Tag: Growth

  • The Magic of Docker

    The Magic of Docker

    The popular British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said,

    “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

    And let me tell you all this: I’ve started practicing magic.

    That quote is the third of three laws Clarke put forward, and is probably one of the most repeated and cited. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Could you imagine someone from centuries in the past time-traveling to our present day? They would think everything was foreign, or maybe even sorcery. I recently saw this concept illustrated beautifully in the classic 1993 Halloween film Hocus Pocus. It’s one that we watch at least once a year during “Spooky Season,” and the one particular scene that stands out to me these days is when one of the teen characters, Max (Omri Katz), threatens and confuses the witchy Sanderson Sisters (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker) from the past with a power of his own: the “Burning Rain of Death,” which involves him holding a cigarette lighter to a fire suppression system and causing the sprinklers to engage. They briefly scream, assuming the falling liquid is deadly because they’d never seen a mortal child “make fire in his hand.” Clarke told no lies — the sisters witnessed Max perform actual magic.

    The “Burning Rain of Death” scene in question.

    As a lifelong Trekkie, I also like to throw it back to the ’60s. The casual Star Trek viewer might think that the technology Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew utilize is nothing short of fairy tale make-believe. But in today’s age, their hand-held wireless communicators, face-to-face video conferencing, and voice-activated digital assistants are all common tech you can find on the average device in your pocket. In fact, your iPhones and Androids are just a few small features short of literally being a “tricorder.” Recently, in one episode of Strange New Worlds (one of Star Trek‘s more recent spinoffs), the character of La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) makes off with vital information she found on a PADD that our new, young Scotty (Martin Quinn) had gathered. Rather than a simple prop made to look like said “PADD,” I think the series has just started using actual iPads, because I was struck by how unfuturistic the device looked… Despite the series being set hundreds of years in the future. And while scientists are still working on making them a reality, Star Trek still has plenty of tech that seems downright impossible for those of us still stuck in the past.

    Uhura’s had it with this shit, too.

    Well, I guess the future is now, because I’ve started learning more than I expected to when I started tinkering with an old PC of mine. I was determined to turn it into something of a “private server” for me and the family to use, however we wanted. You may recall that I initially tried to host this very website on it for roughly a month before I threw in the towel on trying to keep it up and accessible. The problem was largely that I had decided to use a platform called YunoHost (the name of which is clever internet shorthand for the question “y u no host?”), which you can install onto any available server and then run self-hosted software on it with just a few clicks. No less impressive than installing an app on your phone, really. The issue, though, is that YunoHost had a bizarre way of sinking its hooks into every part of the server’s system, which complicated the way that I wanted to host stuff outside of its services.

    That was when I sorta made the hasty decision to quit the server project. I wiped the entire machine, moved this website over to a proper host (much of which you can read about in my last post), and called it a day. My brain kept thinking about it all, though, and I decided that I still wanted to experiment. Tinkering with this stuff and the feeling of creating something useful out of what was otherwise useless equipment was turning out to be a little addictive. My nephew was also still keen to at least get the Jellyfin media platform running for his library of literally hundreds of digitized movies. Plus, my frustration, in reality, stemmed from my mistake of putting all my eggs into YunoHost’s basket, not the homelab itself. So I started looking into alternative approaches to what I was already trying to accomplish.

    That new approach turned out to be Docker!

    For the non-technical, Docker is a platform that allows you to install services, apps, and other types of software into virtual “containers” on your computer (or a server), which not only allows for really clean and organized stacks of tech, but it also prevents software from gaining footholds in the rest of your system!!! Which I can’t emphasize enough, since that was the biggest issue from the last build that I did. Since it all stays isolated in its own little containers, you can actually test and experiment with stuff without them all conflicting with one another. Then, when you decide you aren’t going to use it or don’t like it, you can delete the whole dang container as quick as you can type docker compose down!

