On a random April day, I was sitting in the cafeteria, talking to my friend Nicole, just like every other day, when I felt something hit my ear.  I looked on the ground, and there it was: a raisin.  My immediate thought was, what idiot just threw a raisin at me.  I didn’t get mad or anything, I just kind of laughed about it, and decided to keep the raisin.  I still have it in my bookbag.  I figured it wasn’t personal.  Honestly, things get thrown around a lot at lunch.  Another time a girl almost got taken out by a hamburger bun.  I’d like to think this raisin changed my life for the better, although most people would laugh at the idea of that.  But after that raisin, my senior year went from kind of not great, to probably the best year of my life.  As silly as it may sound, maybe that raisin served as a wake-up call.  I was wasting my last few months of high school with the thoughts many other seniors share.  Thinking I hate this town, these people, this place, I want to get out of here.  I’m so tired of worrying about what random object is going to make its way to my lunch table.   I realized that I needed to start enjoying these last moments, these teachers who taught me so many things beyond science and math, these people I’ve been going to school with since I was five years old that I might never see again after high school.  There’s so much more to high school than graduating.  Take chances.  Ask that boy you’ve been crushing on all year to prom.  It could turn into something beautiful.  Don’t waste away these four years, the years nobody will remember the second you graduate.  Nobody cares if you screw up, embarrass yourself, it’s the nature of high school.  When you stop taking everything so serious, suddenly high school becomes so much more fun.  At the end of the day, it’s just high school.  It might not be like the movies, it might not even be close.  You have to find the good in it regardless of that.  The good in every raisin and every rejection.  Every failed grade, every late assignment.  All the friends that weren’t and the relationships that could have been.  You’ll look back and you won’t care anymore.  So learn to take risks.  Learn to stand up for yourself.  Learn to appreciate the people that are here for everything they are.  It won’t be perfect.  High school never was going to be.  But it’s not about being perfect, it’s about the fun you can have if you let yourself.