My farewell address 

My farewell address

Because I want to add content but don't really want to type anything here is my farewell address from highschool (no I wasn't valedictorian, my entire english class had to write them):

Farewell Address Matt Fister


I am going to start here by telling a story that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I think it was a Saturday, and my parents had kept bugging me to go and get a job. They had both left to run some errands, so I got in my car, put my key in, and turned it. Nothing happened. Here I had left my lights on all night and my battery was dead. Having left my lights on many times before, I knew how to jump my car. The only thing I could jump it from though was my Mom???s Saab, a car with manual transmission. About a year before this my Father tried to teach me how to drive stick shift. After stalling a million times, I sort of got the hang of it. I could back her car up, pull up next to my car, jump it, and pull back into the garage. To begin doing this, I got my Mom???s car keys and got in her car. If you have never driven stick before, the first thing you need to remember is to put the clutch in when you start the car. If you don???t do this, your car rapidly accelerates in the direction the transmission was in when you parked. Unfortunately for me, I forgot this.
The Saab lurched backwards, flew out of the garage, and despite my efforts to stop it with the break pedal, went in reverse down the hill, and finally stalled at the base of the hill in the muddy grass that had been wet from the rain. Somehow I had avoided hitting anything. I opened up the car instruction manual, and quickly learned that the clutch does need to be pushed when starting the engine, as ???failure to do so may result in movement as the starter is engaged???.
Anyway, I decided to try to get the car up the driveway before my parents came home, because they probably would not appreciate seeing the car sitting in the grass. With my newfound knowledge I started the car up again, shifted into first gear, and tried to go forwards and onto the driveway. For some reason it just would not go. I stalled a couple of times before realizing that I was stuck in the mud. I got out, observing the scars the tires had cut into the lawn, got back in and tried again, this time in reverse. That worked a little, but soon the gradient of the hill became to steep for the tires to gain traction due to the rain. I went forward again, and finally made it to the driveway. Once there, a funny thing happened. I began to figure out how stick shift worked. It all started making sense. I made it up the driveway and into the garage without even stalling once. When my parents got home, I told them what happened and we had a good laugh over the whole experience.
We all share an experience very similar to my misadventure. When we first started high school, it was like we were flying backwards out of control, only able to barely avoid crashing into anything. We quickly learned the rules and tried to figure out what was expected of us. Finally we began to understand what was going on, and tried to gain control of our education. As soon as the things began to make sense, we all experienced getting stuck in the mud. We all had our own struggles, our own hardships, our own disappointments, and our own failures. But after fighting as hard as we could, and changing gear a couple of times, we survived them, and succeeded in getting out of them. After all of this, we finally got the hang of it and made it up the steep hill of classes, tests, and projects.
Here we stand today. We are at the end of our journey. We made it and we learned much from our path. However, new challenges lie ahead of us, but we will be ready to conquer them. We will make it up the steep hill and reach our dreams.
Thank you.

I wrote this not because of the metaphor (it's so terrible) or the hopefull moral at the end (it's so cliche). I wrote it simply to be able to tell the story. I thought it was funny, so I used it.