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Epic Story - Part 1

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I've got a personal story. I'd like to share it and think it has value to just about anybody, however, it's not worth telling without including some of the honest, real-life, nitty-gritty details, and it will be kinda long. Not worth the time investment or worth revealing personal facts if no one will read it. Also don't want to spam the forum with something no one cares about. I would call the story sad, disappointing, and cynical; but also very inspiring, a little funny (in a weird way), and with a happy ending...
 
Looking for 10 people to say they'd like to follow it, post here. Maybe we can just PM if there's low interest. Thanks!
 
PS yes it relates to my new avatar and signature ;)
 

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Part 2: The Setup

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There are three things you should know about me before this story progresses:

1. i am not religious;
2. my family has been in pieces for a long time;
3. my friends are awesome but very rarely able to help.

You could classify me as a headstrong; i'd rather throw my shoulders into a door than admit it's locked. A lot of that stems from having none of the support that most people rely on; everything i am comes from sheer internal conviction. I spent 9 of my first 18 years writing a book about a man much like me. Here is his introduction:
 
"His parents were never known, his surname and the legacy of his blood gone—he had no family, no heritage, no religion, no allegiance. He simply was. And he was named Morgan, for a note was attached to his cradle bearing only the word."
 
Morgan,
meaning,
"of the sea."
 

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The story begins in October 2009. Basically, my life fell apart in every possible way:
 
My University (whose state is facing a massive budget shortfall) pulled a fast one halfway through the semester and cut my aid in half. I faced dropping out of a school i'd fought tooth and nail to get into and pay for. This was an even bigger problem because i've been paying for my entire education since i was 14; i chose against my parents' wishes to go to a private prep school, where i amassed an entire year's worth of college credit to get ahead (to save money on a year of college, and because i'm anxious to get into the world and start acting instead of playing in academia-land). This required me to work summers (terrible jobs) and early every day before school for 4 years, with every dollar going straight into tuition -- i paid off $7k/year as a high school student, and launched into college with almost nothing except the conviction that this too i would find a way to make happen. Anyway, my University cut my aid and my bill quadrupled literally overnight. They locked my transcripts. Without transcripts, i couldn't apply to graduate schools, thus ruining all those years fighting to get ahead. I had to come up with $7000 in two months. I was never what you'd call starving (maybe a little hungry sometimes, lol) but there was no room for mistakes like this. As an example, i've been wearing the same pair of super-glued shoes for the last seven years. You don't even want to know how i got a rig together and have managed to sell/upgrade it, or buy tools.
 
Of course, when it rains, it pours. I had just broken up with my long-term (5 year) girlfriend because in 4 years of trying every trick in the book, i realized her lack of self-esteem was beyond my ability to fix. When you are a person whose life is built around helping others, it is a huge defeat to know that you cannot help even one single person even after exerting all your might for so long. Plus, ya know, i had kinda-sorta-maybe, ya know, wanted to marry this girl in a few years... rather than dumping her in hopes she'd finally learn to be more confident in herself. (Side note: jury is still out on whether the breakup helped her or not.)
 
Meanwhile, i was working a job and taking a heavy course load that included several graduate level classes i had no background for -- yes, i was trying to trim down the length of my upcoming graduate studies, while trying to finish off my undergraduate degree and minor in three years. Unfortunately, this wasn't going so well. (i've still amassed a lot of graduate credits, overall.) Add in trying to apply for graduate schools that i couldn't send transcripts for, bombing an entrance exam i didn't have the money to retake at the time, and realizing that you suck at life, and you have some idea what those months felt like. Have you ever read the poem by Robert Burns that has the line "The best laid schemes of mice and men // Go often askew"? Well, my seven years worth of plans were going far askew, and it seemed i didn't have the strength to correct the course.
 
I did have two close confidants, though. One passed away a few months earlier of a sudden heart attack. The other was a student who I looked up to. She was like my big sister and was the only person I had ever really felt comfortable telling my problems to. Between all this other stuff happening, she decided to stop talking to me, but would not explain why. It was truly out of the blue and struck me as very "drama" from someone who i had revered as mature. I have thought about her every day this last year and wondered... "why?" She knew how burned out i was on life itself, and turned away from me when i most needed her. I had, as usual, no one to turn to, but could only dig deeper into a well that had already been long spent. The greatest irony for me was that i wasn't bitter; i just wanted to do good with my life, and it seemed that every possible obstacle was determined to stop me. I'm not sure this qualifies as the low point of my life, but it's at least in the top three, and this time the failures were mostly mine.
 
