Heros/Villians

The story of Josh Vlahakis for me starts in Junior year advanced algebra. He was a year older and I had never known him before. I sat next to him in the back of the class by two other friends I had previously known before, Killian and Lucas. We all somehow became friends and started a snapchat group chat. I never knew the reason to why we connected when I had not known him aside from seeing him at my junior high. He said in the interview when we had first set the stage for our friendship that he had just decided to mess with whoever he was sitting next near in the class which is a good way to start to describe Josh as a person. He is just carefree and will mess with you if he is comfortable enough around you. From an outsider perspective Josh is the quiet weird kid, but when you get to know him and understand his humor he starts to grow on you. It wasn’t until I had actually got to know him further that I had found out he wasn’t as outgoing with just anybody and was not a “popular” kid in his grade. I thought just by the way he acted around me he was an outgoing and friendly person towards anyone. This is part of the reason why I chose Josh to be my subject for this profile. I don’t know why he liked me and my friends enough to converse with us everyday but he did. He then led me to my second job I’ve ever had at Jewel-Osco, across the street from Carl Sandburg High School. This was because I liked him and he had already worked at Jewel for over a year before I met him. He started as a bagger, then to a cashier, and then to a dairy stocker and a grocery clerk. Josh is one of the hardest workers I know and it is his work ethic that drives him in life. He would walk across the street to Jewel almost everyday after school to start his shift at 3:30 and work until 10. It would be hard for me to even go from 5-10 once a week and he would start right after school everyday. I believe this was because he didn’t like being a home, living with his dad and sister, who he doesn’t talk about much, with his mother absent from his life. This hard work he put in and his commitment to being smart and saving his money at a young age allowed him to buy his first car with a little help from his grandma. He was a naive kid and walked into the dealership with $10k in cash to buy his car. He states many times in our interview how he enjoys working hard with his hands, and I assume this is some sort of therapy to him, rather than having to sit and think in school, which he can’t concentrate on. This is why he dropped out of school to work at Jewel full time.

We discussed this at some length in our interview, the switch from working part time at Jewel and going to community college at Moraine Valley. He wanted to work full time as well as go to school, but his father would not allow that to happen. Since Josh was living at his dad’s house and his dad was also paying for his tuition, Josh had to listen. But then after his first year of school he had dropped most of his classes and bombed the rest. He was not happy in his current situation and was not happy with going to school at the time. All this time his dad didn’t know about his grades and Josh said he felt bad his dad was still paying the tuition. So he told his dad he was gonna take a semester off and he was kicked out. After this he had to live at his grandma’s for a week while figuring out a place to live at 18. This doesn’t happen for many people and of course Josh had no experience in apartment hunting and had no established credit nor good check stubs. He told me he had to put down the first 3 months rent and the security deposit and a half. This is why Josh is the subject for my profile. He is doing what most people his age aren’t. Josh is living entirely independent of anyway, and doing quite well, at age 20. He has his own car, insurance, apartment, savings, while most people his age are going through college off their parents dime or going into massive debt, living either with their parents or in an apartment partially paid for by their parents. He is interesting to me because of his unique situation, at least in the circle of people I know. How he has managed to do this is nothing short of hard work and dedication, something most people of this generation seems to lack, including me sometimes. Josh has been a very successful employee for Jewel-Osco becoming the company’s youngest manager, another reason he is the subject of my profile.

Right before Josh had dropped out of school and moved into his apartment he had applied for the manager program at the Palos Park Jewel. After he was accepted he was transferred to the New Lenox Jewel to be trained for 30 weeks on how to manage the grocery department. He completed that program with flying colors, graduating from it early and got transferred to the Oak Lawn Jewel, his favorite one he's worked at. He said he liked that one so much because of the environment it was in. He loved the controlled chaos of the back room and loved the little bit of “crazy” the customers had compared to the other Jewels he has worked at and over his current Jewel store in Lockport. This interests me because Josh is admittedly not a social person, which is why we’ve only hung out twice and he lives alone and loves it. Josh has a job that requires him to interact with people but he enjoys doing it despite being somewhat of a hermit and preferring to be at home alone and “staying silent” he says. He said most of his day is spent in silence, when he’s not working. Josh is not shy about how much he hates his current store, saying he thinks the people are lazy and idiots and the customers are annoying compared to his past experiences at Jewel. Josh is hoping he can be promoted to an assistant store director or to transfer stores after the holidays when things slow down at Jewel and they make personnel changes based on the sales of stores and what needs to be changed in the district. To back up Josh’s amazing work ethic his store has increased in sales dramatically since he got there and he has a lot to do with it, being the grocery manager and in charge of the store’s largest source of income. Josh has also been burning the midnight oil and working large amounts of overtime to keep the store up to his standards and just to make money, which he enjoys doing and saving a large portion of it to reinvest into a new condo or some sort of fund.

