19 May 2003 ~ Expelling my classmate...

So I'm supposed to be doing this paper with three of my classmates in my Abnormal Psychology class...

The assignment is: do a 10-20 page research paper on the subject of your choice (having to do with abnormal psychology). Use APA citations. Present your work to the class Wednesday, and turn in the paper during the final week of class.

Okay... We've had this assignment since the first day of class. We got our groups together on the third week of class. My group chose to work on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). We divided up the work thus:

J. would write five pages about people diagnosed with DID and their relationships with other people. S. would write five pages tackling the "repressed memory: myth or fact?" issue. R. would discuss the dysfunctional aspects of the disorder. And I would clean up those fifteen pages, get the citations put together correctly, copy-edit, and then write a page or two discussing what DID actually is, its symptoms, etc.

Well, J. did a great job on her five pages. S. did a shitty job on his four and a half, but at least he wrote something. And R. asked me: "I was supposed to write something?"

You're fucking kidding me... We have a presentation to do, Wednesday night, on this shit, and this guy hasn't even started?

I gave him hell. Yes, R. is fifty-something, and he's sort of scary, but cripes! I'm sorry, but I'm not in the mood to go down with a sinking ship! That is to say, I don't want to work with a fucken slacker... Or a moron. I can't decide which category R. falls into.

The thing that REALLY sucks about this is that, initially, R. didn't want to work with anybody else. R. wanted to do his own project. Why? Because, he said, the last time he'd done a group project, his group members didn't do any work, and he had to do ALL the work, and blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine...

Okay, so I BEGGED R. to do something. Anything, I said. If he couldn't find any information on "dysfunctional aspects" (that was his first choice), then he ought to maybe try looking up treatment options for people diagnosed with DID. He said that was a great idea, and the next day, I got 30K worth of essay in my email box from R.

It took me three days to find a computer that had the right program to open the stupid file...

Fucken A., can I even tell you what a bitch it's been, ALREADY, working with R.?

I downloaded it today, and discovered (via Yahoo), that the entire thing is plagiarized from two different websites. I mean, NOTHING is cited, and almost nothing is changed. The dude went through every sentence, and changed ONE word. Sometimes, when he couldn't find a word to change, he'd change a spelling. So, about half of the damned thing is misspelled.

I want to kill this man. He sucks SO much.

*sigh*

I'm feeling REALLY shitty today. I've got my stupid period, and I'm all dizzy and tired and lightheaded and spacy. This has happened to me a couple of times before; once, I almost collapsed at work, and one of my co-workers had to drive me home. So I went into the house, and collapsed in bed, where I took a six-hour nap.

I HATE taking naps during the day.

And I REALLY hate it when I have to do collaborative work with fuck-ups.

So, in an effort to relieve myself of both stressors, at least to some degree, I'm going to release some tension by being a total fucking bitch. R. will be my victim.

Oh, I'll put this paper together, all right. I'll take J.'s piece, and I'll take S.'s piece, and I might even have a couple of minutes to do a couple of pages of my own. I'll type it all up, make it all pretty, and have it ready to turn in. Then, I will take R.'s paper, and I will hand that in separately, with a letter advising the professor that it's plagiarized, that R. claimed to have written it himself, and that I found the original sources at blah, blah, blah websites. Of course, I know there's a chance that R. will get expelled, but what the fuck? The dude has done NOTHING this entire quarter. We've done two different projects now -- an interview, and a literary analysis. He didn't do either of them. When it came to his turn to discuss his "interview" with the class, he talked about himself. And, I'm sorry, but people like this just waste my academic air.

Why, after all, should a plagiarizing slacker be able to go to Evergreen whan Jake can't? (Jake, incidentally, cannot ever get student funding again, ever, because he was convicted of a drug charge. Oddly, R. claimed he was in prison -- not jail, prison -- for awhile, but got out due to some legal loophole. Supposedly, he was in for attempted murder. The "justice" in this is something I will never understand.) Why, after all, should R. get the same number of credits as I'm getting, essentially for nothing? Why, after all, should I risk getting MY ass thrown out of college for some other asshole? You all know how hard I worked to get where I'm at! Remember? Begging you, my readers, for information about how to apply for financial aid, and how to fill out applications? Working my stupid butt off to get a job to pay for Greyhound tickets? Waiting, day after day after day for an acceptance or rejection letter? Taking an extra community college class every Monday night in order to ensure I had enough credits to qualify as a transfer student? Moving all my shit into storage, mailing all my shit to myself via UPS... Sending my entire life across a continent? I'M GOING TO RISK THIS FOR A MOTHERFUCKING CHEATER?

Go to hell, R.

I hope they expel you.

~Helena*