Final Blog

The things that are important to me are my family and friends. For most of them I would give up anything. I get very close to my friends, especially my best friends. It is going to be sad that most of them will be going away to college and I will not be able to see them for a while. 
The other thing is family. I do not think I would have gotten anywhere without my mother. She is the one that has been pushing me the whole time through school and even in soccer. I was proud to make her happy when I handed her every single accptance letter from all the colleges I applied to. She is brutally honest and will tell me how it is, even if I do not agree with her most of the time. My mother has been great to me and I want to make her the proudest mother in the whole world.
The one thing that I do not have yet but is important to me is my future. I am going to keep pushing myself until I succeed. I have always told myself that failure is not an option and is not taken lightly at anytime. I would like to make it clear that I would not be this ambitious without my family and friends. I want to be able to share my success in the future with those who have been there for me through it all. I take a look back in the past and the memories I have are everyone telling me to keep pushing yourself and when you think you have gone as far as you can, you are only half way there.
Through my high school career, I did not find my grades to be of much importance. I found that as long as I got into all the schools I wanted to, I would be fine. Now that I am coming out of high school, I feel it is important to buckle down and start working hard. This is the final level of school for me and I do not want to ruin anything. I will be playing soccer at the college I will be attending, I hope to make the team and possibly be a starter. Soccer is important to me, but I am the type of person that thinks with the glass half full. If I do not make this team, it may benefit me in my grades in college. College should be a great experience and I hope to make new friends that will keep my mind off the ones I miss. Don't get me wrong, I will never forget the ones I leave behind, including you Mr. Mannion, I am going to miss you!

Courage

 When ever I hear the word courage, I really have to stop and think about what it actually is. I tend to get confused about its real definition because I think of courage as a word that has many definitions and meanings. I am actually glad that there is a blog about courage because now I get to express what I feel that courage is all about. And maybe and I can finally figure out what courage is. So I will begin to explain what courage is, in my honest opinion.
     Is courage chasing a bank robber down the street until he is caught? To be honest, I do not believe that this is a courageous act. You are putting yourself in danger to catch a criminal just so you can become a local hero. If he stole your money and you wanted to get it back, I can consider that courageous because you have a reason to chase him down. Other than that, this act wouldn't fall under the category of courage. Is courage shooting down an enemy plane from a hideout on a mountaintop? Now this act, in my opinion, is very courageous. I believe this because you must be very talented to shoot down a plane like that and you must have tons of courage to accomplish something like that. There are many things that people consider courageous in their eyes, but others may find it to be the opposite. These two acts fall under that category because they can go either way. It is just the way people look at it.
     Courage can be other things as well. A physically challenged person making her way down the street is a courageous act in my opinion. Some people are very embarrassed to have a disability and they tend to hideout from others so they are not made fun of. It hurts to say this, but people sometimes do make fun of others who have disabilities. I think it is very wrong for them to do that because it was not the persons choice to be physically challenged. Is courage a father working a twelve hour day in a horrible job to pay the rent and feed his children? This is one of the most courageous things you could ever do in my opinion. You are doing whatever you can to put food on the table for the one's that you love. You would rather not work all day, but you have too in order to survive. And the fact that the job is horrible shows your courage right there. It is a horrible job and most likely doesn't pay that much. But you keep on working so you can feed your children and pay rent. There's nothing more courageous than that.
     A courageous person does not have to just be an adult. There are kids out there that have so much courage. You may even find a child who is more courageous than an adult. Animals are also courageous. The example of the father working twelve hours a day falls in the same category as an animal. The mother/father animal has to go out there and find food for it's babies so they can survive. So the answer to the question is that anybody can have courage.
     Courage is when you show no fear, and are willing to put others first so that things are made right. Courage permits one to face danger and difficulties without fear. Do I know anyone in my life whom I'd define as courageous? In my opinion, the most courageous people in this world are people in the military. They show no fear and risk their lives for our country to make things right. I can't see what would top that, and I am pretty sure that others agree with me.

Advice to a Younger me

Giving advice to myself two or three years ago I think is tough. to do because of how much I enjoyed my life over the last few years, and I do not think there is anything I regret doing or regret not doing. I mean I feel like I have not learned that much that would change things in my life. I have never made a decision in the last few years that I really had to think about. I am a safe kind of guy and I do not really like to change things and I like to keep things the same and not change the status quo. The one thing I know I would tell myself is that freshmen year make sure that I buy lunch everyday. My freshmen I had free lunch the entire time and I HAD NO IDEA. I found out THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL. I was devastated when I found out. I didn't buy lunch freshmen year because in 8th grade I bought lunch once and they charged me for two some reason and it got me really upset and I didn't since that. So me having free lunch my freshmen year and knowing it would have been the greatest thing ever.
With the social groups I think that I have made the right choices. I really do not care who you are I have no problem being your friend. Popularity does not mean anything to me so I think I made the right choices and that I would just tell myself to keep doing what your doing. Nothing traumatic has happened in my life at this point so there is no advice that I would have o get to myself except just to be ready because at any moment anything can happen. Academically though I would have to give a lot of advice like what classes to take and which one to take, espically my senior year because I made many mistakes. But the main advice I would have to give would be just to make sure that I do all of my work that I am assigned on time because I have a big problem with getting my work in and getting it done on time.
The other advice I would give myself would have to do with sports. I would tell myself to become goalie my freshmen year instead of playing the field because of how much less running I would have to do and how much more fun soccer would have done. I also would have told myself to play basketball. Even though I am not that good at it, it is still a lot of fun and I know I would have a blast playing it. And because we did not have volleyball my freshmen year I would have told myself to do tennis because now I really like everyone on the team and I know I would of have playing that as well.
Also I would have done the amazing race every year of high school and not just this year.