    It’s perfect for someone like me, who mostly enjoys learning by doing. I’m still wrapping my brain around the concept of testing things before launching them or throwing open the door for others to enjoy stuff that I’m hosting, but even then, it’s still been a really fulfilling concept to learn. I had to learn how to set up network utilities like Nginx Proxy Manager and Pi-hole — the lack of which I have a sneaking suspicion may have contributed to my WordPress hosting issues before the wipe — and finally got Jellyfin up and running right before my nephew got me the media library to populate it with. I’ve even started learning how to customize the software by initializing it all via Docker Compose, a method that spins up an app based on your commands written into a docker-compose.yml file. It’s all pretty incredible, and has had me Googling topics like “fun docker images” for the past week.

    Now, even my 72-year-old father can enjoy the hundreds of movies and shows we’re serving up on his TV’s Jellyfin app. Almost as if by magic. ✨

  • Reset

    Reset

    Making my own decisions is kind of a struggle.

    If you’re a regular viewer of jiggyflyjoe.com, you may have noticed that it has undergone some major changes this year since I launched it as a blog/email newsletter hybrid on Substack back in February. You see, what Substack is doing is pretty interesting. It has seen a growing number of independent journalists and writers like Aaron Parnas and Under the Desk News set up shop on the platform that could easily be described as a hybrid between traditional blogging, email newsletters, and social media. I’ve stated numerous times, however, that it was brought to my attention pretty early on that Substack also willingly platforms white supremacists. So I packed up shop and swiftly moved over to Ghost instead.

    Ghost was surprisingly refreshing. That’s why Jiggy’s Journal thrived over there for so long. Ghost is also a hybrid platform that mashes up blogging and email. They’re also in the early stages of adopting the open web to add that crucial “social media” element to it. Ghost also has one of the slickest and most enjoyable editor, which allows you to utilize Rich Text and/or Markdown simultaneously. I had (and, honestly, still have) high hopes for Ghost. I’m still rooting for them. But ultimately, the platform was difficult for me to maintain as a self-hosted app on my own server, and paying for their Ghost(Pro) service felt like too much for a personal website like this one. Especially since I would have had to fork over even more cash for the full ability to customize the website’s look, layout, and other critical settings for me.

    So ultimately, I wound up back on the old standard WordPress. And look, I thought I would be able to self-host WordPress on my own server because installing it and getting it running was surprisingly quick and easy. But since I’m still extremely new to the whole “self-hosting” thing, I kept running into catastrophic system failure after catastrophic system failure, and in my mind, jiggyflyjoe.com needs to be up and running 24/7. It’s the one link that I provide everywhere on the web. In my social media bios, on other website forums, and even on-screen during my Twitch streams. That said, when the link that I have posted all over the internet doesn’t work, it’s like OCD takes over, and I start to get itchy. What I wound up doing instead is scrapping the entire self-host server build, and I moved this site over to a proper hosting service. Because even while I continue to tinker and experiment with my own home lab and try to understand the concept of Docker, this here website needs stability that only the professionals can provide right now.

    Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken steps to rebuild this site from scratch, and per usual, there were a few casualties. The mailing list was an important one, but I was thankfully able to log back into an old database on the server and manually extract it before fully wiping it, so you should all still receive these posts in your inbox. If not, there are plenty of spaces around jiggyflyjoe.com where you can still subscribe (or re-subscribe if I somehow missed you). One of those places is right below this paragraph! Most of the text from all my old posts is still available, too, but they may have some broken links and missing images, comments, and other elements. I’m going to try and restore the important stuff here and there as I’m able. Those old posts can now be found in The Ghost Archives, because it just sounds cool and spooky, but also because a majority of those posts were written on Ghost.

    Essentially, I’m just trying to say: Please don’t mind the mess!

    More cool things are coming to the website, as well. WordPress itself is kind of a fun place to experiment because there are so many compatible plugins and services for it. And unlike the platforms in my past, I have full control over this digital space, and we can turn it into whatever we want it to be.

    Stay tuned! 😉

  • Do Your Best

    Fun fact: I used to be a vegetarian!

    Some of the time that I wasted on Facebook over the years was actually educational. As Americans, I think that we kinda knowingly turn a blind eye to where our food really comes from. While the words “pork” and “beef” are historical linguistic artifacts, isn’t it a little bit convenient that we have alternate words for a lot of animal products we consume? I mean, nobody really wants to think about sweet little Babe while they’re frying up their breakfast bacon, right? And after seeing some of the videos from activist groups on Facebook about some of the suffering and actual torture these poor animals face every single day from factory farming, I swore off eating meat. And I maintained it for two years.