THEN: i ran across one ray of hope. It was called Semester at Sea, and though the odds of it actually happening were one in a million, it was the coolest thing i'd ever seen. I'd been to perhaps 5 states in my life and hadn't been on a vacation in 8 years; traveling the whole world aboard a gem of a ship was like a dream. The application deadline was only a few days away. I brushed aside all the garbage going on and was accepted to the program...
 

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Part 3: The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly

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So, the application got me admission to the summer session – then the cheapest program they offered. It was a long shot, still nearly a $13,000 bill. But as with most of my life stories, something bad had inspired me to believe in something good.
 
THE BAD.
 
Coming out of high school with no funding, my father and I drove 3 hours to my school before my freshman fall semester. We tried to explain my father’s financial situation to them (they base calculations on gross parental income only, not debts/lack of savings, and don’t factor whether you actually receive support). Let’s just say, the response reeked: i “wasn’t from the inner-city,” and they didn’t give a damn. Go “get a job at John Deere,” they told me, and apply for some scholarships. (I’m not an idiot, I’d already worked up to two jobs in high school, and applied for numerous scholarships – I’d even received a few at that point, it just wasn’t enough).
 
My dad was very unhappy, because he had worked very hard his whole life and didn’t have anything else to give me. We stopped to grab some hotdogs on the way home and i told him, dad, i’m not angry at you. We’ve had our differences but i know you’ve worked for a living. Yeah it’d be nice if you were like all the parents of the wealthy families from my high school, and had a PhD or owned a business… But I’d rather have a dad who worked for a living and never missed a day at work than any of those people. His work wasn’t deserving of his talents -- he is an actor, singer, and dancer, who once was offered a chance to sing with Pavarotti, and earned standing ovations when he acted alongside his high school friend, Billy Campbell. But i told him that i was proud of what he had done, giving up dreams and taking care of his family while we were still together, and that even though it was hard, i was proud of where i came from, and that it made what i was about to do all the more important.
 
Wanna know the irony? Shortly after my school told me i wasn’t poor enough, and that we weren’t working hard enough, i found out i’d earned one of the prestigious full-tuition scholarships i’d applied for; it was a big deal, had to give an acceptance speech in front of state congressmen and everything. Guess what my home school did…
 
They cut all my university housing aid proportional to the scholarship, leaving me with the same balance of loans and a large funding gap to figure out as before the scholarship. Even after we had begged them to help us, and even after they’d already allotted the money previously. It took me most of the spring and part of the summer just to pay off my freshman year, which should have been a zero-debt year on the back of a prestigious scholarship. Welcome to my education!
 
THE GOOD
 
SAS, though, was not my school. They seemed to have a reputation for following through on their funding promises; they seemed to really try to make sure everyone had the opportunity to sail if they would work hard enough and have enough need. The $13,000 bill for the summer trip was a herculean prospect, but after the way my home school had treated me, i had hope that--this time--it would be different. Because of that, i banked everything i had to make the trip happen.
 
I began the spring semester at my home school (January ’09) with about $5 in my savings account; I had just paid down the $7,000 “surprise!” tuition bill a week before spring semester started. That bill (plus hundreds to pay for graduate admission fees and tests) cost me the ability to apply to about half the graduate programs I’d wanted to, but it was done and i was on track to finish my degree and minor in 3 years. I applied for a course overload (beyond maximum semester credit hours) to finish my degree and waited nervously for the hammer of graduate admission decisions to fall. Meanwhile, my out was thinking about SAS.
 
They required a $500 down-payment, which i obviously didn’t have. There was only one thing of value i had left... A few months prior to the tuition meltdown, after a summer of 16-hour days, i’d built bar none the nicest thing i’d ever owned: Modern Industry. It wowed my friends, crunched proteins at 4.44GHz, and was my pride and joy. It earned me a teaching job and won an award.
 
Would you guys have sold a rig like that, to pay for something that had a high probability of never happening? Think on that for a sec…
 
Yeah, I thought about it for a long time… about 5 minutes. Then it was up for sale.
 
