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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It seems obvious. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to game the system so I can get paid to see the world for as long as I can remember. I wanted to be an archaeologist before I knew how to spell “archaeologist” — not because I liked digging in the dirt more than the next kid, but because I wanted to go to Egypt. Egypt was the only foreign country other than Pennsylvania that I knew about at the time. As I grew older that dream morphed into photography for National Geographic, which turned into freelance photography, which — after discovering in high school that I sort of sucked at photography — led me towards freelance journalism.

Somewhere in that whole process my congenital urge to travel got lost. I guess I let myself get duped by the idea that long-term traveling was for self-indulgent weenies. You know who travel writers are? Vegan college grads from Vermont who smoked a lot of pot in school, talk about their auras, and listen to The Disco Biscuits. The ones who are convinced that their trip is the most inspired and insightful, man — that they’ve glimpsed something sublime in a place where thousands of other people have been before them. The Taj Mahal was built specifically for them to have their perfect little transcendental moment: “I looked around, and it all just, y’know, made sense, man.”

Good God. That is what I fear most. More than bears and knives and eternal damnation — I am terrified of becoming a self-indulgent travel-weenie. Human kitsch. Someone for whom all the beauty and all the suffering in the world was assembled just so he could write pensively about it in his Moleskine travel journal.

Gah.

I’m pretty sure this is a view shared by most of my family. My clan seems to rank traveling (outside of the standard-issue, two-week-per-year vacation) in the same category as modern art and talking about feelings: they’re not exactly opposed to it. They’ll try to listen politely if the subject can’t be avoided. But they don’t seem to understand the point. Why not… build a coffee table instead?

In all seriousness, the biggest hang-up for me has been trying to decide between what I want to do and what I feel like I should do — namely, getting my hands dirty in political journalism. When Amy Goodman spoke in Ithaca a few years ago, she compared vigilant journalism to a public service on par with medical work. That stuck with me. I recognize that I have some writing skills and, I’m told, a strong sense of justice; it seems like the responsible thing to do would be using those abilities to help people. Besides — if I’m going to be pissed off about politics all the time I might as well get paid for it. That blood-pressure medicine ain’t gonna buy itself when I’m 40.

So I’ve resisted travel writing for years. I’ve tried to talk myself into getting a grown-up job — maybe not building coffee tables, but at least something I could talk about at Thanksgiving without getting that look. A job where I wouldn’t have to worry so much about getting tagged as a Trustafarian permanently on summer vacation. Something where I could use my powers for good instead of drivel. Something with a desk.

But apparently, resistance is futile. I can’t not travel. It’s what I want to do.

I think I’ve finally come to terms with that. I feel a lot better. There’ll be plenty of time for a “serious” job when I’m ready to settle down in a few years. Also, it’s not like I’d just be writing hotel reviews for Sandals: my immune system would physically reject that after a short time. I can find a way to write meaningful stuff while still traveling. There’s always value in exposing people to other cultures. The more we understand each other, the better the world will be. I can still be a travel writer without being a bum.

But by God — if I ever turn into a self-indulgent weenie, you better put me down.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

When I regained consciousness from my travel coma two days after arriving in Portland, I had to find a way to experience the city as completely as possible in one week. The best way to do it was to plug into the CouchSurfing community. Currently boasting almost 3,000 members and growing, Portland is blessed with a super-active CouchSurfing scene – one of the best in the U.S. Its members go way beyond just offering travelers a place to crash. CS Portland organizes monthly meet-ups; it’s a tight community where a lot of members know one another and hang out frequently. My host, Adam, and his converted-church apartment were semi-famous among Portland CouchSurfers. It was an ideal scene for somebody like me, far from home in an unfamiliar city.

I had an extra motivation to make friends with the natives. My host had taken me in on short notice for a few days on an emergency basis – I hadn’t been able to find a host before I arrived — but I was in danger of overstaying my welcome. It was time to find another place to stay.

Once I felt like I was rested enough to form complete sentences, I set out to meet people. A group of CouchSurfers were meeting up that night, close to where I was staying, at one of Portland’s eight billion bars. Another big plus for the lonesome traveler in Portland: they take their drinking seriously. The combination of a dedicated brewery culture and a climate that tends toward dreary keeps the bar scene thriving. Happy hour is a city-wide event there. It felt like there must’ve been at least three drinking establishments per full-time resident. Bars and pubs as far as the eye could see. Glorious.

The CouchSurfers I met were all traveling. One was from Vancouver, headed to Kansas; one was from Arlington; the third was from Des Moines, looking for a place to settle down. It was an easy group to fall in with: we were all from somewhere else. We had all left home for similar reasons. As soon as I met the group, it was the same almost-instant comfort I’d found all the way across the country. The transient “here today and gone tomorrow” mentality of true travel-junkies makes for fast friendships. The pints of high-caliber local brew might also have had something to do with it.

Matt from Des Moines, as it turned out, was also having a lodging dilemma like mine, looking for a new place to crash. He had a promising offer from a group of CouchSurfers with a lot of space. I asked if I could tag along when he met them the following day to see if they had room for one more.

