2011 Annual Report

It’s been a long, hard year.

I wish I had something more positive to say about 2011. But it’s undeniably been a year I’m not sad to leave behind.

I had high hopes going into it: Freshly graduated from college, just back from my pilgrimage to the West Coast, full up with big plans and ideas. Same as many people my age, I was expecting my first year as a Certified Grown-Up to be exciting and challenging. Time to start getting recognized and rewarded for all the valuable skills I’d been assured I have.

So obviously it was a bit of a let-down when I ended up living with my parents again. My first paying job as a college graduate was cleaning the Prozac-inducing discount movie theater in my hometown, seven days a week, for $8 an hour. Not exactly the illustrious entrance to Real Life I’d imagined.

And that set the standard for the rest of 2011. Moved back to Ithaca for a high-paying restaurant job; got fired under questionable circumstances. Spent subsequent months cobbling two to three jobs together to get by. Went on food stamps.

Additionally, 2011 saw almost all of the friendships I’d developed in college — some really important relationships — either burn out or fade away. That’s been really hard in itself, and harder still without any new friendships to cover the loss: With all the mental and emotionally energy I’ve burned up trying to dig myself out, I haven’t had the wherewithal to make any new friends. I’ve spent a lot of time by myself this year.

Not that it’s all bad: Leah’s been really good for me. She made an otherwise discouraging year not only tolerable, but frequently happy. I don’t know what kind of shape I’d be in now if it weren’t for her.

And there’s definitely something to be said for some healthy adversity. All the set-backs of 2011 have given me a lot of opportunity to think seriously about the direction I want my life to go in. I’m still hammering out the details — I’ll be lucky if I get it all figured out before next New Year’s — but I’m getting there. If nothing else, it’s good to be disabused of the dewy-eyed idealism I started 2011 with.

On top of that, I’ve got some promising prospects lined up for 2012, so things are already looking a little brighter than they were twelve months ago. It’s too early to say whether I’m really out of the woods this time — but at least I can see the light through the trees. And this time I’m going to be a lot more purposeful in the steps I take. Hooray for learning the hard way.

Happy New Year, everybody. See you in 2012.

 

And the world’s got me dizzy again…

I’m mothballing my blog until further notice.

I’m still trying to figure out what it’ll take to get me writing publicly on a regular basis — the right combination of inspiration and self-discipline.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the presence of mind right now: my plans for moving to Denver have suffered a major setback. I’m in damage-control mode right now. That’s occupying most of my mental energy. Writing convincingly about anything else would take an emotional investment that, frankly, I’d rather not make at the moment. I’ve got plenty to worry about without trying to flog this thing into shape.

So for now, cheers, take care, and check back here in a couple of months.

Baby I love you, but I’m not the answer for the questions that you still have…

I’ve gone beyond burning the candle at both ends: I’m just throwing the whole damn thing in the fire.

In the past week, I’ve been alternating between getting less than 4 hours of sleep at night and sleeping for 12-14 hours. It’s beginning to wear on me. I tried to finish up my next post on the 2012 elections, but the thoughts just weren’t where they needed to be. Hopefully I can throw something substantive together before the week is over. Hopefully.

An assortment of random thoughts:

• Killed my Facebook last night. Feeling pretty good about that. I caught myself thinking about using it today, but I’m chalking it up to habit versus need. Honestly, I’m glad to be rid of it: I was getting tired of feeling like Mark Zuckerberg was constantly lurking over my shoulder.
• I’ve been wanting to write something about Binghamton — if only I could find an angle that other people would want to read. I have a determinedly bad attitude about my hometown; I could write an encyclopedia of belligerence about this place, but that would get tiresome pretty quickly. Maybe a survival guide…
• World news is getting pretty heartbreaking lately. Libya, Yemen, Japan… too much wrong and too little to fix. It’s months like these when I get overwhelmed. Buying a farm somewhere starts sounding like the best idea.
• I’m looking forward to being in a place where I can start dating again. It’s been over a year and a half since my last serious relationship ended; I’ve been in limbo since then. Once I get settled in Denver I’ll be ready to find somebody new to fight with. (Just kidding.) (…kind of.)

That’s all for tonight.

Quick Update

Don’t have the presence of mind for a real update tonight. I was up most of last night helping a friend and I only got a couple hours of sleep. My brain is all static-y.

Mostly I’m just glad it’s almost spring. Warmer weather means it’s almost time for me to start planning my big move to Denver. After four months — four long months! — of hibernating in Binghamton, I’m ready to get my life back on the rails. I’m ready to start living again. It’ll be a huge step: once I leave New York I’ll be really, truly on my own for the first time in my life. Make or break. Scary stuff. I hope I don’t screw up.

Anyways, that’s all I’ve got for tonight.