The stone was hard, but my persistence to wear it down was harder. If there were but a crack in the foundation, a way to break through, i’d find it. Water is an adaptive force. It makes its path even without hope, against reason; that is its nature.
 
The chassis was sold on these forums (into good  hands). The money was scheduled to be available in my bank account the day the down payment was due.
 
THE UGLY
 
And then, two days before the money transferred and I could confirm my seat, something no one could have predicted happened: SAS, for the first time in its 40 years, 100+ voyages, was overbooked, and could not accept any more confirmations. The rejection letters for ultra-competitive PhD programs came in a few weeks later; seven years of trying to get ahead  became a waste, and i realized that i wasn't good enough. I finished my degree and minor in 3 years, but had nowhere to live the next fall, no reason to stay in school, no job good enough to pay my loans, and my beloved rig was gone; my hope sank with the ship.
 

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Part 4 of 5: Choices

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HERE’S  WHERE  IT  GETS  GOOD!
 
So: the journey of a lifetime had been over-confirmed and overbooked. But, something good had to come of something bad… Right?
 
Semester at Sea offered a $10,000 grant for any summer voyagers who wanted to roll over to fall ’10 or spring ’11 trips. They stated this money would not interfere with any other financial aid. The only stipulation was taking one of the better ship cabins, which put the cost around… more money than I could make in several years. 
 
Life was still adrift. My regular University’s spring semester bill stacked up. The former girlfriend -- whom I still cared a great deal for -- had started dating someone else; wasn’t (still isn’t) clear if I helped her, or if she just found a new source of comfort. Then there was the triple-screw: 1) No PhD acceptance letters. 2) Waiting on PhD acceptance letters meant I had nowhere to live for the fall, since most apartments are leased the October before… rather than in May. 3) I had a choice to drop out and risk a cycle of never being able to pay down loans with a worthless undergraduate degree, or stick it out for a 4^th year of school I didn’t need (my degree/minor were done) while regrouping for graduate school. In that rush of realizations, and in the profound depression of realizing how precarious 7 years of education gambles were, I again had to decide:

• try again for a full-length SAS trip -- now priced at a jaw-dropping, heart-stopping $28,000
• or give up. 

 
Maybe it was the hectic time; maybe it was a desire to do “something” good with that extra free year I’d worked for over the last seven years. Maybe I’m just freakin nuts. Whatever it was… I rolled my enrollment to the Spring 2011 voyage.
 
I was still sitting on that $500 from Modern Industry. Another choice:

• put a down payment on University housing for the fall,
• or lock in my seat at SAS and scramble-gamble for an apartment.

 
You are beginning to know me now and of course I locked in my seat on the SAS ’11 voyage, and began the apartment search between working and course-overload finals week (that was an adventure of its own – never done it before and it took ‘til late July to find one and a cosigner to get a lease…)
 
The summer was supposed to be relaxing (after working 16 hour days the year before, and the hellish school year you just read about), but I had the opportunity to work 70-90 hours per week to raise some funds. [If you’re enjoying this story, there’s a more thorough but slightly tangential take on this time span here. It explains this SR-2 thread.]
 
Thus far in a semester of apartment living, I’ve used one roll of paper towel, one roll of toilet paper, half a bottle of Windex. I take a bus or walk to campus, often walking 2-2 ½ hours per day. I don’t go drinking, I buy only small quantities of healthy food, my friend and I rent movies for free from the library… Remember the super glued 8-years-old shoes? Yeah, both pairs fell apart with all the walking, but super glue saved the day again. If at any point you wonder if these things are a chip on my shoulder… No! Hell no! I’m proud of how far I walk, how little I use, how much I can scrape and save, and hope my determination becomes yours. Whereas most “normal” semesters (i.e., not being punished for my school’s budget shortfall) I’d come up about $3000 short, this semester I came out with a $2500 surplus due to rock-bottom housing/food costs. I beat the university at their own housing game and actually had loan money left over. I doubled my work hours and have been able to shield that chunk of money.
 