    There were good days and bad days during that stretch. Even though there are some truly awful “meat alternatives” on the market, I was pleasantly surprised by how many are also delicious! I once even took Beyond Burgers to a cookout, and they were a hit even among the meat-eating crowd. And don’t get me started on Gardein’s faux-chicken tenders… I found that they were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing! I probably spent a small fortune on those suckers while I was living the veggie lifestyle. I used to order a mac and cheese dish topped with them from Yard House whenever I felt like I needed to spring for lunch at the office that I used to work at in downtown Indy, and the scent of the Gardein tenders even fooled a co-worker into thinking I was a fraud!

    Sadly, though, after a little over two years, I did wind up falling off the wagon. Getting enough protein wasn’t the issue, although I know that concern does sometimes cause even some of the most militant vegans and vegetarians to go back to animal products. It honestly just got too hard to stay consistent. Being from the Midwest, a large part of socialization and our culture revolves around food made mostly from meat, cheese, corn, and potatoes, and my family is no different. As empathetic as they were towards me and my concerns about animal slaughtering and factory farming, I wasn’t going to convince them to change on my own. And honestly, being the only one who constantly has to find an alternative when we hit the drive-thru while honestly still having cravings for a damn cheeseburger was extremely hard.

    I learned something simple but valuable during those two years, however. It may have been the moment in my life that made me realize: Nobody is perfect. And that’s okay.

    Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sums things up perfectly in The Good Place.
    Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sums things up perfectly in The Good Place.

    I was discussing this with a fellow content creator recently, and she mentioned that it is amazing if you even care. That’s a lot more than most people in today’s age. With the planet and humanity practically deteriorating before our very eyes, the fact that you are even making an effort at times is enough. We’re never going to be perfect. Even the strictest vegan you could possibly imagine probably owns or has likely consumed something against their moral code or healthy lifestyle. And guess what? The world spins madly on. And I think we honestly forget that we’re all just kinda making it up as we go in life.

    Just do your best. That’s really all we can do. Nobody is the morality police, and nobody is perfect. Anyone who tells you otherwise or makes you feel judged or wants to start virtue signaling all over their socials in response shouldn’t be in your life anyway.

    I still hate where meat comes from, by the way. And I still stump for animal rights, as ironic as it may sound. I would be beyond heartbroken if someone were to hurt one of my cats, but honestly, what’s the difference between a cat’s life and a cow’s life? And then what’s the difference between a cow’s life and our lives? Don’t we all deserve to live them? I think that we do. But we can only do what we can do. I’m only one person. And I hope that my two years of vegetarianism and my ongoing efforts to still choose compassion when possible in other ways have made a difference.

    We’re all just doing our best. And if that best includes a little more compassion, even sometimes, that’s worth something.

  • The Warning Signs

    Hi! It’s been a minute. Life’s been hectic. So much so that I’ve got a cautionary tale to tell, which involves me getting hired at a new job, starting work, and quitting all in the last week!

    Some of you may recall that I’ve been looking for a new gig since April of last year. If you’re new or unfamiliar, you can read all about my trials and tribulations from around that point and onward in the “Retail Therapy” section on this post. I had spent the year (or more…) learning more about programming and coding, but also desperately applying for any job that came my way. Anything that I figured I’d be able to do, anyway. I’m a 40-year-old college dropout with very few in-demand skills (working on that, obviously!), so it’s not exactly an easy path in what is already a challenging job market. The icing on the cake is that I also now live in an area of the country that has practically zero jobs unless I want to return to retail. There’s also manufacturing and factory work, but I passed out working behind a customer service desk at a big box store in this town, so I’m not so sure manual labor is going to be on the table for me either.

