in a pretty horrible mood right now. failed to register for an avp qualifier tournament this weekend out of sheer stupidity. this is a big blow.

dirty clothes

the four of us went for our very first laundromat visit this evening. before leaving the apartment, i "accidentally" dropped three beers and a mixed drink in my laundry basket, which we all enjoyed while our clothes tumbled peacefully in the background. we also played the game apples to apples to help pass the time.

i used to absolutely detest the laundromat-like seeing someone eat spam and enjoy it. but as it turns out, i've just been washing clothes with the wrong people.

being poor can really teach you things.

playdate

boys 1, girls 0.

that's because the boys set up their very first playdate today while the girls have yet to make any volleyball friends here. we did walk over a mile the other afternoon

searching for girls who were playing on the beach...but no dice. don't lose your faith in us just yet--we have leads, and we have the tenacity to follow up on those leads--we just have had no luck so far. it's frustrating, it really is. all you wanna do is play against some talent but it feels like you are just waiting in line to get into this exclusive club and guess what: your names are not on the list. not to mention, you don't have the funds necessary to flash the bouncer a twenty.

well, more likely a fifty (this is l.a., right?).

so my friends, today the girls will tag along with the boys on their playdate in santa monica. at least that's what i hope will end up happening...

back from hiatus

i don't know what the motor vehicle equivalent of "jet lag" is called, but whatever it is, i'm well over it and set on pacific coast time. more specifically, manhattan beach, los angeles, time. that is my new place of residence as of last thursday afternoon, may 20th, 2010. the first day of the rest of my life...if you're in a "real life story made into a motion picture" state of mind...

...los angeles. land of palm trees and over-sized sunglasses. it is also the land of ridiculously small yet ridiculously expensive homes. no matter what we happen to live in at a given period in our lives (house, apartment, condo, closet), don't we all just try to make that place our "home"? for the four of us, a stocked kitchen did the trick. and even though our living room/dining room/study/guest room is furnished with folding beach chairs courtesy of our next door neighbors, having a room that is oriented towards a great big television really makes a place feel like home. even if that home doesn't have cable yet. even if our wireless provider is the coffee shop located a few blocks away.

since college, i've always taken two things with me when i moved somewhere for an extensive period of time: white christmas lights and kerri walsh. the calming, romantic, and festive feeling that a string of glistening white lights gives me puts me at ease. and the framed newspaper cut-out of kerri walsh digging a ball in the 2004 olympics keeps me motivated and focused on my goals (kerri is one of the best beach volleyball players in the world by the way). those two items help me get through the tough transitional periods between places of residence. and let me tell you, this may very well be the most drastic transitional period of them all. the difference between my physical environment a week ago and today is like black and white. i traded in my parents and my brother for three of my best friends...the luxurious new home in a gated community for a two-bedroom, one bath apartment...a college town for the pacific ocean. i have left behind the struggles that come with living with your parents but have gained an entirely new set (remembering to not buy food that requires a microwave for one thing).

but as we all sat down the other night in our beach chairs, sipping our bud lights, we couldn't be happier. and i wanted to cry when i walked in and saw this sitting on our "dining room table":

hand-picked by one of the boys.

i have no words.

it's good to be back on the blog :)

i'm on the no plan plan

i don't know what to say to you besides the fact that tomorrow morning i leave for california. four good friends caravanning in two cars out on the open road. goodbye east coast, hello west coast. goodbye great big house, hello sardine can.

at the beginning of this week i had all these ideas of things i was going to write about...a wonderful summarization of some of the wonderful things (quitting my first full-time job) and some of the not so wonderful things (getting my car towed twice) that have happened to me this past year. but i'm not going to do that. this blog was never meant to have a "final term paper" feel to it. i'm not going to tell you what i will miss about carolina and my life here...i'm going to wait a week and then tell you what i miss.

one thing i will tell you, however, is that i have never been so fearless in my entire life as i am at this very moment. and by "fearless" i mean a total abandonment of wanting and needing a definite plan. i neither know what city i will be in tomorrow night nor where it is i will be sleeping. i don't know where i will apply for a job in los angeles, how i will perform in comparison to all the other athletes this summer, or where i will be when the leaves start to fall off the trees. i always had questions, but now i don't feel the compulsive (and exhausting) need to have my answers. i don't know where all my ducks have run off to, but they are certainly not in a row. and for the first time in my life that's alright for me.

