U. Up in the Air.

This is a part of the April A to Z Challenge. My theme is my Bucket List. Read about it here. Other posts in the A to Z Challenge: Ancient Ruins, Book, Coffee Shop, Date a Supermodel, Entrepreneurship, (Be a) Finisher, Give Away my Wealth, Handle a Baby, Inspire, Jack of all trades, Keep my shirt on, Make a lot of money, No, Off the Grid, Poker, Question Everything, Run a Marathon, Settle in the mountains and Teach. 

Next is U. U for Up in the air.

The movie. The one that had George Clooney in it. The one that was based on the book. The movie is about a dude who travels to places in America to layoff people. The important bit, the one that I want to achieve in this life, is that he has 1 million frequent flier miles and has a personal goal of collecting 10 million miles.

If you think its undoable, check out Chris and Ansoo. If not a million, they would be pretty close. In fact, at one point, I had 300,000 miles myself.

So the movie is about this guy who’s job is to meet people who have been laid off and counsel them on the post-layoff distress. As a part of his discourses (read speech, monologue etc), he asks them a simple question. What’s in your backpack. He further sort of glorifies the joblessness and extols the virtues of a frugal, free life. Lee Child and Jack Reacher would be proud of him. Not a pleasant job but a job nonetheless. That takes him to multiple cities and allows him to meet people and allows him to earn miles!

Like I said, at one point, I had more than 300K miles on me. I am not sure how many am I left with now. The trouble is that they are/were staggered across multiple airlines and multiple alliances. Plus a lot of them have expired because of inactivity. And I have used a lot of those for some travel in the last one year of joblessness. When I start work again, I want to stack up on the miles again. Took me 3 years to get 300K. There is no reason why I cant do it again. The million miles figure shouldn’t be tough to achieve. Lets see…

Further, if I compare myself to Ryan or Jack right now, I have a houseful of things that I want to cling on to. These are books, pictures, photos, toys, puzzles, posters and I dont know what all. I want to be able to reach a point where I can pack whatever I own in a carry-on case. Thankfully, I am not that attached to clothes, so my bag is anyway half empty. But the other things, I need to start simplifying. I need to start giving away things. May be I’d start with my books. I dont know. I’d think on it. Soon.

So, the U for me is Up in the air. And the other smaller question. What’s in my backpack?

Before I close this post, here is a question for you. Two. How many miles do you have? And what’s in your backpack?