I was born in Berkeley, and grew up in Kensington up in the Berkeley hills. I took a lot of flack for this because everybody thought Kensington was a snotty rich neighborhood. This is a sad misconception, especially for me because Kensington in reality is a small middle class town. Both of my parents worked full time and my brother and I had to share a room in our little two bedroom house up until the day I left for college. Okay, so I wasn't living like Charlie Bucket, but we were definitely far from rich, cut me some slack here.

I was educated all over the Richmond Unified School District. I am a product of the 80s. It was an era of fashion train wrecks and i did my part to make it worse, but I think I came out of it okay. I went to college at UC Irvine, which I knew nothing about when I applied there, except that there was a cute girl in the grade ahead of me who was going there. The party schools like UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego would have nothing to do with me, so I was forced to choose between either UC Santa Cruz, the hippie granola campus or UC Irvine, the campus behind the ultra conservative Orange Curtain. I chose the latter because although the Santa Cruz campus was gorgeous, Irvine had an actual grading system and was hundreds of miles away from the Bay Area. In hindsight, allow me say something about UC Irvine: academically it's a fantastic school, but Orange County is about as exciting as sitting in the desert by yourself in your underpants. And there are truckloads of rich people around. No wonder so many good punk bands come from OC. There is a lot of angst in urban suburbia.