2007 is a weird time for me. My life has always been split between academic and artistic endeavors. In high school, I always got good grades - which if you want to goof off a lot is a great cover. Teachers will let you get away with a most anything if you do well in their classes. Most of the art I made in high school though was stuff - videos and such - that were class assignments. Invariably these always turned out weird and surreal. One German assignment I had was to make a soap opera. What my friends and I produced was so nonsensical (one of the rules was that each character in the video had to say 100 words in German...in ours, as each person hit their 100th word, an Indian shot and killed them with an arrow) that it caused our teacher to tell future classes that their projects had to make narrative sense. My friends and I sometimes made videos on our own, the most notable of which was a longform improv piece called Crooked Cops, which truly embodied the phrases "mildly amusing" and "veiled homophobia", and which, in retrospect, oddly presaged Reno 911. So, up to the age of 18, these two strands of my life - the artistic and the academic - had been rather heavily entwined.

In college, I still only dabbled in filmic pursuits. My main project was a casio-pop group named harm (originally h.a.r.m. or sadly, Holistic Analog Rental Meat - which is an MST3K reference). I met my music partner Kyle in my freshman year. We bonded over a love of The Silver Jews, after I told him my story of how I got in a physical fight with my girlfriend in high school when she purposely pulled my dub of The Arizona Record out of the cassette machine and started to unwind it. Playing in a band though gave me a lot of experience performing live. We released a cassette our freshman year, a double cassette our junior year, and in 2005, an EP of stuff we recorded our senior year (and just recently a song that will probably be on the third Unicorn Mountain CD). We also played CMJ and MacRock twice. A lot of the time in harm the logistical stuff was on my shoulders; and as I was young, I didn't handle it well and was kind of a giant prick. Ask me about the CMJ incident in person if you want to hear about it. Anyway, the only "film" I made in college was a bunch of Sketch Show-like vignettes which I projected behind us when we opened up for Of Montreal.

After college, Kyle moved off to grad school, and I decided to take some time off before doing the same. The first six months were great: I was still dating the woman I had met my senior year, I had a dumbass job at the library that allowed me to fuck around online for hours and hours a day, playing chess and scrabble with my friends, and because I worked at Pitt, I was allowed to take classes for free. So basically, I was like that guy who graduates high school, but always comes back to visit and hang out with the seniors. So, I started to slowly drift into a monumental clusterfuck of existential bullshit, growing more and more full of dread for the future, radiating anxiety like a blackhole spits out Hawking radiation. My relationship started going to shit; artistically I was going nowhere. Although I didn't think about this shit at the time, in retrospect, it wasn't the most fantastic situation.

Part of my future anxiety had to do with a direction in life. My undergraduate degree was in philosophy. I got into philosophy because I took an existentialism class my first semester and fell in love with Nietzsche and Kant and we read Goethe and Tolstoy and it was a great class. But, unbeknownst to me, Pitt is a deeply-analytic school and really doesn't do the interesting or worthwhile philosophy. A Heidegger class in my sophomore year kept me going, but as a naïve initiate, I didn't really know what continental or analytic philosophy was and never made the distinction between the different strategies, so Heidegger was the same as Donald Davidson - it was philosophy, just philosophy. I just knew that some of it - what turned out to be continental (and that's really just a codeword for "non-analytic") seemed great - and some of it - the analytic stuff - didn't make a lot of sense. But that's what I was taught, so I ran with it. And when it came time to apply to grad schools, I only knew about analytic shit, and so I only applied to analytic schools. And my interests obviously didn't align with theirs, and so I was rejected, further adding to the existential shitstorm.

So, this is 2003. My girlfriend finally had the sense to end our slowly unraveling relationship; I had been rejected from most grad schools (except NYU's interdisciplinary MA program, which I would have had to pay for), I had tried an abortive music project (where I got to know Mark, away from being my friend's brother-in-law [that's how I met him]) and reality basically had the tenor of a mediocre Garfield strip. But then my friend John introduced me to The Art of News crowd - a number of smart, interesting and funny guys that got together and whatever ideas they had, they just did. This was incredibly inspiring; I mean, if one of them had an idea - to film something, to make an event, whatever - and everyone was into it, they just did it. As I go to know them, the show they were making - a satirical and surreal local news show - was just ending. And a number of them thought I should make a show. So the idea was planted in my head, and my old roommate and good friend Luke suggested that Mark would be a good partner to make a show with since he had the same sense of humor and liked a lot of the same media as myself.

And so we did it. We just started coming up with ideas and writing. It helped that I had hired Mark as my student worker at the library and so while avoiding work, we could brainstorm together and write and even film sometimes. But really, it was that simple. Once you overcome that inertia, you just start taking ideas and doing something with them.

Anyway, I applied to grad schools again, still not knowing anything about the realities of studying philosophy, but Temple - the petit bourgeois of analytic schools - accepted me because in my confusion, it looked like I wanted to study Donald Davidson and experimental fiction. Since they were a school that dealt with analytic aesthetics, I seemed to be the perfect student. But already by the time I got there - August 2004 - I was already moving away from that kind of philosophy for good as I began to read the really interesting stuff - Foucault, to begin with. This continued for the next few years as I moved further and further away from the philosophical orthodoxy. Writing weird essays that balanced precariously on the edge between philosophy and literature. And most of the professors were not happy with me. And so I got more and more belligerent in my criticism of the orthodoxy. Thanks mostly to my favorite professor - my mentor? - who turned me on to Bourdieu and complexity theory - I slowly began to re-imagine what philosophy would look like in terms of these things, and eventually was so out of step with the program, that I was "asked" to leave.

While I love philosophy, I cannot stand the way it is studied and produced in this country. And that's what I meant by 2007 being a weird year for me - it's the year I decided to dedicate most of my time to aesthetic pursuits. I love philosophy, but I refuse to eat shit to practice it, and I refuse to eat shit until I get tenure. I've learned the lessons of The Art of News crowd too well. Although I love teaching, it's not worth it to go through all of the bullshit of professional philosophy. So, at the moment, I am concentrating solely on writing comedy. Freelancing when I can; working on producing Wrestling Team so that we can have a budget; making videos for websites that will pay me; adjunct teaching; studying complexity theory and Bourdieu in my spare time. And that's my life. As happy as I was in grad school, I am inordinately better off at the moment. I am willing to eat shit to produce Wrestling Team, and that's how I know that this is what I want to do.

We'll see how quickly my tune changes when I can no longer pay my rent.