i have arrived! i have not arrived!

Ulysses Update #11
Yeah. Whose terrible idea was it to post about Ulysses every day? Mine? Awesome. Anyway there’s this book called Ulysses and I’m still reading it. And now you’ve been updated!

I Have Arrived!
I got an email from Manu informing me that there’s a blog out there with my posts on it, though it appears to be by a dude. Well, I am here to tell you that I am not a dude, so I checked out the blog and I was being plagiarized. Two of my posts are on it:

random question of the day (or, that one about oatmeal), which was originally posted on October 2.

and

this meme, originally posted on October 3.

Both posts seem to have been put on Thiefblog (that’s not really the name, and I’m not linking to it on purpose) on October 6.

I’ve been plagiarized a few times before. There was one time when someone stole large chunks of an old About page I had on a previous incarnation of this blog and used it for her own About page. I read it and thought about contacting the blog’s owner and saying I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER “I notice that you seem to be unable to come up with your own original material and have therefore decided to describe yourself as… well, as me.” And then I considered whether or not it was actually doing me any harm, knowing that there was someone using my words and not giving me any credit for them. I eventually decided that it wasn’t doing me harm, especially since my blog is not a commercial entity and from the looks of things, nobody was actually reading that other blog anyway. I’ve thought about it a few times since. I don’t know if I made the right decision, because even though I generally tend to err on the side of not making a fuss about things, the fact still remains that those words are mine, dammit. I wrote them. They are my jokes. And I don’t care if people quote me or tell my jokes or whatever, but still. Credit where credit is due, and all.

So now here I am, faced with the decision once again. I can file an infringement claim with Google or I can let it ride. (And is it wrong that I’m irritated the person didn’t at least steal something really good? I mean, a meme? COME ON.) I guess what it comes down to is whether or not I want to set a precedent of letting people take my stuff. I know that people will take my stuff, and I know that I will not always be aware of it, but I don’t know if I want to make a policy of being cool with outright theft. Ah, decisions, decisions.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure being plagiarized means that I have arrived. Somewhere.

I Have Not Arrived!
Three months ago, I think, I was contacted and asked if I would be interested in writing a chapter in a book about the Beats. It was to be a philosophy book and I would be writing about the poet Gary Snyder and environmentalism and Zen. I was contacted at the last minute so I only had a little bit of time to figure out what the heck I was doing and I spent about an hour writing a proposal/abstract. I’m no academic and I felt very much out of my league, at least in terms of credentials, but I wasn’t really worried about the writing part because while there may be many areas where I am awkwardly lacking in confidence, writing isn’t one of them. I’m so good people steal from me! (Please see I Have Arrived! above.) Ahem. Anyway, I sent off my proposal and didn’t hear anything back and pretty much forgot all about it, but I got a note yesterday informing me that there were two Gary Snyder articles competing for inclusion in the book and the publishers decided to go with the other one. Man. I didn’t know it was a COMPETITION. Had I known, I would’ve worked harder on WINNING. Drat!

I don’t think it would be correct to say I’m disappointed, because I’m not. I’d pretty much already filed the entire experience under One Of Those Random Things That Happen To Me Sometimes and moved on, and besides, I apparently have mad on-the-spot proposal-writing skillz (that may be a paraphrase of something the note said and not a direct quotation).

This just goes to show you that arriving is a fluid process, and as soon as you do arrive, you don’t.