by Karem al-Ghay
Gaza City, January 17 - Dammit. I can't believe I was that forgetful. I had all the right papers filled out, ready to send, with maybe a tweak to one of the essays if I got around to it, but in the rush to evacuate our position before the Israelis took it over, taking all the Harvard application forms with me slipped my mind. Now I'm going to have to copy everything from someone else's work all over again.
The stupid thing is I had gone over this exact scenario in my mind like eighty times. I had contingency plan after contingency plan. Herd the hostages; grab the supplies; set the booby traps; snag the Harvard application essays that I'd copied more or less verbatim from twelve different sources. But when the moment came, my brain turned to mush and I left the essays right there on a chair in that bunker. When the IDF blew up the little tunnel system we had going, it probably burned to crisp. I'm never getting it back. All that painstaking plagiarism down the drain. I have to reconstruct it now, and that's going to take at least half an hour.
I hope the Admissions Committee at Harvard appreciates the extra effort I had to put into this application.
The main challenge, at this point, will involve getting the right mix of plagiarized sources. I thought I had a good product before. I just can't guarantee that what I reproduce will be as close to the quality of my previous effort.
Some people prefer to submit their applications online; that would have sped up the process. The thing is, while the claims of "We have no internet in Gaza because Israel cut it all off" are mostly nonsense, like the claims of fuel and electricity shortages, certainly for Hamas personnel, it's still occasionally spotty, such as when we're hunkered down in our tunnels with a protective ring of Israeli hostages. I need to put together those essays offline, and I work best with hard copies, So once I've copy-pasted the passages I need while I have a connection, I do the work offline. I could have typed in the finished application online in the end, but that's... academic. As it were.
I could still do that when I reconstruct my work later, I suppose. But it's such a pain! Might have to take out my frustrations again by beating or raping some of the hostages. But that experience could also be worked into the essay about leadership. Pray for my success!
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