    In late March, my sister, MissFiasco, emailed me a job listing for a work-from-home role with a healthcare company. The title was “Radiology Scheduler.” It mentioned how much it paid — not much, but more than what any retail job in the area was dishing out — and as the title suggests, would involve scheduling patients for medical imaging and diagnostic procedures. It did involve talking to patients on the phone, which I honestly despise, but it didn’t necessarily sound like a call center, either. So I figured it would probably be okay. Not only would I get to work from home in my pajamas and start earning some dough again, but it also sounded like I would play a role in genuinely helping people, which is always a nice feeling. So I gave it a shot and sent them my resume.

    A couple of weeks into April, I received an email back from the company. They were interested in interviewing me! It was the first time anyone had even shown interest in me professionally since I went to talk to a temp agency in February with no success. Naturally, I booked the interview. And that’s when things started getting strange…

    My first interview was conducted by an AI chatbot. Yes, you read that correctly. My interview was basically conducted by ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever. It asked me some fairly standard questions and suggested that I be as thorough and detailed as possible because, if I passed this round, then I would be invited to interview again with a human representative. It was weird, but I kept going because… Well, because I needed a job. I did enough to impress Chad (a nickname MissFiasco and I gave to ChatGPT), so I progressed to the next interview. It was scheduled to be a 30-minute video chat, and I was advised that the dress would be business casual. I did my best to look presentable since I’m almost always dressed very casually, snapped a photo to my family’s group chat on Discord, and joined the Zoom meeting early and prepared.

    The selfie that jiggyflyjoe snapped before his interview!
    Photo of me looking my “best.” 🥴

    Much like the interview with Chad, the interview went well enough, but it still just felt odd. The woman that I was speaking to seemed highly indifferent throughout the entire conversation. On the other hand, I like to sprinkle in a little sarcasm or jokes here and there, so the contrast was a little jarring. I’m not one of those creepy dudebros who think that women always need to be warm and receiving, but man… She did not show even the slightest hint of a sense of humor. It was as if smiling were simply not allowed while on the clock. Regardless, the process continued afterward, and I was sent an offer letter by mid-May. An offer letter that invited me to accept the role of an “Engagement Specialist,” which I had not applied for. The shift that I had requested was also changed, and the compensation was a bit less than the radiology scheduling role. I emailed back the recruiter and inquired as to why I was being offered a position with hours and wages that I did not apply for. She simply stated that the Radiology Scheduler role was “no longer available.”

    This was my first major red flag.

    The interview with Chad and the subsequent recruiter were strange, but I brushed them off because I was desperate enough to get working. But this was the exact moment that I remember thinking, “I don’t know about this.” The vibes were off and, frankly, I felt that they had pulled a bait-and-switch on me. And in retrospect, I see now that this is when I should have declined the offer and dodged the bullet completely. But again, the siren song coming from incoming money was too strong. I signed the offer letter and, in return, they shipped me a computer with which to work from home. And the family rallied to help me prepare. To the point where my brother-in-law (aka MrFiasco) transformed a room in our home that had been serving as a storage room into a home office for me. Complete with an actual cubicle! I was getting nervous but excited, especially by my new workspace. I was no longer going to be crammed into a small corner of my bedroom, where my current desktop setup is! I was going to be an unstoppable workforce of one back here!

    An animated image of Brie Larson as Carol Danvers becoming the superhero Captain Marvel in the film of the same name.
    Okay, I’m not Captain Marvel unstoppable, but I felt pretty close.

    Last Thursday was my first day. I went through orientation and training on both Teams and Zoom, and learned that the company was effectively a healthcare call center. I cringe at those two words together because working for a call center is one of the last things I have ever had any desire to do. As I mentioned earlier, I despise speaking on the phone in the first place. But they informed us that we would only be making outbound phone calls to insurance members to try and convince them to schedule an in-home health assessment, which is where a nurse practitioner visits their home and reviews their overall health, medications, etc. My last office-based job that I had worked at for more than 8 years eventually threw me a phone and told me to play call center, but this company surprisingly had an entire automated phone system that included an actual script, and you were able to schedule the appointments in the same software! That seemed fairly easy and convenient. Maybe I could do this job! The trainers also seemed friendly and very knowledgeable. I won’t lie: The first three or four days were even kinda fun. I was digging it.