i lied. i will tell you one more thing: i've given this blog a lot of thought these past couple of weeks and i'm happy to report that theboomeranger ain't going no where...at least as far as the world wide web is concerned :) i may be leaving the nest but nothing is for certain. a new phase of my life is ushering in and i want to continue to share my adventures with you. i'll be more specific as to what direction this blog is headed for later, but for the duration of my roadtrip, i'd like to "check out" as they say (sans the use of narcotics). besides one post that i have already prepared and ready to go, you won't be hearing a peep out of me for the next three thousand miles. at least, that's the plan...but we all know that doesn't mean shit anymore.

see you in a week.

marriage

let me tell you about marriage.

marriage consists of one recurring argument, which consists of dishes. dirty dishes to be exact. it goes something like this...

dinner has been prepared and consumed and all that remains are satisfied stomachs and dirty dishes. wife expects husband to do the dishes since wife made the dinner. husband is willing to do so but is too involved in a television program at the moment to take care of it. dreadfully fearful of "waking up to dirty dishes in the sink", wife resorts to doing them herself, all the while bitching about the fact that she is the one doing them. meanwhile, husband, who's relaxing evening in front of the television is now being disturbed, is equally annoyed that wife is bitching about doing the dishes when he had all the intentions of doing them himself. repeat this scenario about five hundred times and you have a twenty-year marriage. if you're lucky. that's the most important part: you are lucky if this is the revolving argument in the "till death do you part" partnership. that is what i have come to realize. blessed be the couple who argue over the petty, small things (like dishes) because that means that there aren't larger, life-threatening issues to worry about.

and there i am, watching this old record play over and over again because neither will change their ways--my mom will always want the dishes cleaned and put in the dishwasher immediately following a meal and my dad will always prefer to wait a while before doing them by hand (avoiding the dishwasher altogether). in my earlier stages of naiveness i used to think that i could diagnose and fix this problem. "hahahahah" laughed the relationship gods above. i've come to believe that having the same argument again and again can actually be comforting. humans are creatures of habit, and having that one (or ten) fight to fall back on is like the most messed up security blanket in the world.

this is one of the things that boomeranging has taught me. since i am no longer a child (at least by law), my marriage earmuffs have been collecting dust; therefore, i get to witness all the "you're just like your mother/father" comments as i eat my popcorn. live with your parents and you too can earn a front row seat in the r rated film that is your parents relationship. just remember to wash your dishes.

blah blah blog

even though i've been bogging now for almost a year, sitting down to write is rarely ever easy for me. it's still scary. i wish i had read this advice given by penelope trunk about starting a blog:

4. Post something right now.
Don't tell yourself you'll do it tomorrow. Blogging is about courage to say something. Don't worry about being stupid because trust me, no one is reading your blog. Post anything. You can nix bad posts later. For now just start writing.

i'll have to make my dad read this little blurb as well because he just started a blog to connect with the swimmers that he coaches and let me tell you, it has three things: a title, a picture, and white space.

a year ago today

i'm leaving for california in five days. five days of mom, dad, brother, friends, and the carolina blue sky. five days of sleeping on a plush mattress and waking up entangled in waves of pottery barn. five days of taking five steps to my own bathroom and fifteen steps to the laundry room. yes, i place a lot of value on these two rooms.

at this very moment in time i am feeling extremely excited for the upcoming move; however, i have had my share of emotional, pessimistic, and fearful moments these past few weeks. some days i just get overwhelmed thinking about how many people i've disclosed my dreams to...overwhelmed with the possibility that i won't have the answers i want by the end of the summer...overwhelmed by the thought of sharing one tiny bathroom with four people. two boys and two girls. i repeat: two boys and two girls.

i'm the kind of person who is really affected by my surroundings, a fact about myself that i realized when i took that trip to florida last fall. i actually thought i was going to move out of my parents house and happily reside in the sunshine state--that is, until the pastel-colored buildings started to make me queasy. and i realized that i much preferred the way that california beaches fuse with the surrounding community. let's just say i made a very smart choice by ending my plan to move there.

