Your My Pithy Observation

I’m hoping that, over time, I will come to believe that I wrote this myself. I’m pretty sure this will work, because I’ve recently noticed that I treat other people’s stories and ideas the same way I treat their CDs. When I first borrow someone’s CD I’m very careful, when taking it out of my player, to set it off to the right side of my desk, far away from the pile of my CDs on the left side of my desk. But one day in my haste to listen to the new Creed album, I take the borrowed CD out and just leave it in the middle of the desk. And then, on some later date when I’m straightening up, I pick up the uncategorized CDs in the middle and throw them into my pile, making a mental note to sort them out later. And from that point on it’s pretty much my CD. I’ll even create an entire backstory in which I purchased the CD myself using an Amazon.com gift certificate.

Same deal with borrowed experiences. At first, when I’m recounting something that happened to or was thought up by someone else, I take great care to properly attribute it. But then one day it occurs to me that it’s a lot quicker to say “me” instead of “a friend of mine I went to high school with” after the opening “A funny thing happened to”. And after the next mental straightening-up the great story gets integrated into my own biography and the great idea becomes something I dreamed up years ago. It’s better than the CD scenario, though, because you never have that awkward scene where the original owner demands you return the perloined goods, and you’re all like “screw you, dude, this is totally my Swimfan Soundtrack,” and then there’s all the punching.

Wow! That’s a pretty great analogy that I just made and/or read somewhere!