    That was until Day #5. I don’t know if my trainer was just having a spectacularly bad day, but there were a few moments throughout the morning where her friendliness seemed as though it was starting to wane. At one particular point, I was essentially told to stop taking notes on a topic and to start doing a quiz about the same topic instead. And then, earlier in the day, we were directed to complete an activity that involved us recording ourselves doing a practice phone call with yet another AI chatbot. When the AI chatbot broke down for numerous people in the training class and stopped letting us progress, assistance was not exactly forthcoming. And when the assistance finally did show up, it was entirely useless. By the time we went on our lunch break yesterday, I started feeling pretty triggered. I’ve described the feeling to my family multiple times now as feeling like workplace PTSD. My eagerness to keep learning and to try and make things work for this job withered away and was instantly replaced by a sense of panic and dread in the middle of my stomach. My spidey sense was tingling. I’d been here before.

    And in a moment of clarity, I came to the entire reality of the situation. This was a call center, I was a salesperson (there was even commission!), my higher-ups were unwilling to help, and I was once again going to be expected to address questions for people that I did not know the answers to. Furthermore, my target demographic was vulnerable elderly people who were likely being taken advantage of by their insurance policies anyway. We were instructed that these health assessments were yearly benefits that they receive for free, but as my famously inappropriate father likes to say, “there ain’t no free lunch.” And sure, the calls were mostly scripted, but we were also advised to “manage resistance” when folks tried declining the assessment, which also felt scummy. I quickly realized that I wasn’t digging it, after all.

    Then I quit! I was that guy who went to lunch and never came back. After I signed off, I packed up their computer and immediately shipped it back out to them this morning in the very same box it arrived in.

    CTA Image

    Jiggy’s Journal now has an AMA (Ask Me Anything) page! You got 🔥burning questions🔥 for me? Maybe a comment or suggestion? Check out the page here and submit everything that’s on your mind. Afterwards, I’ll respond in a future post!

    Ask Me Anything!

    And while I’m absolutely certain this was the correct decision to make, I’m disappointed to say the very least. Nobody knows how much I wanted to be a productive member of society again. My family has been extremely supportive for the most part, but I know that I’m a drain on them financially, so I think they’re at least a little disappointed in me, too. I know that I’m also exceptionally privileged to have enough of a support system currently in place that I’m granted the option of even considering leaving a job when I’m mentally in distress. Not everyone can do that, so it wasn’t a decision that I made lightly. I did try my best. I took several pages of handwritten notes throughout training, did my best to fully understand the company’s campaign that I’d been hired for, and adjusted everything else in my orbit to rotate around my new work schedule. Despite my gut instinct frequently trying to communicate to my brain that this wasn’t going to work.

    So my unemployment journey continues. I’m still working on coding. Maybe even refocusing on it a little more since I started to slack off on that a bit. Hopefully, I can eventually develop that skill into something employable. I’m still making web content, like always, for the love of it and because it earns me a little pocket change here and there. (By the way, have you subscribed to this publication? What about my Twitch channel?? Or maybe you’d like to buy me a cup of coffee??? 👀) I’m still open and looking for any other jobs that might surprise me and somehow won’t be completely soul-crushing. And otherwise, I’m chillin’ with my silly little games and shows. (Yo, Severance, Silo, and Foundation have been rocking my world lately. Get you some Apple TV+!)

    Let this also serve as a reminder to listen to your internal monologue! Trust your gut instincts! I understand that they aren’t always right, and maybe we are just cucumbers with anxiety, but your feelings are valid, and there is a reason why they are making you feel that way. Don’t ignore the warning signs! Otherwise, you might just unwittingly find yourself in a call center.

    In the meantime, you know if anyone’s hiring? If they aren’t completely drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, shoot me an email! We’ll be besties forever. ❤️

  • Leave Out All the Rest

    “Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti.”
    — Victoria Pedretti as Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan.

    In my very first entry here in Jiggy’s Journal, I wrapped things up by briefly touching on being a lonely kid who felt like nobody was interested in befriending. I think this might be my first memory where I felt a sense of social anxiety. My medical records state that I still currently suffer from a “generalized anxiety,” so the idea that it started manifesting as early as kindergarten kinda tracks.

