I’ve never had my writing stolen before. It was something that just belonged to me and a few other people read it sometimes. And some of these people would comment, there are a few who always email and maybe some others of you just read it and kept to yourself. That’s cool… I usually do that too.

(tangent… does anyone else think that the convenience of a feed reader is also causing less interaction among bloggers? It’s taking that extra step to click through and comment rather than just nodding to yourself or laughing a little before you keep scrolling down? No… just me? Well color me lazy.)

But the other afternoon, I was kind of bored and my feed reader was empty and I hadn’t watched Project Runway OR Mad Men so I was avoiding Television Without Pity AND Tom and Lorenzo plus there were other people in the office so those episodes of Weeds on iTunes weren’t doing me any favors EITHER. (And it should go without saying that working was out of the question… it was too hot.) So as I’m looking through my bookmarks list, I notice a long-forgotten link to a stats counter for this site. Meh… why not. I’m bored and surely that will kill at LEAST 45 seconds until I resort to picking at my cuticles.

So of course, I recognized most everyone listed and was just about to click to something equally fascinating when I saw some sort of link from a website called Gravity. The link was a long one but as I looked at it, something was oddly familiar. The link was the title to a very stupid post I’d made back in 2007 about having a sore ass after gardening. And someone, just a few days earlier, had tried to pass it off as their own.

They failed. Someone, some stranger with a super hero’s cape, called them on it. And I live to fight crime another day. But this had never happened to me before and I guess somewhere, somehow, its supposed to be a compliment that someone liked what I said enough to claim it as their own or whatever but I was really shocked by just how angry I got. Those were MY words. And ridiculous as they may be, they were still mine.

I am glad that they were called on it before I even discovered the whole situation because when I did actually post something on this (VERY strange) Gravity website, nobody believed that I was me. It was the weirdest feeling, reading people who were saying “I seriously doubt that the original poster would take the time to join Gravity just to confront someone who copied their work.” Really? Well first of all, it only took like 3 seconds to join. But secondly and more important, why wouldn’t I take the time to do just that? Those words are MINE. And some asshole was trying to pass them off as their own and then backing down like a little bitch as soon as they were confronted. “Oh no, I NEVER meant to imply that I wrote that.”

So those of you who have been plagiarized… what did you do? Did you just ignore it? And were you as angry as I was when you discovered it? (Not only that… but then somewhere else on this Gravity site, someone called me a one hit wonder. And then? They called me OLD!!! Perhaps I shall burn and pillage? Plunder? Pontificate? What’s the word I’m looking for… and if it belongs to you, can I borrow it?)