Boomerang

You’d think that for someone whose degree consisted of making many, many words appear on a computer screen in essay format that writing a blog would be relatively easy.  Indeed it would be, I tell myself with a despairing groan, if I hadn’t spent the past year allowing my brain to turn into soft, pink mush.  If I had started this blog whilst I had been at uni; somehow finding time in-between bodging essays, annoying certain lecturers, drinking, and joining the Navy, I would not be facing the problem I am now facing.  That problem is quite simply that IT IS NOT EASY!

However, before you sigh with despair at the thought of me going into a rant about being unable to find something to write about, do not fear!  I already know the source of the problem and it is that problem which, appropriately, forms the topic for this first peace.  The problem is the reason that my brain has been in decay; the problem is being a fully paid up, Gold Standard member of the “Boomerang Generation”.

We’ve all heard this phrase going around.  One goes to University, one achieves a degree in procrastination/giving excuses as to why you look hungover in a lecture, one runs up debt, and finally one comes home to the parents having acquired a taste for living independently.  Here in lies the true problem of playing “The Human Boomerang”:  You have lived independently of your parents, you have enjoyed it (what you remember of it), and now you’re back living in a house with somebody else’s rules and no immediate job prospects because you’ve been told you may have to wait for up to a year before you’re accepted into the Navy (Bitter? Moi?!).

“Arrrghh!”  I hear some of you cry.  “I was sensible enough to leave uni with a job already secured!  Haha!”  Well I take my hat off to you Sir/Madame for being so farsighted, and if you are now living in your own place then congratulations again...but if you are not living in your own place then I am afraid there is no way of denying that you still a member of the “Boomerang Generation”.  You may well be a Silver rather than a Gold Member, in which case you do not get the complimentary pot noodle and endless reruns of Top Gear on Dave, but you are still member.

I have seen many of dear mates walk straight into jobs in the wake of coming home from uni, some have even stayed in education and been able to prevent themselves from coming spinning menacingly back towards their parents, but of all those who have walked into jobs only one of them has moved out.  And in terms of intellectual sharpness she is now the stiletto to my club, although she’d tell me that she was always that anyway.  Just as many of my mates have gone home to part time jobs whilst they wait to get a place in something bigger, and just like me the frustration of living with parents after the giddy independence of university has driven them to the point that the kind of people who go on shotgun massacres look like attractive role models!

The point I’m ultimately trying to make here is a simple one.  It is not natural for a young person who has lived the high life of independence to come back down to earth and live under someone else’s roof and rules again.  Having gained a taste for it, it is only natural to feel a desire to spread your wings and fly, but how do you do that with the current job market and the knowledge in the back of your mind that there is a bloody great big Australian stick heading towards you ready to slap its brand name on you?  And once it has how do you get away from it?

My solution in the end was to, oddly, join the “Boomerang Generation” for nearly a whole year waiting for my dream job to turn up, which it did just in time to prevent me from going berserk with a pair of garden sheers.  So in the end, annoyingly, the only way to get out of the “Australian Novelty Items Club” is to wait until that dream job application you’ve sent off Boomerang’s back to you.