Is this even real?

Alright then, so when I started this blog I wrote that I would be documenting my departure from the harbor that has been my life in Winnemucca. Well, finally, here is a post about that. For those of you who don't know, I am going to graduate next Thursday, and tomorrow is my last day of school. I haven't honestly been that excited about it. It's not that I'm dreading it or anything, just the opposite in fact. I am looking forward to it more than any single date in my entire life thus far. The gravity of it all just hasn't hit me yet. I still feel like it's ages away. I really can't believe that I won't walk through the doors into the glass hallway at Lowry next August. I can't believe I won't have soccer practice all fall. For that matter, I can't believe I'm done with high school sports. For four years my life has been dominated by Albert M. Lowry High School and I can't imagine it no longer being so.
The weight of it all is hitting me even as a write this. Suddenly everything just seems so dark and cold. I'm scared. As much as all my friends and family, relatives and mentors tell me how proud they are, I feel as if I have wasted so many opportunities. So many things I could have done have slipped through my fingers. And now I crouch in the starting blocks, awaiting the signal to start running into my own life, the life I will create for myself. And I'm even more scared. What if I'm not making the right choices? What if I cannot handle college? What if my course load is too heavy? What if I fail, what happens then? Where do I go after college? I have scattered ideas about graduate school, the Peace Corps, high ranking jobs. What if I can't do any of those? What if I am aiming too high? Should I just be content with a family and a good job in a nice town? But there has to be more than that. I want to travel, live in a city, write articles that change people's lives, help people who would normally never even knew I existed. But can I do all of these things? Should I? I feel like all of these things are going to rush up on me just as fast as graduation has, and again I won't be ready.
This morning my mom (oh God, what am I going to do without her? I can't do this...) warned me that things were sneaking up on me. She meant I needed to start writing thank you cards and letters, but she was right on such a higher level. You're right Mom, things are sneaking up on me, and I feel like I need to hide from them just a little longer...
So there that is...

You would think that with them working at a school they could read...

In the latest edition of Just Outside the Harbor I would like to embark with my readers on a relentless tirade into the idiocy that I encountered while filling out a survey on my high school's website. The survey, titled "Lowry Educational Mission and Beliefs Survey" sounded quite important, so being the highly opinionated individual that I am, I decided to fill it out. With the first few questions I knew my insanely sarcastic psyche was in for a real treat. The second question, for example, listed literacy as one of the 9 goals of high school education I was to rank in importance. Now, perhaps I am mistaken, but I was under the impression that literacy was one of the implied goals of any educational program. And shouldn't students be able to read before even entering high school? Just to be safe, I ranked it number two after "Job readiness", a choice I was soon to regret.
Later on in the survey, I was asked the same question twice ("7. Albert Lowry High School provides a safe environment for the students and faculty," and "9. I feel safe at Lowry High School,"), posed with a question asking what the overall purpose of the high school setting should be (strangely, "learning" and "education" were absent as choices, replaced instead by "safety", "respect", and "discipline"), and confronted with misspellings ("12. Albert Lowry High School provides adequate programs for giftd and talented students," [emphasis mine] to which I only wish "apparently not" was a choice I could choose to reply with).
Now, to be fair, I really have no idea who wrote this survey. It could have very well been a student who in all actuality really didn't know how to read very well, and was therefore bitter over the system having failed him. This student may then have composed this survey and purposely added "Literacy" as a goal of high school education to mock that which he hated most in the world. He also may have intentionally chosen to ignore the spell check button. Somehow I doubt all of this though. Somehow, deep in my cynical mind, I have a feeling that someone working for our school district, someone being paid with our tax dollars to educate our children, wrote this and published it on the school's website. And the powers that be approved it. This probably really isn't that big of a deal at all, or even as funny as I feel it is, but honestly, I'm tired and can't sleep and it sounded like a good idea for a blog to me.
So there that is...

txt msg spk (Or, if you can't read this you must be old)

k so i dsided i rly h8 wen ppl use txt msg spk in evryday sentences or evn in txt msgs. i mean, u hve 160 ltrs y cant u put in vwls? & propr pnctuation! & cptlize ltrs! & jst cuz a # snds lk a wrd dsnt mn u cn use it as 1. it mks me :(...
so thrs tht...