I was following this tutorial, but I am not getting the mesh to work correctly with subdivision surface.
I was using the boolean modifier to cut my mesh, and was stressed that subdivision surface was causing my mesh's surface/geometry to be warped after applying that boolean modifier.
The problem was that I was using the exact solver instead of fast(in bool modifier), and choosing the fast solver fixed the geometry warping, presumably because the exact method was causing some imperfections that I made when trying to align two objects.