I was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains. From an early age, I had interests in both the arts and the sciences. I had a talent for mathematics but dreamed of becoming an artist and musician. I did not realize at the time that mathematics and creativity pair very nicely, and my path to becoming a mathematician turned out to be a nonstandard one. After a rough junior year of high school, I transferred to an adult high school located on the top floor of Old Knoxville High School, the same building that my father and grandfather had once attended. I graduated a few months early and spent the next year washing dishes at a BBQ restaurant and then stocking auto parts for a warehouse in 'Mechanicsville'. Around that time, I fell in love with number theory. In my spare time, I would contemplate the irrationality/transcendence of pi, the distribution of prime numbers, properties of the Riemann zeta function, and other number theoretic topics. I wanted to devote my life to this passion.