Blog
Asking questions can lead you to new places. Writing helps bring you to answers. And more questions.
Here, I’ve collected writings on a number of topics. Sometimes they’ve been published elsewhere, and other times they’re just for this blog.
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“Can you imagine not working?” my dad asked me yesterday. We’d just loaded hand tools, power tools back into my dad’s van, with its hardly latching doors and cracked windshield. We were driving away from the job, a home in great disrepair. Not a glamorous, forty-some thousand dollar kitchen remodel, but it was work. “Well,”…
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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 43 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the…
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Kurt Vonnegut, in a commencement speech at Syracuse University in 1994, recalled a bit of wisdom about being an artist. One of Vonnegut’s high school teachers told him: “What is it artists do? … They do two things,” he said. “First, they admit they can’t straighten out the whole universe. And then second, they make at least…
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The Sporting Life
I’m not the biggest sports fan out there. But I like a challenge, to get to test my abilities in areas that, let’s say, are not my strongest. So when The Reporter-Times asked me to cover some spring sports, I said yes without thinking twice. It wasn’t like I went in completely ignorant of sports.…
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Lara Parker: BuzzFeed staff lister extraordinaire
As a staff writer at BuzzFeed, Lara Parker spends her days figuring out how to make list articles—”listicles”— that will go viral. And she loves it. Just last year, though, she was a recent UIndy grad trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. I was working at a PR agency at…
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Somebody else’s problem
I was walking around Lowe’s with this homeless guy. Let’s call him Randy. He had long, stringy hair and a gaunt face, and his accent was Kentuckian-ish. We were at Lowe’s because his flashlight was dead. It was a small, blue LED light, the size and shape of a toilet paper tube. The problem was…
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Graduation
I want to say “Thank you” to every single person who has wished me well and congratulated me. The kind words over the past few days have been countless. Really, it has been a long journey, and I would not have been able to do it without the support of friends, family and faculty. Thank…
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God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut
What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once, and switch from one opinion or subject to another one so quickly, that a discussion between…
James Figy 