Essays and Family Guy

8 years have passed since I last wrote an essay. A lot has happened over the past 8 years and although my essay writing skills have laid dormant in the depths of my mind for this time, I assumed all it would take is a quick dust and polish and they would be as good as new. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t been using language and writing for these erstwhile years. Surely essay writing will be just like writing an email, or my shopping list. And surely quoting and referencing will be just like when I hear a really funny line off Family Guy and rush to find a pencil and some paper so I can later refer to it and experience the humour all over again, carefully noting the ‘author’ of the line so as not to misquote them or to be accused of plagiarism by a friend far more educated in all things Family Guy then I.

“I never knew Biscuit as a dog, but I did know her as a table. She was sturdy, all four legs the same length…”
(Griffin, Stewie, 2000, The Road to Rhode Island, In Family Guy, USA)

How wrong I was. As I sit here and write my first essay in years, each word painfully flowing from my fingers into the keyboard, face screwed up in literary agony, I breath heavily with exertion and the end of each sentence is celebrated with a nice lean back in the chair and a jatz cracker. As I watch the word count creep closer and closer to the magic number which I know will put an end to my painful reintroduction to essay writing, I find less things to distract me, as the promise of liberation becomes more reality than a mere dream of freedom.