In early September I’d figured my budget and needed to get a passport ASAP. This required a cash payment of around $160 due to the photographs and specific pages required for SAS. The day I went was the same day my bike (had it since grade school) got stolen and money got taken from my PayPal. My confidence was not very high, and dropped even lower when the fees added up just a few dollars over my cash level, without another paycheck coming for a few weeks. I took several trips to my car and literally scrounged every quarter I could find from under the seats, and came up with just enough to pay for the passport. I had it within two weeks and was on track to apply for visas right after the financial aid announcements.
 
And so we come to one of the most terrifying part of this story… Waiting to see how financial aid played out. I’d researched a lot; there were no other major study abroad scholarships applicable to SAS due to the nature of its short port visits, and my school didn’t “approve” of SAS, meaning I was ineligible for scholarship funds. So, everything rode on the promise that SAS funded generously.
 
Days before the aid application deadline, I lost all my essays and paperwork during a file backup. The deadline was close, and I thought, “this is it. You’re screwed. You’ll never ship these in time. It was a nice dream.”
 
I spent 3 days pedal-to-the-metal rewriting the best essays I could, pouring over dozens of forms and paperwork and trying to neither make a mistake nor simply fall asleep. Despite being awake for several consecutive days, I could not physically redo all the applications in time even for overnight shipping. Same-day courier shipping estimates were in the thousands of dollars. And so, I contacted an awesome member from these very forums, who drove long distance to hand-deliver the paperwork for me. Please read THIS for the amazing story of how someone I had never met managed to get the paperwork in just before the deadline… Again, my sincerest thanks to Slagar for his help in pulling off a logistical miracle.
 
The next two weeks were agonizing; I constantly felt nauseous and worried about how the aid would play out… I’ve never wanted something so bad. Finally, it was deadline day. My mother and her boyfriend (who has known me since I was a kid) were coincidentally making their yearly trek southward and passing through campus. I showed them around nervously watched the clock. Aid deadline passed, we hurried back to my apartment.
 
A calendar of the countries I would visit hung on my wall. My passport stood proudly alongside my monitor. The MV Explorer adorned my desktop. I opened the aid award letter, and…
 
My body uncontrollably slumped. The aid… it didn’t…even…come…close…
 
Need-based aid? I’d received $1000 of nearly $10,000 possible (the minimum). Merit scholarships? $500 of $5000 possible (the minimum). I had a work study going for me, and some miscellaneous extra funding. Nearly ten grand still stood between me and the trip. My choice here was not how to celebrate that finally, one thing in my life had gone right, had “just worked out,” my choice was not how to relax and breathe easy. My choice was whether to break down, or to grind my teeth until they felt ready to break.
 
I walked my mother and her boyfriend out, physically trembling with anger and disappointment. I was embarrassed to have staked so much on something, to have come so close so many times, only to fail so miserably, and with them there; these were people I had had my differences with -- serious, life-altering differences stemming from my childhood -- and who I had never asked for help. It has been the blessing and curse of my life that I’d gotten so far without anyone, but the one and only thing I had ever really wanted “just for me” was now impossible. It was frustrating, disappointing, embarrassing.
 
My mother’s friend came up just then, and he got in my face. He sounded tenser than I’d ever heard him. He said, “I have $4,000. I will give it to you, right now.” I looked at the ground and began to protest but he said, “it’s not a loan. You can have it. Don’t pass up this opportunity.” I explained the numbers again, said this is too much, not even I can pull this off, not even with the amount he was offering, and I couldn’t accept his help anyway. They are people of extremely modest means, and he has his own children to support. My mother later explained that they suspected I’d come up short, and they’d been saving money since the spring.
 
He said, “Find a way to bring the cost down. Don’t give up, don’t pass this up. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. No one has worked harder than you have. No one -- no one -- deserves this, more than you do.”
 
Folks, of all the hard stuff I’ve done in my short little life, the hardest of them all was… hearing that… Hearing someone say so intensely that I deserved something, and especially coming from someone I’d had a long history with. Do I believe it, even now? No, not fully… But that really hit me, to hear someone say that… I’m at a loss to describe what that was like. It was embarrassing, but, I wanted to believe it, you know? The way he said that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
 
I told him I’d look into it and get back to him, but in my mind -- no matter all the powerful words in the world, or how much I wanted to believe they were true -- it was over. It had been a nice little dream, and a nice little distraction from the fact that I’d failed to get into a graduate program, but now it was time to focus on a new round of grad applications and forget this all ever happened… It’s over, I said, again, and again, and went back to my room and beat my head on my desk and fell asleep, not wanting to think or feel. In the coming days, I would discover several broken promises, and the bill would actually grow from $10,000 back to $18,000 and beyond.
 