Back To My Digital Hermit Cave

I think I’ve decided to kill my Facebook again.

Yes, I know I’ve talked about it before — actually done it a few times. My Facebook is getting to be like that ex you can never quite stay broken up with. Actually, come to think of it, I’m notorious for that too. Hmm. Maybe not the best analogy. It’s like…

…well, hell, it’s like this annoying thing that everybody seems to think you need but is actually pretty useless. Like kidneys. Do you need those? Like a second kidney then. Apparently it’s not my night for analogies.

The only reason I resurrected my Facebook after euthanizing it the last time was thinking that I should use it for business contacts. Then I remembered that I don’t have any business contacts. Nor do I have a business yet. Since I already had the account back up, I figured I might as well use it — but now it’s finally and completely lost its appeal.

The thing that bothers me the most about Facebook is that it creates the illusion of connectedness. It’s easy to fall into feeling like just being friends on Facebook is enough to qualify as a relationship. Back in the grand old days before Facebook — so the legends go — people actually had to communicate to maintain a friendship. Now we just have to check a box. All you have to do is lob the odd “LOL” at somebody every few months and you’re golden. I know, it’s been said before, but it can’t be overstated: Facebook makes friendship weird.

You know one thing Facebook is good for? Ignoring people. “We don’t need to talk! We’re friends on Facebook! Now please go away.”

So, once again, I’d rather find ways to keep in touch with my friends that actually keeps me in touch with them. That was the biggest thing I noticed during my last foray into de-Facebooking: it forced me to put effort into staying in contact with people. That felt good. Who knows — maybe if I stop using Facebook, I’ll start sending personal messages to people again. Maybe I can bring back hand-written letters.

(Tangent: Do you ever wonder what damage the invention of email has done to the future of biographies? It seems like old biographies always include these super-interesting personal letters that shine a new light on important people. “Biographers uncovered a letter written by Mark Twain to Theodore Roosevelt on the subject of lawn furniture…” What are we going to have now? “Biographers sifting through spam for Mexican Viagra and Photoshopped cat pictures in Justin Bieber’s Gmail trash folder discovered a series of emails…” It’s not quite the same, is it. Alas. Then again, hardly anything would make Justin Bieber’s biography interesting.)

Anyways, I haven’t made a decision yet. Maybe I’ll just keep lugging my stupid Facebook around for another few years, along with my second kidney. At least I finally broke up with that ex.

Stay tuned.

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© Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch, 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

My Very Busy Schedule

No matter how hard you try, you always end up with an odd number of socks after doing laundry.

It defies the laws of physics: you put the socks into a closed container and shut the door. Half an hour later you open the door, being very careful not to drop any socks or leave any stuck to the inside of the dryer — and yet somehow they vanish. It makes no sense.

That’s how I feel about my time lately. I’m only working 19 hours a week; I have absolutely no other obligations or responsibilities. It seems like I should have all the time in the world — and yet somehow the days slip by. I feel like I’ve hardly done anything but I can’t figure out where my times goes.

(Incidentally, the sock thing is how I know I’m borderline obsessive-compulsive: I will genuinely get angry and throw socks in the trash if I can’t match them. Even if I have two perfectly good unmatched socks — if they don’t match, I refuse to wear them. Go ahead and call me crazy. It’s better than letting the sock goblins win.)

What I’m getting at is that I’d planned on posting some more stuff today about the presidential elections, but I ran out of time.

I actually do have a busy weekend planned. My best friend’s birthday party is Friday night. Saturday is Binghamton’s infamous Parade Day — otherwise known as Get Wasted In Public Day, when hundreds of people dress up as alcoholics and stand around on Main Street. There also happens to be a parade on the same day. It’s basically a city-wide support group for people who live in Binghamton. Everybody gets a free pass to drink as much as they wish they could during the other 364 days they spend in this Godforsaken hellhole lovely community of ours. But I digress. I probably won’t be participating, but I’m sure I’ll get lured downtown one way or another; that takes care of Saturday, and then Saturday night is another birthday party. It’s a pirate-themed costume party. I’m thinking about dressing up as an albino Somalian and taking hostages.

Anyways, check back next week for more (hopefully) election-related posts; if I get any good Parade Day commentary, I’ll post it here.

A Very Good Day: On Being a Travel Writer

I’ve finally arrived at some much-needed clarity about my future: I’m going to be a travel writer.

Or a traveling journalist. Or a journalist who frequently travels. I haven’t quite worked out the wording for my business cards yet. (“Ryan Miga: Generally nice guy who likes not living in the same place for too long and is also pretty good at writing.” Might be a bit much.)

In any case, after years of waffling, I’ve finally come around to the idea that the next phase of my life will be built around traveling and writing.

