There was a lot I didn’t know about how people lived until I moved to Atlanta.

In Maine, the students I taught grew up the way I did. They went to public school. Their first experience of music lessons might have been when I became their voice teacher, even if they were sixteen or seventeen years old. They worked in the summers in restaurants, hotels, or retail stores, collecting hourly wages while serving the tourists who visited the seacoast in droves. College was accessible, but not easily.

Then, in my early twenties, I started teaching music lessons on the campus of an expensive, exclusive private school. My students ranged from itty-bitty yet already high-achieving five-year-olds to teenagers picking up their second or third instrument amidst a wide array of extracurriculars and other opportunities that my teenage self could have only dreamed about — if I had even known they existed.

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Years ago, I moved to a new city with only the slimmest of job prospects (that was crazy decision number one).

I managed to find a part-time, temporary gig as an assistant teacher of music classes for older adults. We were teaching them how to play keyboard instruments, but the goal was really to sell them fancy home organs so complex that their array of buttons and dials resembled the cockpit of a 747 (the price was similar to that of an aircraft, too).

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My Brother, My Brother, & Me, a long-running podcast from brothers Justin, Travis, & Griffin McElroy, bills itself as “an advice show for the modern era” (Justin always pronounces it “modren”).

But this is not an advice show. It is a cleverly executed improv comedy show. The brothers field listener-submitted requests for advice along with selected Yahoo! Answers questions, offering deeply outlandish solutions to the problems presented. For instance, a question from a server in a restaurant about how to accommodate a guest who orders something that isn’t on the menu leads to speculation that perhaps the guest is a ghost who must return every week to the same restaurant until he is given his requested meal and is then gratefully “banished to the hell dimension” in a puff of vapor.

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In my early twenties, when I was trying to figure out my life, I briefly pursued the idea of moving to Boston, which is just over an hour from the small town on the southernmost coast of Maine where I grew up.

On a hot summer day (yes, they have them in New England), I drove down to an outlying commuter station and took the T into Cambridge, where I met with a really cool and interesting young woman and her roommate. They were looking for a third. I remember that the monthly rent for one room of this shared three-bedroom apartment was more than I ended up paying for my first one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta, which was a palace compared to these potential digs.

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