Time is a deceitful prick. You hear your best-friend-from-high-school-who-you-haven’t-talked-to-in-five-years-and-come-to-think-of-it-you-really-don’t-know-why’s baby brother just started his freshman year. You know, the one you dropped off at kindergarten for his mom that one time she was sick and you offered because you were part of the family and now you can’t even remember what color the front door of their house was painted.

Like I said, time is a little shit. In our minds, we never age at all. Time is ours. And then you hear something like that. And it’s basically like someone throwing a 7-lb. brick at your temple. Time goes by faster than Usain Bolt, whether we like it or not. One day, you’re balls-deep in a panic attack over that calculus test tomorrow that you definitely should’ve been studying for last night instead of going to Coree’s house to watch A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila followed by a rousing episode of The Hills but whoops. The next, you’re watching the Golden Dome fade away in your rearview mirror, diploma in hand, tears in full swing.

Time. What a guy. We know him intimately. We know how very short and limited he is. Yet we still squander the shit out of him. We graduate from college with a degree we didn’t want, move on to a job we have no real interest in, marry someone decent enough, and proceed to live out our days in this self-created bubble of mundanity. And why? For what? For whom?

I decided I’m not going that route. Fuck it. Time may be a bitch, but I promise I am bitchier. So, fuck it. I have a marketing degree from the University of Notre Dame. And what am I doing with it? I’m working at a fitness studio. I’m tutoring kids for the ACT. I’m writing a blog. I’m taking classes in the art of comedy—seriously, stand-up, sketch, the whole nine yards. In short, I’m doing absolutely nothing with my degree. And I love it. If you had told me at 18 that my 24-year-old self lives in Los Angeles running the front desk of a fitness center, hoarding ScanTrons, writing a random blog, and taking comedy classes at the local theater, I would’ve choked on my own ass and died. I would have seen failure.

Teenagers, am I right? Because that’s the thing about failure. We all have varying definitions of what it means to fail, but it all boils down to the same thing. We fail when we let our parents down, when we let our boss down, when we let our kids down. When we let ourselves down. We fail when we’re not happy. That’s it. Right there. That’s the whole shebang. We fail when we’re not happy. It’s that simple and that complex. How do you avoid failure? Well, you make yourself happy (not like that, you rascals). How do you make yourself happy? Now, there’s a question for the ages.

I don’t know how you do it. Maybe you buy a tricycle. Maybe you throw some glitter in the air and sing Purple Rain. I don’t know. For me, though, it all came down to one alarmingly simple concept: doing what I wanted to fucking do. I hated my job after college. So, get this. I quit. I hated living in the glorified high school cafeteria that is Grand Rapids, Michigan. Solution? I left. I want to write. I want to do comedy. Can you guess what comes next? You got it! I write. I do comedy. I go to shows, I go to classes. I do what I want. It sounds so simple, but the process of getting there was incredibly calamitous and murky and overall heinous. Deciding to leave your life as you know it. Growing the balls to leave your family and your home (mostly, your precious dog, Baxter, who is the cutest, most angelic creature on the entire face of the planet and without whom you cannot breathe so you honestly do not know how you are surviving at this point). It’s not for the faint of gonads, let me tell you. But if you’re thinking about it, if you’re looking for a sign to tell you to smash that KPMG coffee mug to pieces on the floor of your preposterously small cubicle, walk out of that place and chuck up the deuces, then let this be it.

Join us out here. What we lack in number we make up for in unspeakably dark humor and self-deprecation. We’ll show you the ropes. So, come on in. The water’s great.