Excitement in my life is usually the unwelcome and unexpected sort.

(This makes me wonder whether I kill the welcome kind of excitement simply by expecting it. But that is an entirely different issue!)

So, the unwelcome and unexpected sort...

Last night I discover that a girl -- someone I have know when she was a 13- or 14-year-old and a few years older -- has been lifting posts from my blog and glibly posting them on her Facebook page as her own. She has lifted not just phrases or lines, but entire posts. In one such copy-pasted post on her wall, she has tweaked the last paragraph to suit her own life (childhood, in this case). The original paragraph that I had written talks of a game between my brother and me as small children. She has tweaked it to read like a game between her and her brother (who I happen to have known rather well too). Her brother, oblivious of his sister's doing, has even commented on the piece of writing.

When I realised what this girl has been up to, for the past five or six months it seems, I saw red. I have rarely been so livid, about anything. I shot off stinkers to her and her brother. I took screen grabs (below) of the girl's FB profile with my writings on it. Posted those screen grabs on my FB profile. Fuming all the while.

So, why was I fuming? This is, after all, a rather insignificant blog, read by a handful of friends. Does it really matter that someone has picked up stuff from it and flaunted it as her own? (Maybe I should be flattered that my writing is liked so much?)

There is one reason really.

Something belonging to me had been taken without my knowing. If she would have asked, I would have happily given it, no matter what my current equations with her or her brother are. But behaving like a sneaky little thief is not something that I will accept from anyone.

Perhaps, there is another reason.

It is an angry sense of disappointment at learning that a kid I was once quite fond of has grown up to be that sneaky little thief.