Oy

The bulk of the last few days has been a hideous amalgamation of dog walks and work. Do note that I omitted “full nights of sleep” from that list. (Did I mention that my parents were gone this week?)

Yoshi has this annoying tendency to bark at the paper delivery people—at 5:00 in the morning. Silencing that usually takes me two rounds of getting out of bed and telling him “enough!” He then starts barking again about 8:00 am, ostensibly because he needs to go out. Thus my day begins, and then begins again.

Following that first walk is shower, work, lunch, work, walk Yoshi, work, and then finally return home in the evening. From there my sister and I eat dinner (trying also to make sure our grandma has something to eat as well), and then I get to listen to her fret over her awful group until late into the night. Combine the late nights with interrupted sleep cycles and whatnot, and I haven’t had a good eight hours of sleep until last night—when my folks came home.

About my sister’s group: she’s in a class that has a major group paper, and that paper was due this last Thursday. On Tuesday evening she had started to revise what the others had written—and discovered huge swaths of plagiarism in two of the other gals’ work.

They were going to turn this thing in with six people’s names on it. (Plagiarism, if you aren’t aware, has punishments that range from getting an F on the assignment to getting kicked out of the university.) Their plagiarized sources included the CIA World Fact Book—and, as Brian noted, “[the World Fact Book] is a good source, but is bad for being caught [plagiarizing].”

See the quotation marks? (Actually, I can’t remember Brian’s exact words… consider this dramatic license.) These gals thought it wasn’t plagiarism if they cited the paragraphs they cut and pasted. (???)

Anyway, that devolved into a messy group dynamic where the self-appointed leader and hog of information (and plagiarist) became quite pissed at my sister for calling plagiarism by its true name. Add in some chats with the professor, and it was obvious this team wasn’t going to be able to function.

I wish I had been the one facing off that other gal as she tried to get mad at me. I swear, I would have rained righteous hellfire on her until she was sobbing in the fetal position. You don’t attempt to fuck people over like she did, and then expect to be able to get pissy at the person who calls you on it.

Other notable events of the week: one afternoon Yoshi was running around in the park, and ran up to a bigger, meaner dog. Thankfully, he only ended up with two minor scrapes and a tiny puncture wound in the end—but we learned the noise Yoshi makes when he’s in pain. (He starts sounding like a female dog.) And then, another afternoon, Calliope managed to kill a bird and leave it as a present on our doorstep. I nearly stepped on the poor thing as I was leaving the house, which didn’t do anything for my heart.

Once again I have reaffirmed (as I did during my parents’ previous vacation, when Cricket managed to have diarrhea all over the entryway) that I don’t want pets of my own at this point in my life—and kids are out of the question.

 

One Response to Oy

 
  1. Brian says:

    To clarify about the CIA World Factbook: Good source for information, bad source for not getting caught ripping it off. On a side note, since the source was so obvious and this girl cited it in the paper too, it seems more likely that this girl is at least being honest that she thought it wasn’t plagiarism. So instead of lazy and criminal, we have arrogant and stupid. Which is worse?
    As for “kids [being] out of the question,” I would just like to caution you about the dangers of accidental pregnancy via holding hands. Just say no.

 

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