Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Less Moments

I'm having less moments of sudden panic where my mind is racing and all I can think is, "where am I and what the hell am I doing here?".  And I am definitely less lost.  I no longer leave a building debating whether to pull out my map to see if I should turn left or right to get to my next destination.  Life is so much easier when I know which way to head.  How is that for a life analogy.  ;)






Sushi Study



How I love being able to eat in the library!  Pass the wasabi please.




Homework waits for no man. It doesn't give a break to women either.

I've been so sick the last two weeks with bronchitis and asthma flare up.  It's tough doing homework when I can hardly remember my name.  That's all the whine I get.  There are deadlines to make.





Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Arrested for Plagiarism

Don't laugh.  At three in the morning this feels like a very real concern for me right now.  But on my behalf can I just say that I didn't mean to.  A flimsy excuse, I know, once I'm hauled into court for sentencing.  I don't even know what they do to people who plagiarize.  I don't even know if I have plagiarized.  I'm working on my first BIG research paper for English 102.  What a swirling, confusing, wonderful, awful experience this has been.  I have always loved to write.  I can say that now.  I have kept that juicy tidbit a secret for decades, even from myself.  After all, who am I write - let alone enjoy it.  But I don't know what I'm doing.  And it scares me to find out.  Oh, but I long to find out.  It's like this siren song that I cannot and do not want to ignore.  And so I have gotten my wish.  I'm in a swirling state of new ideas about rhetoric, exigence, constraints, and the like.  You know what it's like when you have a new vocabulary word that you are supposed to use in a sentence.  You have the definition, but not the experience and deeper understanding of it, yet you must plug it into the sentence all the same as best you can.  Well, it's like that but instead of just a word or sentence, it's this swirling (there's that word again), churning mass of words and ideas and a conversation in a parlor that has been going on long before I entered the room and will continue long after I am gone (a concept I just learned in English. and no, I'm not citing it - I'm too tired).  I want to enter the conversation.  Though it makes me feel completely unsure of myself and off balance to the point just before nausea. 

I went into the writing lab yesterday.  Yes, they have such a thing.  My English teacher told me about it.  I made an appointment on line, looked on my campus map to find it and away I went.  It's this little oasis of writing knowledge complete with couches and tea.  It's free for all with a paper in hand and a need for assistance with all parts and pieces regarding writing.  My appointment was with Alex who couldn't have been more helpful.  I have reams of notes and now my head is swimming with rules on margins and headers and proper etiquette on citing.  And the plagiarism!  Such a fine line between parenthesis and paraphrase.  He had insightful ideas not just on the formatting but the structure of my paper as well.  It all sounds and feels so right and I want to pull it all together and bring it into this perfect flow.  This perfect paper that I envision that it can be...  Or maybe I'll just settle for a cohesive thread of thought.  I'm so excited to be catching a glimpse of understanding of these things but it's also overwhelming in so many ways.  So much so that it makes me want to cry  And I would but I'm too damned excited to be learning how to write to let that silliness get in my way.  And here's a thought, if I get arrested at least I'll have more time to write.



ACCORDING TO THE MERRIAM-WEBSTER ONLINE DICTIONARY, TO "PLAGIARIZE" MEANS

  • to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
  • to use (another's production) without crediting the source
  • to commit literary theft
  • to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.  And perpetrators will be dragged off to jail and flogged accordingly. (that last part was loosely paraphrased)