so yes, i'm feeling nervous about the whole moving across the country to pursue my passion thing. but i also know that my angst is coupled with the tendency i have to think back to what i was doing exactly a year ago today. a year ago today i was in the atlantic ocean. alright, i was on a cruise ship in the atlantic ocean...headed for bermuda with three of my college roommates. i was dancing my ass off with bob--a man so old he might've been a ghost--and other elderly folk because, unbeknownst to us, we had signed up for a senior citizen cruise. a year ago today i was lying in bed in our cabin, missing my current boyfriend and contemplating how it would feel to graduate from college. what a different place i was in. what a different place all those seniors are in right now. i hope they are cherishing their last days together because you can never go back. you can try and re-live the "glory days" but it will never be the same. when i graduated from high school i knew that the day i became a graduate and walked off campus was also the day i would lose that special sense of ownership with my school. that gym, that track, that quad--they will always be a part of me, but they will never feel the same way as they once did when i ran suicides up and down that gym, ran laps around that track, and self-consciously made my way back and forth across that quad. and the same goes for college.

such is life. i don't know which we should dread more: the nostalgia that comes with a year ago today or the anxiety that comes with today a year from now. pick your poison.

book report

this is WAY over-due, but i wanted to share my two cents about the books i have collecting dust in my shortlist...first up,

the adventures of johnny bunko: the last career guide you'll ever need

this might be the most non-traditional career advice book you can find out there. as you peel back the cover jacket you are immediately immersed in the art and design that is manga, a

comic format used by the japanese. and, like a comic book, the words are being communicated through thought bubbles rather than long paragraphs that seem to drag on and on. but don't let the book's brevity turn you away because what it lacks in words it makes up for in pure genius. yes, i said genius, because the authors don't bullshit their way through a two-hundred and thirty-two page "self-help" career book like so many others...they break down and simplify our qualms and our worries about where our lives are headed without wasting our time. and they manage to do so with the help of some magic chopsticks...intrigued? you should be. and it's the kind of advice you can use whether you are fifteen or fifty.

gimme!

and secondly,

20 something, 20 everything: a quarter-life woman's guide to balance and direction

christine hassler wastes no time in giving it to you straight. her introduction chapter is titled "welcome to your twenty-something crisis". yah, and you thought only mid-life crisis's existed. wrong! hassler uncovers why our twenties are filled with a shared sense that nothing is really wrong, but nothing really feels right, either. she introduced me to terms like "expectation hangover" and "the comparison game" which totally matched up with the way i was feeling after i had graduated last may. the book is filled with a lot of reflection exercises to help you apply her advice directly to your life (i was too cool for school to do most of these...okay, any of them, but if you like that sort of thing go for it). and she covers topics ranging from finances to relationships so you really get a complete picture of why and how we females feel off balance and lost throughout this fragile decade of our lives. her target audience is obviously women, but that doesn't mean a man can't benefit from her writing.

gimme!

and now you have two excellent works to turn to if you feel pressure or mis-direction in your life. i'm always eager to hear what other titles are out there, so please holler at me if you come across one and i'll check it out for you.

and the winner for the most loaded question goes to...

"are you going to live here? are you going to fall in love and get married in carolina or meet someone in california!?!"

thanks, mom, thanks. the other day i contemplated marrying a farmer so i really don't think i'm ready to decide who i will marry and in which state we will spend the rest of our lives together at this moment. two years ago i definitely had a plan--a plot if you will--that had me creating my first offspring by my 28th birthday (you know, so that when my daughter turned twenty i would be just forty-eight years old...still young and hip enough to relate to her).

yah, f that. i'm way to selfish right now to be worrying about being "hip" enough to relate to my future twenty-year old terror who, by that time, will probably have a computerized chip installed in her ear so that she won't miss a single tweet. plus, i've realized that there are too many things i want to experience and accomplish by myself and with the future love of my life before you come in and upchuck your gerber applesauce all over my new pottery barn table cloths (which, if you know me at all, will most likely be whitish in hue).

so sorry, mom, but i can't say whether i will nest here in carolina or in some other state. i can tell you that we could probably narrow the possibilities to like twenty five states if that makes you feel better (a life in north dakota? no thank you.). i understand that it's hard having your other daughter on the other side of the country and that you just want to keep your kids close to home. i get that, and i respect that. i just can't make any promises...not in the slightest.

