*This is continuing a series of me looking back at how I got to be where I am, what I went through, and where I’m going. It’s terribly navel-gazing, so feel free to skip if it doesn’t interest you.*

By early 2004, I had completely immersed myself in the “adult experience,” as I like to call it. By that I mean “I realized that sometimes the things you want to do seem impossible to achieve, so let’s get drunk and be aimless.” I never had a HUGE problem with where I grew up. Suburban western Pennsylvania was pretty devoid of culture, and that forced my friends and I to go out and find it. We would go on journey’s around the tri-state area to find rare movies, see shows, and meet different people. It felt like a safe place to come back to during summers in college. We had a nice house, I had some money in my pocket, and all seemed well because I had friends around me.

The problem with coming back home after college, I quickly realized, is that I was one of very few people that did so. So many of my friends had moved on to different parts of the country, my mom had downgraded to an apartment (from other issues), and now here I was, still at the same job I had in college. The glaring boringness of my area was brought into pretty clear view, and I hated it. My fun came from my friends, not home, and now I didn’t know where I was.

Then I saw an ad in the paper for a theater group looking for people to do improv, and I jumped in.