarter past six in order to get to work by half past eight, I decided they’ve all got the right idea, and set off to find me a car loan.
Now the thing about personal loan information brochures is that they’re always all about the benefits and the freedom you can buy (?) with your new money. I found them all really annoying, because I was already sold on getting a loan. I just wanted the necessary information on interest rates and repayment schedules. Apparently those data aren’t the sort of thing you want to include in an “information” brochure (notice my experiment with using /data/ “correctly” as the plural of datum. That’s classical styles, baby. I’m still not sure if it works in the new millennium, though. Thoughts?).
Eventually I stuck my head out and asked for an appointment with a bank … consultant? Assistant? What do we call these people? My bank … lady’s card just says “customer service specialist”. I think that’s a bit pretentious, but then, I use data as a plural, so I’m in no position to judge.
At this point the flood gates opened and I got so many facts and figures that I was drowning in them. It took me a week to get over it and figure out exactly which among my plethora of options I wanted to go with. I made up my mind and got myself a pre-approved loan just in time for the weekend. Tony Barber appeared from behind a nearby bougainvillea bush and exclaimed
“Let’s go shopping!”
And then disappeared again. Weird.
I spent the following Saturday shopping around the various new car dealerships in Darwin. The trick was that they were spread a fair way apart, and the bus system, as I mentioned, is not really an efficient way to get around. I started my mission at half past eight in the morning and had collected all the information I needed to make my decision by half past four that afternoon. I signed on for my brand new car, and got ready to take the forms to the bank on Monday.
At this point I hit my first snag. In order to fund the loan for the car, the bank needed to know the insurance details. In order to insure the car, the insurance company needed to know the registration details. And in order to register the car, the car company needed to receive confirmation that the loan was funded. It was a cyclic impasse the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the great frequent flyers calamity of ’07.
I let the customer service specialists battle it out between them, and eventually we got the loan funded, but not before I discovered the insurance company had created a policy under the wrong name, and the car dealership needed three extra days to treat the paint and tint the windows. Finally, after a three week ordeal, here are the specs for my brand new spacesh… I mean… car.
Model: Ford Focus CL Sedan
Doors: 4
Transmission: 5 speed manual (better than automatics for dropping down a gear and overtaking a road train)
Allegiance: Autobot
Power: 107kW
Torque: 185Nm
What those numbers mean: No freaking idea. A kW is a kiloWatt, and an Nm is a Newton metre, but I’d need to find my high school physics books to figure what that means. And that’s not going to happen.
Colour: TARDIS Blue
Average fuel consumption: 7.1L/100km
CO2 emissions: 169 g/km
Dimensions on the outside: About average for a small sedan, I guess
Dimensions on the inside: 15 decks, with accommodation for 560 crew, mess, cargo bay and holodeck.
Top speed: Well, the NT now has a blanket speed limit of 130 km/h (so stupid…), so obviously I won’t be going any faster than that. However according to the specs it can get as fast as warp 9.75
Armoury: articulated transphasic photon torpedoes, frequency modulated phaser blasters and a picture of a bear holding a shark.
Woah… sorry, I got confused between my new car and the USS Voyager there at the end.
Um…
Far from home
Garry with 2 Rs