Of course, I wouldn’t be telling you all this if it ended like that. You know the phrase, “mind over matter”? Well, this isn’t that story, because my mind gave up: cold, hard numbers made the situation clear. All the brute intellect in the world wasn’t going to solve this.
 
No, this is the story of “heart over mind,” a story about a young guy who chose to quit, but -- to steal a line from my book -- “his heart wouldn’t let him.”
 

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Part 5 CONCLUSION

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A refresher:

• Everything was sucking. Applied to Semester at Sea (SAS) program, a floating classroom that visits 13 ports.
• Exhausted all emergency funds, sold Modern Industry to make SAS down-payment.
• Before funds could transfer, ship got overbooked for first time in 40 years.
• Enrolled in more expensive spring semester with $10K grant SAS offered due to overbooking.
• I enrolled for a fall semester at my university to remain eligible for SAS, even though I’d finished my degree/minor in 3 years.
• Scrounged quarters out of my car to pay for passport.
• Lost all my financial aid paperwork during a file backup, 3 days before deadline. Worked day and night.
• Slagar from these forums delivered 40 pages of applications -- in person -- by the deadline.
• Aid package fell way short of the required amount; it was over.

 
There’s another scene in my book that I come back to often. The main character is preparing for a suicide run against a city-fortress and his friends try to stop him:
 
“Not hard, Morgan! It’s impossible.” Claire’s voice was high, desperate. “You’re damn near invincible out here on the plains where it’s all about you. You can move with freedom out here. But if you get inside that city it’s going to be close quarters. All it’ll come down to is how much abuse your machine can take walking down an alley. All the willpower in the world won’t hold your armor on.”
“They’ll tear you apart, Morgan.”
 
And he replies simply,
“Then I’ll be torn apart.”
 
It’s resignation and defiance; he knows he can’t win, but he goes anyway. So it was for me.
 
Despite having approximately zero hope, the Monday after the aid was posted, I called SAS and told them I knew they sometimes put people on a waiting list for more aid, since other students would inevitably drop. As we were discussing the current aid and costs, the aid officer asked where I was coming up with my current estimate. I explained and she checked my records.
 
“The $10,000 grant was never posted,” she told me. Despite emails in which another rep had rolled my admission to the spring along with the grant, they’d never credited it. She told me that they did not have the funding to give me all of my aid and the grant (it could only be one or the other), because it wouldn’t be fair to other students. I had heard this before and understood; however, they had promised me this money with explicit written documents stating that it was compatible with financial aid. It was offered because of their overbooking fiasco, after all, and rich students could have received the grant too.
 
My hopes went from zero to about -50. The bill had actually gone UP to approximately $20,000. 
 
Not sure why, but, I next visited my home school’s study abroad office. First they told me that I must attend a “first steps” meeting to even talk to a counselor. I tried to explain that I was already enrolled in a program but was told the meeting was required. So I went to the pointless meeting later that day. I came back the next day and again asked to talk to someone. They asked what program I needed to talk about, and told them SAS. They responded that SAS isn’t an approved program and I couldn’t talk to a counselor. I patiently explained that I’d already talked to the financial aid office in the spring, and was told that when I had a final cost estimate of my trip, that the study abroad office could write it up and they’d figure out an aid package based on what I’d normally be given for a spring semester. The office worker hesitated but finally went to get someone.
 
The next aid officer told me that, despite what the financial aid office had said, because SAS wasn’t approved by my university, I could not transfer any kind of aid. I would have to have my courses approved by the dean of my college, who had never approved coursework before. (Don’t forget, I pulled a Kirk and had already finished my 4 years in 3; I didn’t need any kind of course credit.) She sarcastically told me “good luck” and I left. I had dealt with enough administrative people at my school to know talking to them was futile.
 
