Blog # 52: Stress

Today I am struggling on a topic to talk about for my blog entry. What in the world shall I talk about? There are thousands of topics I could easily stumble upon as I free write, but what topic really would interest me today. Okay, I figured it out. Lets talk about stress. Stress is my worst enemy. I hate everything about stress, and I am beginning to think it is a mutual relationship. Stress has consumed my everyday life this past semester. I cannot seem to venture away from it. My sleep patterns have been devoured by stress. Take last night for example, I laid in bed around 8:30 PM, expecting to fall asleep quickly just like every other night. I laid in bed forever it seemed like. After about TWO hours of tossing and turning I said to myself- screw it. I got out of bed and got on the computer. I figured out why I could not sleep. I had so much going on in my mind it was keeping me awake. My body did not want me to go to sleep because I still had something I needed to do before Monday morning. But what was it? I completely forgot to turn my hard written analysis essay into Safe Assignment. Thank goodness I noticed this before it was too late. After I turned it into Safe Assign on blackboard, I noticed I mistakenly forgot to cite and important source in my essay. I retrieved some of the information off this website to help me understand them meaning of what exactly high school cliques were. I pretty much had to basic idea of what the definition was, but I just wanted to have a real definition and not something made up from myself. Anyways, to make a long story short, I basically forgot to site this source. I used some other information in my essay from this source and I did not want the Safe Assignment to accuse me of plagiarizing because that is something I would NEVER do in a million years. I was nervous because I already turned my essay into Safe Assign and I was not able to go back and put those citations in. What did I do? I e-mailed Ms. Rawls to bail me out. I knew I was not going to be able to sleep peacefully until I received a response from her. To my surprise she e-mailed me right back! She came to the rescue and said I could upload the updated file. She made a good point- “when in doubt, always cite.” That phrase said a thousand words to me. I was not necessarily in doubt, but I wanted to make sure that I gave credit to the webpage I retrieved information from. It would have been such a shame if I ended up forgetting to site the source and was accused of plagiarizing! Honesty is the best policy!