So I discovered the problems. With the UART pins, I think the problem is because I'm using USB to power the nove, but the UART chips seem to shut down if they're in use by USB. As for softwareserial, I tried doing a brand new really simple code for and it seemed to have given me non-gibberish values. On top of that, the servo also didn't freak out. However, as soon as I added the code to initialize the servo, THEN it started to spaz. So apparently I can't do both servo and softwareserial at the same time, at least not at 38400bps.
Any other suggestions? Or should I just switch to i2c?