Josh IS like the typical person his age when it comes to planning out his future. He says he just likes to wing things and doesn’t come up with plans ahead of time. He says he doesn’t like to make social plans with people because he just does what he thinks feels right in the moment and doesn’t let outside factors change his mind on what he is going to do for the day. He also says how he makes his store director annoyed with him about how little he plans, not even making a plan for the day of work. But we did talk about some of his vague plans for the future which included owning a condo for himself and investing his savings pretty heavily into stocks and other various accounts in order to make his money work for him. Josh is a very cerebral person, saying his dad told him he’s smarter than lets on, which he and I agree with. There are deep rooted causes for this he says and it has to do with his past and a very important number to him.

Josh had mentioned in the interview how he went to therapists before for having weird behavior and had been on medication before, even mentioning the word “psychotic” popping up in conversations with his therapist. He says the reason for this is because of deep rooted causes in his family life at an early age. He said the medication didn’t help him and he wanted to get off of it to feel like himself again. He describes the relationship with his mother, or lack thereof, for some of the problems in his life mentally. He doesn’t let these conquer him though, saying he is currently happy in life and wouldn’t do much to improve on what he has now. Josh has done some things to alter his appearance that he says helped him a lot when he was struggling with problems earlier in life.

Josh has both recently gotten a tattoo of the number 11 on his chest and has shaved his head. The shaved head is a sharp contrast of Josh from high school when he grew out his curly hair for a year before shaving it all off in favor of being bald. He says this change is more than just physical, that a bald head has helped him be more confident in himself and helps with everyday problems he would encounter before, saying he just feels overall happier and can get more sleep after deciding to go bald. The number 11 tattoo is there as a number that appears many times in his life. He was born on November 11th and he hadn’t seen his mother in 11 years at the time he got the tattoo. Josh has taken his uncommon attitude toward the rest of the world and used it to help him figure out his personal struggles, citing these two material changes in his life have help him live happier and realize he doesn’t need material things in his life. He just wants to be at a spot that makes him happy and he is content. He mentions not caring about social status or material things, or even about relationships. Josh is content on his own, which is something not so common anymore in a world of social media and people have become as social as it gets, always being connected with each by way of the internet. Although most material things don’t excite him, he still does have a passion that some in the US would still consider unusual.

Josh is maybe the biggest soccer nerd I know although there aren’t many of them in the United States. When Josh isn’t working his current passion is soccer, specifically European soccer. I’m a fan as well and like to keep up to date, but Josh is on a whole new level. He says he can list off many odd facts about teams in the 5 major European leagues, including the players’ numbers, number of goals they scored, the results of the weekend’s matches from almost any major league and so on. This passion is what keeps Josh going when he is not at work and he makes sure to wake up early to catch all the action for the day on the weekends. This unique sport to like in America is another reason Josh’s personality has drawn me to him for this profile. Josh also has said he is starting to get into the UFC and boxing to watch and even tried kickboxing at a time, which he said was a lot of fun and a stress reliever he might try out again. Again these are outside of the box from “normal” sports people in America like to watch on a regular basis, again showing Josh’s “oddball” personality when it comes to things he enjoys.

Josh as a person is carefree, independent, successful, and funny, but his personality can have some dark hidden corners to it he would prefer not to come out, and has done a good job at wrapping these up in hard work and physical changes to his body. His story is inspiring to me because of the level he has reached at his job and his personal life. He is successful at work and has done many things that people our age wish we could have right now, but that doesn’t get to him. He doesn’t care he has accomplished those things so early in life. He does his own thing, without a plan, winging it as he goes along, but it’s all falling into place for him, under the guidance of hard work.