Thanks for the kind words @owasco!

Yes, I did end up going to college. As it turned out, my (biological) dad passed away a month after my 18th birthday, meaning that I was considered "of age" in the legal sense... so I spent a little over two years dealing with an incredibly convoluted estate that was otherwise not all that valuable.

After that, I took about a six month "sabbatical" and then headed to college in Austin, Texas in January of my 20th year.

We humans are very adaptable... we may not like everything that comes along, but we adapt and deal with it.