Constant vigilance

Am imagining myself in Italy with Nathan Fillion, instead of lying here in bed, with a headache the size of that leaning tower he's probably posing next to right now. (Nathan Fillion is actually too cool to pose as if he and the tower are both tipping over, I'm sure, it was just the largest thing my poor tired brain could think of.) I actually had a pretty eventful day - wedding crafting with my mom and sisters, which went relatively well.

When it comes to my sisters - to any of my family, really - "relatively" is the operative word. Members of my family have long accused me of being "overly sensitive", and I probably am, but I feel like I am certainly not alone in that personality trait - none of us is particularly immune to the barbs and arrows that are routinely slung around here. Only, for the most part, I feel like they are all only sensitive to what's coming at them, not at what they're dishing out, while I have to be on high alert for everybody's issues. (Hello: I'm an adult child of three alcoholics: I like to try to stave off any emotional conflict before it completely & disastrously explodes - Pleased to meet you!)

But I am apparently the only one who is on hyper-vigilant putting-out-fires-before-they-flame-up duty, because it often feels like every time I tune into a conversation, I see somebody standing there, dropping another match.

It's like they can't see each other's tender spots - or when they do see them, they underestimate the impact on that person when they poke at them. When they're doing it it's "just teasing/joking/making an observation", but if it's done to them, then it's a deliberate insult.

I know people do bite their tongues, which makes me grateful that they have some internal sensors, but I don't feel like anybody else is as tuned into trouble as I have to be. Nobody else seems to see that looking to SisterJ for what comes next is probably putting more pressure on her than she needs/wants, or that continuously laughing at Mum's attempts to cut straight leaves her more embarrassed than amused. Perhaps there's more than a kernel of truth in these things, or in the fact that SisterCh would rather play with her her music list than make a decision, but when people keep poking the same spot over and over, I find myself waiting for the inevitable to occur, and for some to go just one joke too far.

And Lord only knows what happens then.

Part of my apprehension is, of course, this newly formed/found peace between SisterJ and SisterCh, which (it seems to me as a semi-outsider) is being constantly strained and tested by the multitude and magnitude of wedding STUFF TO BE DONE, and while I know it is not my responsibility to try to police their interactions, I keep finding myself doing exactly that. (And then writing super long, run-on sentences about it!) I hear myself re-interpreting something one of them just said to the other, trying to soften a verbal blow that I hope was unintentional, or have to physically stop myself from following after them when they leave a room together, worrying about what might happen once they are out of earshot. It's unreasonable, and I know it, but I haven't figured out how to stop feeling it yet.

They're actually doing a lot better than I'd have imagined, but the potential for danger and chaos is frightening to me, and I know that it's kicking my control freak tendencies into high gear, leading people to tell me how bitchy I'm being, which, when you are really only trying to help, feels pretty awesome, let me tell you. So then I try to dial it back, and wind up seeming uncaring to somebody else. Balance: I need it. (You can't control other people, I keep telling myself. But knowing it and following through on it are two different things.)

What's really evident to me now, though, is how much it hurt when they were fighting - not just them, but me too, - and how powerless I felt during that whole thing. I don't want to feel that way again, so I am trying to throw myself on all the grenades I see now, before they blow us apart again. Of course, this is a stupid strategy, because A) maybe those aren't grenades to anybody else besides me, B) constantly watching for grenades is exhausting, as is trying to diffuse them before they blow up, and C) everybody involved is an adult, and I'm never going to be able to predict or control their behavior, so it's useless even to try.

I am well aware of all those points, and it helps, some, to calm me down when we get to spend a day like to day where there were three separate bouts of laughter-induced tears, two semi-completed projects, and a whole room full of very stubborn people who each gave the day their absolute all, but I have a feeling that this relationship repairing stuff is going to take a lot longer than I want to be on guard duty for, and am going to try to work on that.

Oops...

In the course of reading why Feminism is a tool of Satan (really), and how it's a horrible thing for our society, I came across this older article from December 2002. Written by Phyllis Schlafly, it's about "Feminist Fantasies" and how feminist organizations are out to ruin the world with their nefarious "equality" plots and demands - words like emasculating, sabotage, and radical litter the entire thing. It's pretty nauseating, actually. (Schlafly's public record - being one of the chief opponents to the ERA, her pro-death penalty for minors stance, and her paleoconservate views - weren't exactly benefits to the article's cause either, for me.)

At one point she's talking about the National Council of Women's Organizations fight to make the Augusta National Golf Club (home of the Masters tournament) truly a coed organization. She, of course, disapproves and is lauding the efforts of the club's owner to prevent this from happening. In the course of the discussion, she says (emphasis mine):

The feminists tried to use Tiger Woods, who won the Masters in 2002 for the third time, as a prop in their publicity stunt to advance their special-interest agenda. When asked what he thinks about Augusta National's rules, Tiger replied with the good sense that has made him a star and a role-model: "They're entitled to set up their own rules the way they want them.