    Although the feeling of not making friends eventually went away, I still spent massive amounts of time as a teen and young adult feeling worried and concerned about what other people thought of me. Even though I am, without question, a nerd at heart, I wasted so many of my younger years trying to mold myself into whatever my version of being “likeable” was. I bought and wore the name-brand clothes, I listened to the music that was popular at the time, and I hung out with people who drank and smoked weed! (I’ll give you a minute to clutch your pearls and collect yourself now.) But I would come home from being out with my so-called friends, and instead of feeling the joy and exhilaration that friendship and a hoppin’ nightlife are supposed to provide, I would sometimes cry myself to sleep instead. I would wake up with massive headaches, not from hangovers, but from dehydration. I hated trying to keep everybody but myself happy. Then one day, I woke up with that dehydration headache from crying the night before, and it was literally like someone flipped a switch in my brain.

    I didn’t care anymore.

    Which isn’t to say that I didn’t care about my life or my friends and family anymore. I’m an introvert, but I have still always loved meeting new people, chatting and being social, and my close friends and family are the most important thing to me. But I think I was finally developing the tougher skin that I probably should have started out with. I was starting to believe that “quality is better than quantity.” I can’t please everyone I ever meet. There are going to be people who don’t like me. There will be people who are friendly but not your friend. There are going to be people who will both enter and exit your life. And the only person who can best take care of you and your needs is yourself. And that’s okay. I don’t want to go get turnt or do things for “the ‘Gram” and a billion followers anymore. I’ve even recently noticed that I’ve been having far more fun on my Twitch streams since I stopped stressing myself out over the numbers. Yes, social media and creating content on the web are essentially numbers games or popularity contests, but I don’t think fate or the universe or something is going to let it just happen for someone who wants it too bad. Relax. Just find your zen.

    Animated GIF image of Taylor Swift singing "You Need to Calm Down."
    Taylor knows what’s up.

    The problem I’ve been facing in recent years, however, is that I’ve let the “I-don’t-care-what-you-think-of-me” attitude snowball into letting myself match people’s energy. And frankly, that’s not a great way to handle your differences with people who might already be having a bad day. And look, I still don’t care what most strangers on this rock think of me. But I do care what the people I love think of me, and ultimately, getting labeled as “the mean one” was not on my bucket list. So I’ve been trying to remedy things by trying to filter my thoughts a little more, maybe make them sound a little less venomous. I’m trying to remember that kindness makes a world of difference. And that I still love them even when I want to punch them in the throat.

    I have made a lot of social posts regarding how fun my streams have been since I stopped obsessing over follower and viewer counts. Just a few hours ago, I wrote another one in which I paraphrased a quote from The Haunting of Hill House. That same quote about life’s moments just being confetti is prominently featured at the top of this post. I’m not sure what initially made me think of it and then use it, but after I did, I wanted to see if director/producer Mike Flanagan had explained what exactly it was that he meant when he wrote that line for Nell. And boy, did I luck out! Mike explained his entire thought process at length in a post over on his Tumblr blog. At the end of his post, he beautifully explains the following:

    “And it’s about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just… well, it’s fleeting. It’s colorful. It’s overwhelming. It’s blinding. It’s dancing. And, if we look at it right, it’s beautiful. But it’s also light. It’s tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it’s as light as air.

    The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

    It’s the love that stays.”
    — Mike Flanagan on his Tumblr blog.

    And it’s the truth. In the grand scheme of things, the people that I love are what matter the most. We always forget how influential our lives are to others. I still have habits that rubbed off on me from my mother, who has been gone for nearly 25 years now. In a way, her knowledge, her stories, her legacy, and her impact continue and live on through those of us who remember her. She was my mother. I love her completely, and she loved me the same. I can remember her hugging me close and apologizing for our trip to Disney World getting ruined by the torrential rain that had us completely soaked, I can remember the hand-drawn maps she made to guide her way through dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda video game, and I can remember the awesome muffins she used to bake from mixes she got at Sam’s Club. But that’s all the confetti. The brilliant and colorful but fleeting moments of my life that were shared with hers.

