It’s that time of year – the end of the semester. I get it. We’re all busy and we have too much to do, and reading 浅草紅団 is hard even for native speakers who find the style, slang, shifting character names, etc, irritating and difficult to keep up with. Heck, the book is so hard that most readers misread one of the characters as being two separate people! So. I’m saying that I understand. We all fall apart.
That said, I can’t believe that someone in my department would try to pass off something I wrote as their own opinion during discussion. We do weekly blackboard-esque postings to get a feel for our opinions on the piece before class. We all read each other’s postings so we can know what’s going on in class, and because, you know, we’re graduate students, it’s rare that one of us just doesn’t do the work.
When I’ve been unable to complete my own work, I typically just shut down entirely and hide in bed for the week until all the scary things have gone away. Which is never. However, this has got to be better than getting called on during discussion on a book you haven’t read and then suddenly stating my opinion in the place of the one you haven’t been able to formulate because you haven’t done the work.
But how do you know they just decided to steal your work, N? How do you KNOW?
First, I sat next to this person during the seminar this week, where on his laptop, he surfed the internets and read our postings during the seminar, and spent a good part of it looking up terms from our various postings, including my own.
Second, my posting was rather unique this week, in that I had no f-ing idea what to say about the work because it was so damn hard to read, so a lot of the things I said in the posting were completely out there. In particular, I linked 浅草紅団 to 黄表紙, which is ridiculous! Ridiculous! I’m not saying off the wall insane, but at the same time, not something you could ever write a paper about, really. My point is that on his laptop, during class, he researched the terms I used in talking about 黄表紙 including looking up the particular one I was talking about.
All I’m saying is that the dots seem pretty clearly connected here. I’m not … overworked or going to call the intellectual theft police. It’s that time of year and it can’t be easy for a student still taking language classes to read the book in question, but dang, it’s really something I hadn’t expected here. I just don’t get it. It was just painfully obvious that we all knew it was something I’d said, not him, and it was just a shocking moment for me. Even the professor grilled him on exactly where he would have read the 黄表紙 I was talking about. It was incredibly awkward. I can’t believe someone in such a good program, no matter how panicked the moment in question, would try to jack my own absolutely ridiculous opinions as his own, as if what I was saying made any sense at all. Gah.
