As a child, I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.
My high school coach was a big Clemson fan, and I told him, 'As long as I'm the starting quarterback here, I'm not going to lose to South Carolina.'
I was writing and cartooning and writing short stories from grade school on.
In middle school, I started to draw, and my pencil sketches were huge. They were these 4ft by 3ft drawings, and I got a lot of attention for that, so that was very validating. But I didn't start cartooning until I was in college.
The journalism school helped me develop writing skills, and I had been enjoying cartooning from a very young age. My interest in puppetry, however, came much later.
I did cartoons for four high school publications and then and there decided I wanted to spend my life at the drawing board.
I went straight from high school to 'Gossip Girl,' and both were very structured, scheduled environments, so I never had freedom to explore and carve my own path.
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
I would go to the store, I would buy cassette tapes, and I would read the liner notes and sort of subconsciously creating the connections between the rappers that I was reading and the poets that they were teaching us in school.
I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell... who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
When I was in elementary school, I was a big fan of the zip-off pants that could be turned into shorts. The Delia's catalog used to be my bible.
I used to sit in bed at night and flip through design-school catalogs. I found out that Parsons accepted a small number of high school juniors, so I applied my sophomore year and got in.
When I was in middle school, some of my so-called friends found a catalogue ad I did for Superman pajamas. They made as many copies as they could and pasted them up all over school.
I played American Legion ball starting when I was 14. But I didn't catch until I was 17. I was 75-3 as a high school pitcher, but it was like everybody knew that I was supposed to be a catcher. When the scouts would come around, and I was pitching, they'd make me take infield practice so the scouts could watch me throw.
You can't go to medical school and come out and be like, 'I'm going to be a dog catcher.' That would be so pointless.
I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'
'School of Rock' is fun. Hopefully, I've fleshed it out with a few catchy songs and kept the spirit of the original movie.
In high school, I had to hide my comic book side, my nerd side from the civilian world so they wouldn't categorize me. They would try to marginalize me for what I like. I tried to give it up, believe me. I tried to kick the habit. But there's too much I liked about it to give it up completely.
I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?