    As I get older, I just hope that my family will feel the same way about me. Sometimes I can get upset with them. But while I hope they’ll remember plenty of shiny and sparkly confetti that I’ve sprinkled all over their lives, I hope it’s the love that stays.

  • The Homesick Hoosier

    I used to hate being from Indiana.

    As a kid, I legitimately despised being from and living most of my life in a state that most people have never thought twice about. I grew up in a small, suburban town just south of Indianapolis, and while my childhood was pleasant enough, I had the great misfortune of growing into a weirdo. I was a weird kid, and I liked weird things, and I likely have at least an ounce of the ’tism that made me act and feel very awkward. None of that made me very popular among my fellow Hoosier children. Even though there have been a couple of chapters in my life where I’ve had a solid circle of friends, I’ve never really ever been Mr. Popularity. You know where I did find friends, though? Online. Friends who lived in really fun, exciting, or fancy-sounding places like New York or California, or even foreign countries! England, Australia, India, Sweden, Italy, Japan!

    Cole Sprouse as Jughead announcing that he is a weirdo.
    My condolences to Jughead!

    It’s not too hard to see why this weirdo spent a lot of time dreaming of ways to escape from Indy.

    FedEx Foundations 📦

    I think my perspective started changing around the time I got my job at the Indianapolis International Airport, working for the regional hub of FedEx Express. Back in 2006, I was in my early twenties and pretty much only making beer money flipping burgers. My older brother had been working at FedEx for a few years at that point, so when he suggested putting in an application, I was more than happy to do so! By the way, I wouldn’t normally advise working with family, but he had also mentioned that the facility was pretty massive, so the chances we would actually run into each other while working were kinda slim, so I was chill with giving it a shot. The company took about two months to give me a call back, but once they offered me a job that June, I jumped on it.

    I’ve always been a tiny bit concerned that trading the smell of fries and onion rings on my clothes for jet fuel was probably going to cause me to develop some sort of terminal illness, but it was a trade that I was more than willing to take at the time!

    FedEx was an important chapter for me, though, for a lot of reasons. It gave me my first “adult” responsibility outside of my sheltered little “small-town” life thus far. And some of those responsibilities were big. I started out just sorting packages and rewrapping packages that had broken open upstairs in a conveyor belt “matrix” of sorts that scanned the bar codes on mailing labels and then routed them to their appropriate destinations afterward. But the responsibility seemed to increase tenfold by the time I transferred to a position working outdoors on the ramp. Driving tractor-trailers, pulling long strings of huge aluminum containers filled with sorted packages, and trying not to hit the sometimes actively taxiing multi-million dollar aircraft with any of it in the process. It was stressful, and that wasn’t even half of the job! Those kids (and a few old dogs, too!) who are still out there doing that job, running heavy machinery and loading and unloading aircraft in practically every imaginable type of inclement weather situation, get the highest regards from yours truly. Especially since they’re only doing it for like $16 an hour!

    WRTV 6 in Indianapolis reporting on the Indy Hub, my former stomping grounds!

    I eventually became a “ramp agent,” a title that required me to go through several rounds of interviews and get a decent pay bump. My professional development skills weren’t the only things that grew while I was at FedEx, though. I made friends in my various work groups, many of whom I’m still in contact with and consider some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I attended numerous parties, festivals, concerts, graduations, trips out of state, at least four weddings, and two funerals. We did dinners, went out for drinks, had coffee or brunch on Sundays, holiday ugly sweater parties, retro-themed pub crawls, and formed a beer club at Shallo’s (one of Indy’s best hidden gems, by the way!). A few of us even got to join in Super Bowl festivities together during Super Bowl XLVI back in 2012 when Indy played host! These were the days when I felt young and fun and maybe only a little intoxicated.