Now, I had done my homework on this. I already knew I wasn’t eligible for any study abroad scholarships my school provided, and couldn’t transfer state aid to an unapproved program. But no one had said that the program/courses needed to be approved to even transfer the federal grants/loans; and in fact this is totally illogical, because these should by definition be spendable in any state. Once again, my school had told me a half-truth despite my questions, and they were calling the shots for my life.
 
I called my mother to inform her and her boyfriend that, while I appreciated their offer, the cost had actually grown by another $10-15,000 and was now truly impossible. I’d paid down $7k/year in high school; I’d paid off $7k in a semester; I’d paid off $7k in two months. But this? $20,000? I once again said words that I don’t believe in…
 
“I give up,” I told her. This was my mother, a person I had forcibly separated from my household a few years earlier, and whose help I had done without. “Even I can’t do this.”
 
We began to discuss unpleasant options for where I could live in the spring. It was over. The one thing I had ever truly wanted, and that I had already banked hard on and called in incredible favors for, and that had kept me afloat during some stormy moments, was impossible.
 
Yet, I still chatted with a friend who lives in Chicago and planned a trip to begin applying for visas in person. Applying in-person would save me at least $300, or closer to $500 compared to using the quick-and-easy service that SAS recommended. It was much trickier to do multiple visas this way, because you had to precisely fill out the many forms for each location; this required making a number of phone calls and navigating poorly laid out and contradictory websites (check out the Chinese consulate in Chicago’s website if you want a headache). Even so, I was determined to save money this way. If I drove 3 hours home, I could then take cheap train rides into the city to drop off and pick up the necessary materials, which was even cheaper than the specific types of shipping that were required, as well as faster; I could even finish getting a late start from waiting on aid. My friend and I were scheduled to make our first trip on a Friday.
 
But wait, you ask, why was I doing this even knowing I wasn’t going on the trip? Was I delusional?
 
The honest answer is that I do not know why I continued planning; only that I did. And I sent SAS emails that were even more epic than this daily-grind story. Told them that their program was inaccessible to people like me, that outside study abroad scholarships weren’t applicable, that it’s hard to get anywhere when you aren’t a minority, that I felt let down by their promises to provide good funding to students with enough need and merit. I asked how much poorer you had to be to get need-based aid if I had only received $1000 of the $10,000 possible. I explained that I’d already explored outside loans for my home school and that I could not handle any more debt, nor find a cosigner in my poor family to sign for it. Told them that their program, no matter how you sliced it, required a massive parental investment and a family capable of supporting that.
 
On the Friday of the drop deadline, I drove to my permanent home near Chicago to begin securing visas. That afternoon, I sat down to find the page to drop out of the program on the SAS website. I sent my financial aid officer a final email asking where the drop page was, and mentioned she had not answered my previous emails regarding the inaccessibility of the program and my desire to withdraw.
 
She called me then, an hour before the drop deadline. She thanked me for my emails and was very empathetic. She told me that she could give me the $10k grant, and that I could drop to an economy cabin despite the grant’s stipulations; this shaved another several thousand off the costs, although I knew from pictures that even the tiny “Silent Steel” build I began building in the spring for this trip would have to be scrapped. She said she was also able to offer me a portion of the original aid package: a few “prestigious” alumni scholarships, as well as the work study they’d offered me. “We really need a good IT tech onboard the ship,” she told me, “and you were one of the most qualified applicants we’ve received.”
 
In sum, with the grant, the aid, the work study, and a switch to the cheapo economy cabin, the cost was now around $7,000. She gave me a two-week extension on the drop deadline. I thanked her sincerely for doing her best on the offer and said I’d investigate my options.
 
I hung up that phone in a trance; walked out to the kitchen where my grandmother was sitting. Sat down, stared straight ahead. “Are you ok?” my grandmother asked. At first I put my hand up and mumbled, “thinking…” Then I began to smile uncontrollably, slowly turned toward her, and explained the situation. To anyone else of my means, $7,000 in two weeks was still fully impossible, and I’d be nuts to think I could do that. But after all I’d been through with this trip and in my preceding life, it was damn close… It was within striking distance… Almost feel the salt of the sea air sticking to my skin, you know? I thought,
 
I can DO this.
 
