Take My Word for It

I was reading a popular blog a few days ago and was surprised to find out that several of her posts had been stolen by another blogger. We’re not talking about a similar turn of a phrase here. Nope. It was outright plagiarism down to the last word and idea. Only the names had been changed. Ick.

This got me thinking about bloggy plagiarism. I mean, most of us blog for ourselves as a creative outlet. Is there THAT much pressure to perform that someone needs to troll the Internet for someone else’s anecdotes on daily life?

I mean we’ve all seen renowned journalists throw away their careers under pressure to come up with the perfect story, the perfect quote, or the perfect source. We’ve seen military men pad their resumes and college presidents be exposed as frauds claiming to have degrees that they don’t.

But bloggers?

I would like to think that if blogging becomes so pressured for us to produce that we can’t even fashion posts about our own lives, with our own words, we would step back and evaluate whether we needed to refocus on living life instead of writing about it.

Later on that same day I was reading a post by a favorite new blogger when I saw that she mentioned hiding from her kids in her bathroom. She also remarked how after a hard day with her children, she was glad she wasn’t the subject of a Dateline special. I felt all weird inside.

These were my sentiments exactly! I’ve talked about this before-- how I spent a good portion of my kids’ toddlerhood holed up in my bathroom pounding a diet Pepsi and wishing away their childhoods.

And Dateline? How many times had I said this very thing? My next question was, would I ever be able to blog about these matters, or would I, too, be considered a plagiarizer? Why hadn’t I blogged about it BEFORE I read her blog?

Or, is the whole hiding in the bathroom thing a universal aspect of motherhood such as thinking soccer trophies are stupid or realizing that our kids can be annoying?

What about saggy boobs? If I refer to my breasts as looking like a marble in a tube sock will I be the only one? Lord, I hope not. And my fave new blog’s awesome blog title? Stretch Marks!!! I have stretch marks! Is that copying??

I must admit a crippling sense of responsibility in dealing with similar questions throughout my life. Upon first learning about plagiarism in grade school, my desire to cite all my sources bordered on the obsessive.

In fact, I remember worrying that if my writing sounded far too advanced, my teacher would not think it original. Not much of a risk there for my 9 year old self, but I was concerned.

I also recall writing a report on the giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands. In one of the school encyclopedias I found this priceless nugget: the giant tortoise would urinate on her own eggs. I remember being titillated by this fact and eager to include it in my endangered species report (are they still endangered?).

However, when the time came to put pen to paper, I couldn’t find the page number in any of the encyclopedias, so I reluctantly left the fact off my report. To this day I’ve wonder whether the whole urination thing was a figment of my imagination. Never mind, just Googled it—it’s true.

In case you don’t think I was odd enough as a child, this was about the same time of life that I saved all of my movie ticket stubs.

Sentimental?

Nope. I wanted to have proof of my whereabouts should I, as the wayward child that I wasn’t, be accused of any heinous crime. “No, officer, I was not involved in that stick-up at the First American bank at 3:45 on Saturday; I was at the mall seeing ‘For the Love of Benji’ and I can PROVE it!”

But I digress. Some days I feel like blogging, so I do. Some days I’ve got nothing to say, so I don’t. Some days I probably shouldn’t blog, but I do anyway. Hello? A picture of the can of beans we ate for dinner last night? Sorry.

It would be easy to read the tippy-top blogs and feel insecure enough to want to be just like them. Maybe that’s what happened to the plagiarizer, whose blog, thank goodness, is no longer on the Internet.

I guess I just want to thank you for reading! Writing this blog is pure fun, and although I may lament not being as deep or as funny as some of my favorite bloggers, I don’t feel the need to be someone I’m not. Unless that person has perky breasts and no stretch marks, that is.