Don't you just hate it when something you've written comes back to bite you on the ass? I wasn't buying anything she was saying up till that point (shocker - I actually think feminism is a good thing!), but after that, I just couldn't help laughing. Really, really hard.

In case you missed it...

There's a big kerfuffle over Amazon and its deranking of certain "adult" books. The kerfuffle being that the only books being deemed "adult" are those that contain GLBT themes and characters, and some erotica. What follows is the (3rd) draft of the e-mail I'll be sending them tomorrow... Any ideas for improvement?

Recently, I have come across numerous blog postings regarding new Amazon policies that either remove certain books from the front page searches or remove the sales rankings from certain books. According to these posts, the sole justification for the changes is the content of these books - specifically that they contain erotica; or are published by a mainly erotica publishing line; or that they contain characters who are homosexual, bisexual, or transsexual. Now, I will not pretend that I understand ranking and what it means to the sale of books, or even exactly how important it is for a book to be reachable from a front page search - I'm not in the publishing industry at all. I am, however, an avid reader, and I know that I often use your front page searches for books I am looking for, and if I don't find them there, I quickly move on to a different book. So I can see that the practice of removing certain books, imprints, and publishing lines from these searches would be detrimental to their sales.

Supposedly, these books are being adjusted based on their inclusion of "adult" material, and - while I do not condone that sort of practice at all - if that is your policy, I expect that it will be a blanket policy and apply equally to ALL books that are posted in your system. Unfortunately I'm seeing case after case where this is not what's occurring. If you were, in fact, to apply this policy to all of your books, then your search feature would become obsolete, your rankings meaningless.

Sure, lots of erotica contains "adult" material: so do lots of OTHER books: Fiction is full of "adult" material - will Lolita be losing it's rank? How about Shakespeare? What about regular romance novels that are published by mainstream publishers, rather than just those that are published under other imprints: I hardly ever notice who's published the book I am reading, but just glancing at my shelves, I know that there's more than one mainstream - bestselling - author whose work contains "adult" material: will their rankings be adjusted as well?

I'm quoting now from a blogger who's listing the books who's standings have been changed, and he writes "the only "sex scene" in The Well of Loneliness consists in its entirety of the words "And that night they were not divided."" The Well of Loneliness had it's sales rank removed, and yet I can think of more explicit sex scenes in almost everyone of my beloved Nora Roberts novels, and after checking three of her books, I see they are all still ranked. As is Playboy Nudes, Spring 2007.

And it's not just fiction - apparently, The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians: How to Stay Sane and Care for Yourself from Pre-conception through Birth, 2nd Edition has lost it's ranking: I fully expect, then, that What to expect when you're expecting will be unranked from now on as well? And that to search for it, you'd have to search from Books rather than All Amazon? And what could possibly be the justification behind labeling Young Adult books as "adult" material and giving them this treatment - unless you're also going to be de-ranking books I loved in my young adulthood, too? Will Are You There God, It's Me Margaret be no longer available from the front page search?

I am shocked and saddened to learn that it is your corporate policy to discriminate. Perhaps this is, as has been suggested in the blogosphere, an extreme programming error on your company's part - a glitch where books are being removed/de-ranked based on arbitrary keyword searches. Even so, the fact that those programs would be searching for terms that include words like 'gay', 'lesbian', 'bisexual', 'transexual', or 'erotica' to the exclusion of words like 'nude' or 'graphic sex' is incredibly discriminatory, and it's not something I can support.

Personally, I don't think you should be excluding any books from the searches, as it is obvious that you can not create a filter that will give the proper "consideration to your customer base." And I think it is very shortsighted that you would even try to - I am your customer base - I'm a reader, a book reviewer, and a friend to untold authors - I was certainly not "considered" when this decision was made. As a customer, I think it's more important for me to know that I will get accurate results from my search, rather than censored results. If I type in the name of a book, and the book doesn't come up until page 5, what's the point of searching? (As an extreme example - what good would it be to me if I searched for Hamlet, and instead got Green Eggs and Ham as the first result? Hamlet, after all contains violence & paranormal elements - perhaps they would be the next keywords to be excluded?) You do a disservice to all of your customers when you pick and choose what to include in the search results.

Judging by the responses I have seen online so far, your policy is going to start costing your company a lot of money, very soon. For my part, unless I see that your policy has been quickly changed, and an apology has been issued, I am one avid reader who will begin searching for my books somewhere else. I will also no longer link to books on amazon.com through my blog, and will be removing my wish list widget from my sidebar: I cannot knowingly contribute to a site where such policies are considered as sound corporate practice, and I am not alone - I think that you will find that if you'd like to earn the title of "earth's most customer-centric company" you have quite a ways to go