<p>Eh. So I'm going to be a high school junior starting on the 27th of August, and I feel nothing short of pessimistic. In the back of my mind is that underlying scourge, a trace of the plague which screams, "Why in the heck are you trying so hard when you know you're not going to get in?" Who gives the care about my stats? They're yucky, nothing spectacular. I'm generic. My aspirations are abstract when in comparison to those of my peers. And though I live in a small town where the system of school board politics is really dysfunctional, I have been in the process of trying to make something good. I'm funding our school debate team this year with the money I earned this summer, as our school board won't lend us a dime. I'm led to thinking that won't get us anywhere. I'd like to hope that maybe as a team, we could grow powerful and perhaps make it to regionals/nationals/somewhere good, but what difference would that make? A shroud of apathy takes over me, along with the thought that everything I have ever done will eventually be in vain.</p>
<p>What got the neighbor's kid into Harvard in 2002 surely won't give me a boost into wherever I want to go in 2009. </p>
<p>Maybe it was in that higher power's plan for me to just go to community college or some state school. </p>
<p>Maybe it was in His plan that I stay local. I mean, wouldn't it be really bad of a person to just follow his or her dreams, provided that they are achieved, when his or her mother is currently dying of cancer (as is my situation)?</p>