It was bound to happen. Today, I didn’t get to a computer before midnight. I thought about turning back the clock on my blog post, pretending that it had been posted before the clock struck 12, but that’d be deceptive and unnecessary. After all, this experiment, this writing project is really about writing one short entry each day. And a day starts when I get out of bed and ends when I get back into it.
Midnight is just a scientific construct to demarcate what society considers a day. So, it’s no big deal that I missed the midnight “deadline,” right? Besides, setting the clock to a time other than the actual time I wrote the post would be cheating. No one might ever know about it or find out, but it would reside in my heart as a shameful mark in this yearlong write-a-thon.
I don’t remember ever having cheated in school, although I don’t know if this is actually something extraordinary or not. I always thought that there must be schoolmates of mine that did cheat (in ways both large and small), but I would be hard-pressed to come up with any actual percentage.
And what constitutes cheating? Besides the obvious infractions of secretly getting test answers early or copying off of another student, where is the line drawn?
When I was younger, it wasn’t always be clear when working with other students was mere collaboration, and when it had turned into something more sinister. Likewise with that naughty p-word: plagiarism.
Sure, copying direct passages from a library book into your paper was obviously wrong. But what about rephrasing an idea that wasn’t originally yours? What about letting a book do the critical thinking on a situation for you?
Of course, you don’t really think about this when you’re a kid. Not that much, anyway. As an adult, you realize that cheating surrounds you. It’s not just restricted to those classroom questions of morality. It’s about whether or not you eat that extra donut, whether or not you go to sleep when you told yourself you would, what you write in your self evaluation.
So, I’m not perfect. I don’t always turn off my console after just one more level. I don’t always wake up in time to do the chores I said I’d do the night before. But you have to draw the line somewhere. And forging blog post times to make it look like you wrote something before midnight? That’s just fucked up.