My worst fears...realized in a dream

Yesterday, I read about a blogger who had his post plagiarized by a different blogger. He linked to her and a few of his devoted followers posted nasty comments on her blog. She basically changed a couple words and passed it off as her own. Now, plagiarism is one of my pet peeves. I'm so anal about it that I copyrighted my thesis and nobody copyrights their thesis. And as a teacher, I encountered plagiarism constantly. It was only for extra credit and students were plagiarizing like mad. Now I structure my classes to exclude any writing requirements because I can't stand having to deal with student plagiarism. But, having your blog plagiarized?!?! Now that's just way too personal.

So I woke up this morning from a horrible dream that stemmed completely from yesterday's plagiarizing events. I dreamed that I was younger and back in college, just meeting my roommate in a tiny dorm room. For some reason, now that we were roommates, I had to share my blog with her (willful suspension of reality). So I check out my blog to write something and discover that she changed the template, took down my picture, replaced it with her picture on the left, and slathered a whole bunch of pictures of herself across the top. Then she wrote this asinine post and signed it with my name. ::shudder:: I tried to reason with her, but it was futile. (Which is what happened with this girl in real life. She passes other people's posts off as her own almost every other post. Other bloggers have called her on it and requested she cite them or delete the post. She does neither, just leaves the comment there and continues posting other people's writing. There's even a blogger who monitors her and consistently leaves a comment with the URL of the person she just plagiarized. Yet she still keeps doing it!!)

I hope I never end up reading about blog plagiarism again. I just can't live through another dream like this...mirroring my intense reaction to reality.