This story is not of some wishy-washy miracle where the lighting gets soft and warm Christmas music plays at the end; I sat there and began writing down every source of money and expenses I could think of in nitty-gritty detail. After factoring rent, the GRE exam, grad school application costs, a smidge for food and gas, I could churn up $1500 almost immediately out of pocket. How? Because, after finally losing my girlfriend and moving into an apartment this year like I had wanted to do with her for several years, I’d taken what would naturally be a $3-4000 housing balance for the year (assuming my school had never pulled any fast ones on me) and turned it into a $2500 surplus. With extra saved from my 80-hour workweeks over the summer, and by doubling my work hours during the semester, and by living far from campus and taking the bus, and by only using one roll of paper towel and toilet paper and one bottle of Windex and only spending money to eat out with friends here and there, and going to the library to rent movies, and ordering books online, and so on and so forth, I had lived rock-bottom cheap. My paychecks could protect that nest egg and eventually add to it, month by month.
 
Next, I asked my grandmother: can you stall off the contractors and give me an advance using your homeowner’s insurance? Our home had (for the millionth time) been flooded at the end of the summer, destroying the basement (it still reeks of formaldehyde). She was sitting on a few thousand worth of insurance money and the contractor was being easy with her because she was an old lady. The deal was, we could pay her back with a spring tax return and get the house fixed up then. “Sure,” she said. “I can hold them off for a few months. It’s too cold anyway.”
 
The total bill was now around $4500. I asked my grandmother, what would you think if I took my mother up on that offer for $4000? She didn’t even flinch and said, “take it!” In her view, I’d never received any support from my mother. And, in fact, the situation was much more dire than would be appropriate for me to describe here (out of respect to the privacy of others, I could personally care less). Suffice to say, a great deal of damage had been done to my education by decisions on that end of the family, never mind family quarrels that had destroyed what little family I ever had. What it ultimately came down to for me, though, was that this was something I really wanted -- not something I needed. Hopefully you know what I mean by that.
 
So, I called and explained the situation to my mother and our old family friend who she was living with, and told them I’d accept the offer. I spent the next two weeks examining costs, double checking estimates, considering second jobs, coordinating paychecks and insurance money and bank transfers, and so on. On the extension drop deadline, I called to tell my aid officer that I’d figured out how to pay for the remaining $7,000 and that I’d signed up for a 6-month payment plan (which would continue until April of the next year). The truth was I was still approximately $500 short in my estimates, but I figured… By the time my account runs dry, they’ll have to fly me off the ship on a helicopter. I could just pay off what was left after returning home.
 
And that was it. “I’m going to sail with you this spring,” I said. And that, my friends and enthusiast buddies, is the story of how one guy secured the journey of a lifetime. You can imagine that every single day of that trip, I will wake up and spring out of bed with a purpose and with gratitude: for the help of people like Slagar and my aid officer, for my mother and her friend, for my grandmother… and gratitude for that feeling deep down that said this was right; the voice that, to quote my book, made me “feel you can do what you know you can’t.” As with all my life, I am grateful “for the foe who had given me the chance to make myself what I knew I should have been, even if the way was far harder.”
 
There will be those few times in life when you have the opportunity to define yourself; when you are faced with the unfairness of the world, or the apathy of those around you, and the only way you can pull through is by culling together all the worst of your life. But seek the good people who will help, and absorb the obstructers like a sea absorbs the rain. Most of all, when you are against your own greatest foe -- the little voice inside that tells you to quit, that it was all just a nice dream -- dig down deeper until you hear the sounds that reside there, the voice that booms back:
 
DREAMS
ARE NOT
ENOUGH

what? :S

Sign me up. I like reading your stuff. Were you on that ship that got stuck of the coast of Mexico? j/k

go on

I like to read

I'm down!

I love a good story... feel free to send me a PM

Awesome! That's over 10 now.
 
I'm honored to have your attention and won't feel like it's a pointless spam story.
 
It'll come in pieces until caught up to the present day, then perhaps follow me across the world come spring... heh heh heh Maybe some pictures, the best satellite internet can provide...
 
Stay tuned and thanks again for your interest! Won't let you down!

Why not... subbed:D

sounds good, waiting patiently for details bud

I'm interested.

Keep going. You have me hooked.

Phoenixx45

DMIINC

Keep going. You have me hooked.

Me too!!

 
+1 Keep writing!

Same here! 

DMIINC

Keep going. You have me hooked.

Ditto!  Love it.