    I had quite a few personal milestones during this era, too. Since the “Express” division of FedEx operates as an airline, they also used to have a perk where we could purchase standby seats on passenger flights through Southwest and other airlines for ridiculously low prices. Seriously, during a week of PTO, I flew from Indy to Arizona to visit some friends for like $75 round-trip! Is that even possible anymore with today’s prices? It was my first time flying alone, however, so even though I’d been an adult for a few good years, it still felt like a big deal. During this period, I also bought (and paid off!) my first car. It was a 2006 Chevy Impala that needed tons of work done on it after I got it, but it served me well up until the pandemic, when everyone stopped going places. That same Impala is still in the family. We had to tow that bitch all the way to Kansas when we moved, so needless to say, it’s still a hoopty, too!

    “How Cosmopolitan!” 🍸

    As much as I still love and appreciate FedEx for what it was, at the end of my tenure there, I had learned from experience that I’m not supervisor material. I may know the ropes of a particular job really well, but I’m not someone who can execute all of my job functions while also keeping tabs on what everyone else is doing. Nor did I appreciate taking the heat for what others failed to do. So by mid-2014, some friends from outside FedEx started helping me plan my next move, and that meant completely flipping the script.

    In October of that year, I found myself getting employed by a local office that handled drug and alcohol testing for employers. A few good friends who already worked for the company vouched for me when I applied, so it made the hiring process a breeze. I was already acquainted with two of the three people who interviewed me for the job, so it was also the most comfortable job interview I’ve ever completed. And when the HR lady took me around to introduce me to everyone on my first day, it was almost comical that many of my new co-workers had the same response: “Oh yeah, we already know him!” So I went from working overnight with airplanes and boxes to data entry and paper pushing during the day.

    The office was located in a fairly convenient spot in downtown Indianapolis. There was an office kitchen with free coffee! I had my own cubicle and a phone on my desk with my very own extension! And parking was free, which struck me as a rare perk among folks who live and work in urban environments! The first few weeks at this job felt impossibly cool. I was doing a big boy professional job in an office with a computer and a phone and coffee! Isn’t that like the poster image of an American working man? Now I was really living the life! It felt like I was living an episode of Mad Men or something. To put it into perspective, a former FedEx co-worker once asked my brother how I was liking the new job, and after he described all of this to them, they replied with a two-word exclamation:

    “How cosmopolitan!”

    Christina Hendricks in Mad Men giving someone a judgmental glance.
    Literally the rest of the office staff while I was hyping up my new job.

    Throughout my twenties and thirties, and between working at FedEx and in this new office role for a majority of those years, my distaste for Indy started turning into something else. Eventually, I found myself growing fond of it. When big things happened for the city, like hosting the aforementioned Super Bowl or the annual Indy 500, it was a big thing for everyone. You couldn’t help but develop a little bit of pride in being from the Circle City. It was a blast whenever I got the time to get out and about in the city with my pals. I discovered new parts of the town that I didn’t know about before, including the city’s “cultural districts” like Fountain Square, the Wholesale District, and Broad Ripple Village. These are the places you could find most of Indy’s vintage, artsy, and independent restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues. Who doesn’t love the opportunity to shop at Silver in the City or go party at The Vogue? That honestly describes some of the weekends I’ve had in Indy.

    Indianapolis is extremely underrated by the rest of the country. The entire state is often overlooked as “flyover country” to most of the population on the coasts. Honestly, I can kinda see why. Indiana is well-known for its miles and miles of corn and soybean fields. But it was also a really special place that is growing and creating its own cultural identity. Areas of the city, like Fountain Square, were being revitalized and were slowly moving away from being the kinds of places my family used to worry about me getting stabbed at. Buildings that were previously abandoned and run down were being transformed into funky spaces with stories to tell. A cross-section that mirrors Indy’s own mixture of young and hip with classic elegance and rural simplicity.

    I wound up moving away from Indiana in early 2023. That was when we decided to join my sister, her husband, and their son out here in small-town Kansas. Two years later, I’m still trying to find my appreciation for this different kind of lifestyle. Moving so far away has allowed me to grow and spread my wings in different ways. And I love being closer to my family, and the convenience of being able to see them whenever I want is paramount, especially as the world grows weirder and more frightening every single day. But Indiana will forever be my home. I miss it deeply. It’s the place that raised me.

    And I would kill for just a slice from Jockamo Pizza right about now!