And that’s how I was introduced to The PALS Clubhouse.

↔↔↔

The Clubhouse was, on the outside, a shabby one-story in Southeast Portland’s industrial district. Its close neighbors were warehouses and barbed-wire fences. Train tracks ran directly across the street from the livingroom window. The house perched on a small grade over a dead-end street, looking as if the bigger buildings were literally crowding it out – shoving the poor house back toward the city proper where it belonged.

But the house’s desperate exterior was absolutely no indication of The Clubhouse’s members. Inside the sad little house lived some of the happiest people I’ve ever met. They were a tribe – a group of friends that had come together to form something that was equal parts anarchist collective and never-ending house party. When I arrived with Matt, the place was already stuffed to the rafters with people. I still don’t know exactly how many were actually renting the place and how many were just crashing. Not that it mattered much: if you were staying at The Clubhouse, you were an honorary member of the household, whether your name was on the lease or not. At least six people – a low estimate – were already bunking on floors and furniture throughout the place, but the PALS crew still welcomed Matt and I with open arms. We moved in immediately.

That instant-friendship feeling I mentioned before? Nothing compared to meeting the PALS. It wasn’t like staying with friends: it was like meeting cousins I’d never known. Really fun, slightly crazy cousins. A third of The Clubhouse’s narrow backyard had been converted into a party pit-slash-tribal meeting ground, with spraypainted wooden benches built on three sides underneath a rain tarp. Throughout the day there were always at least a few people hanging out on the benches, if not the entire clan. Beer tabs regularly started popping in the kitchen around noon. We ate communal meals out of a giant stock-pot simmering on the stove. Mitch, my “official” host, was taking college classes and working part-time at a call center along with Mark, another roommate; aside from them, I have no idea what anybody did for a living. It was like the best parts of living in a college dorm, an endless Saturday without work or classes. More than that, it was something I’d never really been a part of before: a group of friends who were equally important in one another’s lives, whose collective relationship was a shared foundation for all of them. They were the best possible people in Portland to fall in with.

Days were spent wandering around Portland with an ever-widening circle of friends: first Matt and Team PALS, then Ashley – Matt’s previous host – then more local CouchSurfers, meeting friends of new friends, until I had more people to hang out with in Portland than I did back home in New York.

Back home in New York.

Weird to think about. A few times I almost forgot that I’d be catching the train back to my own parallel dimension in a matter of days. My past life in New York – a life with responsibilities, where I slept in the same place for longer than a week and owned more than two pairs of clothes – seemed like a decade ago. It almost made sense to refund my train ticket, spend another week sipping beer under the rain tarp with my new friends, get a job waiting tables, my own place in the Hawthorne District… it was tempting. Maybe it was because, after six weeks on the road, Portland was where I’d spent the most consecutive days in the same city. I was craving stability. But there was no getting around feeling very much at home.

↔↔↔

So back to Klaus Nomi.

Saturday, October 30^th, 2010: The PALS Clubhouse Halloween Party. The hands-down best Halloween party I’ve ever been to. I’d spent the day hanging out with Ashley and her friend Ari, watching a very important Oregon Ducks game on TV. (Somehow, after 23 years of caring less about football than, say, how long it took paint to curl, I was yelling at the TV while the Ducks got savage on the USC Trojans.) When we got back to The Clubhouse it was already filling up with costumes. Not lame costumes either – no “I’m wearing all black and I just bought these cat ears, he he!”: people put work into their outfits. Matt dressed up as a blank canvas, wearing all white and carrying markers, letting people draw all over him. Mitch was a treasure troll with his dreadlocks spiked into an imposing cone over his head. Chris had two costumes: he spent part of the night as Glenn Danzig, and later re-appeared as half a paper-mache unicorn, with Leah as the other half.

And then there was Klaus.

When I met Pender, he was a slight, soft-spoken guy wearing glasses. Pender disappeared completely at the Halloween party. In his place was a spot-on impersonation of Klaus Nomi: the crazy make-up, the angular tux (made out of cardboard), the trademark hair, German accent – everything. Pender/Klaus gave an impromptu concert in the backyard, leading the costumed crowd in a drunken rendition of “A Simple Man” that shook the walls of The Clubhouse. It was awesome – one of my favorite memories, and definitely a great note to end my trip on.

↔↔↔

There wasn’t much left of my trip after that. One more day of bumming around Portland, one more night at The Clubhouse; then buying supplies (Ramen Noodles, instant oatmeal, and two $3 bottles of wine) for the three-day train ride back to New York. Suddenly I was saying goodbyes and waiting for my train. Bracing for reverse culture shock. Seven weeks living a different life and I was finally headed back to my old self.

The train ride home was a blur. I slept curled in a fetal position on the seats as Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota tripped past. There was one strange moment when I peered out the window, half-asleep, no idea where I was, stunned speechless by shafts of sunlight breaking through gunmetal clouds over the mountains of Glacier National Park. Then I was in Chicago. Then Ohio, and then – the end of an era – back in New York. 55 days after I left home, the train pulled into the Syracuse Amtrak Station. My parents were waiting for me on the platform.

Home again.

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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.