GQ

my eyes found the following letter on the last page of this month's GQ magazine, and then my heart fell a little in love with it. i've re-typed the letter word for word below and chosen to make my favorite parts bold so you would pay close attention to them, for these parts are humorously--and in a way, painfully--accurate when it comes to the realities that fresh college graduates face...

dear (possibly doomed) class of 2010,

"well, you finally made it. you graduated! you spent four years (or eight, or ten-no judgements!) and eleventy billion dollars of your parents money, and now you're a bunch of learned-ass adults. or maybe you just spent forty-five minutes on the university of pheonix web site, clicked print diploma, and went back downstairs to do a couple of pre-family guy bong rips, because hangin' out on the quad with a bunch of losers doesn't fit into your life-plan right this second. either way: bravo, madams and sirs. (and we're just kidding, university of phoenix! you are totally a prestigious institution. you're both the harvard and the sorbonne of internet colleges. go, fighting, uh, phoenixes!)

sure, you may be leaving college with eight-figure student-loan and credit card balances, a substance-abuse problem that makes tom sizemore look like ian mackaye, opr an un-livedownable nickname like knothole or meat-flaps. that viral video of your mishap on diaper night at the gamma house might still be getting crazy digg hits. but it doesn't mater, because you're leaving. with a degree. you're a bachelor of something, meat-flaps, and nobody can take that away form you.

now for the bad news. you're joining theworkforce in the middle of a jobless recovery, which is basically the o'doul's of economic rallies. it's no picnic out here. or, okay, it's a picnic, but it's a cormac mccarthy the road type of picnic, there's not enough canned peaches in the shopping cart, and everybody's calling dibs on the one bullet. and also there are fire ants. mighty institutions people once took for granted-banks, newspapers, american idol-are crumbling, and while most of them deserve to, the problem with a world without majority institutions is that mighty institutions used to employ a lot of people. you could always get The Man to finance your lifestyle. no more. that unpaid internship you've got your eye on? be prepared to fight somebody for t. possibly your dad.

frankly, we're wondering if you guys are going to be able to handle malaise 2.0. most of you were born in 1988, which means you were 3 years old when nevermind came out (which makes us about 826). you've never know hardship. you've never paid money for a cd, waited for a vhs tape of a batman movie starring val kilmer instead of patrick bateman to rewind, or wondered if the call you needed to make was important enough to risk a case of pay-phone-receiver-borne-ear-herpes. you've also never lived in a world without the internet, which means you've grown up with an exaggerated sense of your own importance. sheltered in stuffed-animal-filled bedrooms by your parents more fearful of your falling prey to pedophiles than their own parents were of the a-bomb, you posted 'response' videos on youtube; poured out your every typeable thought on a glittering, blinking myspace page; exchanged tweets with @aplusk. you had access to all the machinery of self-promotion before you really had a self. you thought of fame as a birthright. and now you've been booted into a world that will lol at your sense of awesome-life-entitlement, then offer to 'hire' you to blog for free.

before you ask: no, we're not hiring. but look on the bright side! since you're fresh out of college, you've got a wealth of transferable life skills that'll help you tackle the harsh realities you're about to face. you know how to harmoniously share an apartment the size of an entenmann's box with six other people and sleep comfortably on a canyoned futon that works days as a couch. you're practically a seasoned recession vet already!

we know how we sound, oh-tenners. we sound old. carson daly old. eddie vedder old. and jealous. we did not, after all, actually graduate form college. we went, and then we went less often, and then we decided we were finished. (it's one of the few things we have in common with kanye west. that and night terrors. and a yen for bionic ladies who kinda look like grace jones). but once we made that decision, we set about starting a life, secure in the knowledge that-because we'd never actually done anything-no one gave a crap about us or our burning conviction that we were too good to make some dudes latte. we advise you to proceed under the same assumption, graduates. having a thousand facebook friends means about as much in 2010 as a personalized-license-plate key chain meant in 1990. we live in a moment when anybody can make a mistake for themselves; the game you're suiting up for is about making that name matter. even if it's meat-flaps."

case of the mondays

it was written on everybody's face this morning, "i don't want to be here. i want to be in bed."

but you suck it up. you roll silverware. you polish wine glasses. you run to the kitchen for some extra parmesan cheese, and you smile and say "take care" to the table of asian americans who just tipped you very poorly. sorry, it's the truth. political correctness does not exist within the food industry (nor in this blog).

unfortunately for me, i have about thirty minutes before i have to go back and work the dinner shift. you know what's bizarre about serving? we are there to make money--we want to make money--yet we still start off each shift being apprehensive towards our customers. we hate the first table we get and the last table we get. always works out that way, because the first table that gets sat in our section marks the official start of our workday and the last table we are sat marks the bastards who we just want to pay and leave so we can get out of there. very strange, but very true.

word of advice: you don't want to be the last customers who sneak in before the restaurant closes for the night. everyone hates you.