{"id":382,"date":"2008-04-12T08:14:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-12T12:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/?p=382"},"modified":"2008-05-08T21:42:59","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T02:42:59","slug":"act-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/2008\/04\/12\/act-time\/","title":{"rendered":"ACT time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shannon is taking her ACTs this morning. It feels like a bigger deal these days than it was when I was in high school (For those outside this area, the ACTs are like the SATs.) Of course, when I was in high school I had no plans to go to college so I didn&#8217;t really care about them. Oh I took the and everything but I didn&#8217;t try very hard and my results reflected that. What can I say? I was an idiot back then. School wasn&#8217;t important to me at all and I definitely paid for that line of thinking with years of struggle trying to find my footing.<\/p>\n<p>All I cared about back then was hanging out with my friends. I wasn&#8217;t a bad student or anything &#8211; a B average with the occasional C or a dreaded D once (Math you know. I still suck at it.) I did well in language and arts classes. Not so well in Maths and sciences. And I wasn&#8217;t a &#8220;problem&#8221; student either. I only ever ditched once, got caught and learned my lesson.<\/p>\n<p>But looking back, I realize I didn&#8217;t really take the whole school thing seriously. It was all about getting there and seeing my friends and having fun. It didn&#8217;t occur to me that you could take it seriously AND have fun. I dunno. I think I chafed a lot at restrictions my parents kept setting on me. Not that I blame them. I caused them a lot of grief. Was always grounded. At that time, my friends were more important to me than getting busted for sneaking out to hang with them.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I didn&#8217;t mean to analyze my high school issues here. But it is interesting to watch Shannon go through high school. I always had some idea that she&#8217;d have her fair share of troublesome moments throughout high school. Hell, I had enough people get their rocks off telling me to &#8220;just wait until she&#8217;s a teenager&#8221; until I came to almost dread it. I think that sucks because at 16 &#8211; three years a teenager &#8211; she&#8217;s still a level-headed, smart girl. Not a podperson in sight. I try to give her opportunities to go out with her friends, but she rarely does. Her friends don&#8217;t seem to go out much either.<\/p>\n<p>Not that there&#8217;s much for them to do around here. But they could think of something. I just asked her why she never goes out even though I&#8217;d let her and she replied, &#8220;Because none of my friends like to go out.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know what to make of that. The concept is alien to me.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;m not going to complain \ud83d\ude42 And she takes high school a lot more seriously than I ever did. I&#8217;m probably a little to blame for that. I didn&#8217;t want her making my mistakes and wasting her potential and all those other cliched parental arguments. Because I see now, that my parents were right. I&#8217;m not a stupid person and I wasn&#8217;t stupid in high school either &#8211; but I did waste potential and I didn&#8217;t &#8220;apply myself&#8221; like I should have. I feel like it took me several years *after* high school to figure out what to do with my life.<\/p>\n<p>Whoa. What an analytical post eh? Anyway, the kidlet just left for the test, all bright-eyed (considering it&#8217;s a Saturday and she&#8217;s up earlier than she&#8217;d like) and ready. I hope she rocks it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shannon is taking her ACTs this morning. It feels like a bigger deal these days than it was when I was in high school (For those outside this area, the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34],"tags":[54],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}