Tightrope.

Sometimes I'm worried, or even ashamed, that I don't make a "good" friend, particularly to my "good" friends who look out for me. You could say that I expect a certain level of obligatory give-and-take in friendship.

And then there are times when I resent being put in a spot, especially if my self-interest or integrity is being compromised, or if I had as a matter of choice, mostly refrained from imposing on that friend. Worse still, if said friend had knowingly imposed on me and hence compromised my position. At times like this, I wonder just how much reciprocity, mileage and tolerance one can reasonably expect from friendship.

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Am helping to proof-read a friend's thesis. I had agreed to her request most willingly. I just didn't expect to be working on something where close to half of the intellectual property didn't exactly belong to her. And that I would have to "scrub" really hard, to the point of reorganising some of the flow and rephrasing much of the writing into the accepted academic style. At one point, she asked me to just make her "sound intelligent".

Granted, I don't doubt she can "sound intelligent" without anyone's help, because she is.

Granted, I don't doubt she would give the due acknowledgements, but such things are so generally worded anyway.

Granted also, thesis writing is a very stressful process (look at what happened to ME), but that doesn't make it acceptable to take one too many shortcuts and to compromise one's integrity, does it?

I found it distasteful because the whole thing reminded me of an ex-colleague who told me that her then-boyfriend (who is now her husband) had helped her with most of her Honours thesis. And later, she had hoped to pick up a Masters thesis by making use of external resources, AGAIN. Now, I may not be the most disciplined and virtuous person in my own small circle of friends, but I do have my own principles that I try to live by.

Would like to think that my friend was just ignorant of the standards expected of academic writing and the dissertation process, as well as the ethical issues. But I remember having talked to or reminded her about some of these things. So, what if she had simply forgotten, because there's always just so many things going on in her life? Well, there are just some things you shouldn't forget, and you should take personal responsibility for.

Nonetheless, on a few occasions, I have chosen to cover for her. Because sometimes I felt that it was partly my fault. Because sometimes I thought that is what a friend should do, and she has helped me before. And because, really, what's done is done, there's no point to saying "I told you so", and we should just salvage what we can of the situation.

Well, I'll still help her with what I had agreed to.

But if it should ever start to unravel, and I truly hope for her that it would not, she would have to depend on her own 2 hands to keep it all together.