A Brief Interlude

I’ve been trying to blog on and off for several years now, and I keep getting caught in these endless boom-and-bust cycles:

Phase One: Blogging is awesome. Everything is great. I have more ideas than I know what to do with, and I’m super-excited about writing. My blog is going to be the best blog in the history of blogs, writing, and generally every other form of technology ever invented by human hands. Life is good.

Phase Two: Oops, looks like I missed a week. No big deal… I’ll just update a couple days late, since I need to come up with something to write about anyway. Everything will be fine. I can do this…

Phase Three: Blogging sucks. For one reason or another, I haven’t written anything in weeks. I have no good ideas. No wonder nobody reads this stupid thing. I have dishonored the ancestors. I should delete my blog. Then I should set fire to my laptop. Then I should turn my back on civilization in shame, go live in a cave somewhere and never betray the written word again.

Phase Four: Rinse and repeat.

Maybe I’m setting my standards too high, trying to crank out publication-grade stuff every single time. I just can’t decide which is more important: writing consistently or writing extensively. Any suggestions?

New York to Oregon: Final Thoughts

(This is the final post in an eight-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

My hitchhiking trip is over — but in a way, I’m still on the road.

Going to Portland was a break with the settled life I was leading before the summer of 2010. I’d lived in upstate New York for 23 years: born in Poughkeepsie, raised in Binghamton, educated in Ithaca. My whole existence occupied a sphere of about 200 miles. I traveled, but my mailbox was always in that same bubble.

Not anymore.

I’m back in Binghamton for the time being, but I’m not staying for long. No way am I settling here. Soon I’ll be moving — probably to Denver, possibly to Chicago, maybe to some other place I haven’t yet considered — and moving again after that. South America, Sweden, Istanbul, Dharamsala… there are a lot of lives to live in a lot of other places. Portland was just the first stop on an extended itinerary that may well stretch on for years.

It seems like a lot of people in my generation are on the same kind of open-ended ticket. Most people probably aren’t afflicted with a globe-tripping addiction like mine, but nobody — nobody — I know seems sure where they’ll be in the next two years. For those of us who tumbled out of college and weren’t handed a career with our diploma, the next destination is wherever they’ll hire us, wherever the rent’s cheap, away from our family’s basement — anywhere, anywhere but here. We all seem to be throwing darts at a map one way or another.

But that’s too grim a picture. In my first post of this series, I wrote a lot about that almost desperate uncertainty keeping my generation from settling down — which is not to be ignored, but also shouldn’t be the main reason. A better reason to postpone settling down is the sheer wealth of opportunities that living in a virtually globalized society gives us. We don’t have to settle for selling shoes in our hometown just because it’s the best job in 100 miles: with the Internet, we can find jobs on five continents, selling shoes or otherwise, without having to do so much as put on pants.

My trip, if anything, was a small-scale exercise in the travel opportunities technology has given us. Think about it: if I’d done the same trip ten years ago, I would’ve been taking a lot more on faith. I would’ve walked blind into almost every city I stopped in. The simple fact that I knew where I was going to sleep most nights, courtesy of CouchSurfing, took a great deal of risk out of the experience. The Internet allowed me to get information and make connections that I otherwise wouldn’t have had available, minimizing uncertainty, leaving less up to chance — which, in the end, considerably reduced the risks I took. Ten years ago my trip would’ve been an arduous series of best guesses and Hail Marys; instead it amounted to a pleasant stroll across the country to visit friends I’d already met. I might not have taken the chance otherwise, missing out on a wealth of experiences and perspective.

So it was with my trip, and so it is with life in general. Our opportunities are no longer limited to a single town, a single state, or, hell, a single country. We can make connections and open doors all over the world. We can build whole lives for ourselves in places we’ve never been while we sit in our pajamas.

I feel like I’m rambling. Am I rambling? There was a point I was trying to make…

Right, yes. So.

For my own part, I’ve wanted to explore long-term travel for as long as I can remember — since I was 11 years old, if not younger. This trip was intended as an initial test-run of whether I could do it. Now that I know that an unsettled life is not only realistic, but in a lot of ways easy, it’s almost impossible for me not to pursue it while I can. That’s where I’m headed now.

I realize that pulling stakes and resettling over and over might not be everybody’s slice of pie. But for the people in my generation who are agonizing about what they’re going to do with their lives, the news is still good: we’re living in a globalized society. We have the tools to make connections around the world. That gives us access to a wealth of options — both in our own country and every other. We can be successful doing any number of things in any number of places. All we have to do is pick one.

I’ll see you on the road.

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© Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch, 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

New York to Oregon: At Home in Portland and Heading Home Again

(This is the Part 7 of a seven an eight-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

Portland will forever be linked in my mind with spandex-clad ‘70s German opera-mutant Klaus Nomi.

Bear with me. This’ll take some explaining.