Starting my research blog

English: A panorama of a research room taken at the New York Public Library with a Canon 5D and 24-105mm f/4L IS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Welcome to my research blog for my English 102 class.  I’m a first-year student at a community college that I’m not going to name because I just had a lesson in why you shouldn’t name names (more about that later).  I did okay in 101 (I think the prof liked my grammar more than my writing; he went on and on about how he appreciated not having to mark a lot of mistakes.  But he didn’t have much to say about WHAT I wrote.  He did ask on one paper that I try not to use so many parentheticals.  I guess he had a point.).

Anyway, this term I’m going to be writing a research paper, and the materials I got on Blackboard make it sound as though this is a much bigger deal than I expected.  I mean, I’ve done research papers before, and they got good grades. 

I’m already over my 100 words, and I still haven’t said much about myself.  I’ll save that for my next post.  

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I hate my textbook; I love to read

English: Six year old boy reading "Diary of a wimpy kid" License on Flickr (2011-01-07): CC-BY-2.0 Flickr tags: diary, wimpy, kid, book, read, bed, boy, hold (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This blog is supposed to be about writing and reading.  So far, so good; I like to read, and I have to write for the class, so you'd think I'd have enough material right there.  The problem is that I'm supposed to be writing (in half the posts) about the essays and articles in our textbook, How to Write about Anything, and I don't want to read most of them, much less write about them.  

So, while it may look as though I'm not reading much, I'm actually reading a lot-- but I'm reading stuff that gives me a break from my everyday thoughts, particularly the sad ones.  As just one example, the first anniversary of my mom's death is coming up (more about that later), and I've been reading mysteries.  In those books, nobody dies of cancer of the spine.  People are murdered, the murderers are caught and usually punished.  Unlike real life, there's some kind of justice.  There isn't anything that satisfying in the textbook. 

 Therefore, and with the permission of my prof, I'm going to write about what I've read lately.

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It's Time

Image by Picture_taking_fool via FlickrThe research paper is due today, and I just finished mine.  I uploaded it to the course page at 4:45AM, which makes me a sort of cliché, I suppose.  I'm not sure it's everything I wanted it to be, but I can't see what else to do to it.  I revised it as Dr. Toffee instructed, and I proofread and polished until I was sick of it, so I guess I'll have to hope that it's good enough.  I think I made my point.
While it's a big relief to have it done, it just occurred to me that I have not done my journal entries for the last couple of weeks, and I need to get going on bringing them up to date.  There's only two more weeks until the end of the semester, and I'll need to do at least one a day.  Why do I always let myself get so far behind?  It just makes for more stress, which I don't need.

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