With all the appointments that Obama has to make, this second wave of vetting has really begun to build steam, so I've decided to be pro-active and initiate my very own self-vetting process. If there’s one thing that we’ve all learned from the McCain campaign, it’s that you just never know when you might be selected for a job that is totally and absurdly out of your league, one that flies way, way above your head. I want to be ready.
A thorough vetting should include any background information that might be inflammatory, controversial, or downright off-putting. Hmmmm. I might be in trouble.
But I don't have a whole lot to hide. Not anymore. And since I've recently been tagged as a "spammer," no doubt due to all the mass e-mails I've had to send out this year in order to keep friends and family updated about my cancer treatment and new girls, I've come to realize that there really is no such thing as privacy anymore, not on the web, e-mailing or blogging or browsing, not in this little town of mine, walking or meeting a friend or hiding out behind the evergreens, not in my testosterone-filled house, taking a shower, writing, doing my nightly yoga-so-I-can-sleep-without-waking-up-with-sore-hips, not really anywhere. There are spies everywhere, it seems, reading our emails, overseeing our online searches and purchases, sending spy chips home with us in our espionaged merchandise, and making rash judgments about what's okay and what's not. And all in the name of security, to quell the paranoia and anxiety that has justifiably sunk its teeth into the way we think about our identities, whatever they may be.
When I first heard that I had been identified as a "known spammer," (and on some big important all-caps-acronym-infested database, no less), I felt really bad, as in bad-girl bad, as in "Kids, don't expect any presents from Santa this year; your mamma has landed on the naughty list, and he doesn't give presents to children of known spammers." Clearly, I had done something wrong. And I was being punished. But I was confused. I don't send out spam. Why would what I send out be considered spam? Wasn't spam bad? Was I bad? It was the witch thing all over again. Spammer tag in tow, I suddenly felt a little like I had cooties (first, it was cancer cooties, and now spammer cooties, plus I still have those other cooties left over from having impetigo when I was in grade school) and everyone was staying clear of me. Let's isolate her; that'll surely do her in. No communication, no emails out, no emails in: a death sentence for those of us living on the edge of the abyss.
E-mail for me this past year has been a real lifeline, to the bigger world out there, to the notion of possibility, and most importantly, to the friends and family that have seen me through some of the toughest days of my life. I used e-mail to tell those people closest to me that I had cancer, that I was scared, that I was being brave, that I needed their help. I used it to receive that help, encouragement and support and love and good healing juju that I could not have done without. I still need it, still need to know that people are out there, that it's not just all the environmental groups wanting me to sign another petition getting through, because, oddly enough, those emails do get through in an avalanche of obligatory charitable requests, but all those dear friends and family members, too, with a warmth and wisdom that has the capacity to diminish the distance between us, ease the ache of loneliness, and restore my sense of surety in this world. I need them to get through, and I need to get through to them. Snail mail is cool and nostalgic and certainly has its place but is slow and expensive and, let's face it, not the most environmentally friendly option there is when you want to send a message out to the masses.
Without that connection, with Comcast blocking my emails from going out and others from coming in, life has felt uncertain, and I've felt untethered, adrift. I'm isolated as it is: homeschooling leaves little time to get out and about with friends or other adults, and living in this quiet rural area, where there are no sidewalks to take you and connect you to friends and neighbors, where the wind rushing through the hollows of evergreens and rippling across the meadows of dried grasses and corn stalks are often the only outside voices you hear, and where the communities do not always intertwine inclusively, while lovely, has not always been easy. E-mailing, then, being able to easily send a greeting, receive encouragement or news from afar, or share the latest hilarious political banquet of humor, has softened the rough hewn edges by making the complex web of interpersonal networking, that rich, broad, intermingling of lives, instantly accessible. Take that away, and you've stranded me on a deserted island, lost in every sense of the word. It's no wonder that my sense of isolation has grown precipitously sharp over these past months. We all know that the ability to stay connected is directly reflected in our overall sense of well being.
I've tried to make sense of it, reading all about the process of blacklisting and talking to Comcast customer service reps for hours on end, and they've promised me that someone today will call and clear things up, but so far, no one has called. So what to make of all this? I've determined that there are several possibilities: given the fact that the first Comcast rep I spoke with last week said that he had discovered a "fake account number" where my name should have been, there's a possibility that someone is using my address to send spam, real spam, as in that nasty, fake, canned hammish stuff that you truly don't want in your inbox or on your dinner table. A second possibility is that someone no longer wanted to receive my updates, momentarily forgot that zilrendrag is actually a real person named liz gardner and not some online sex shop selling nipples and boobies, and reported me as spam. And finally, and this perhaps makes the most sense, is that all those misguided, overzealous Comcast spies saw suspicious, spammish patterns in my group emailing, to a buying club I'm trying to get off the ground, to Luke's and Dominick's soccer teams, to family members about the inherited traits survey homeschool project the boys and I have been doing, to kith and kin with updates on my treatment and reconstruction, and so shut me down without investigating it properly. Perhaps it was more than just the periodic mass e-mailing, perhaps it was the mysterious, slightly alluring subject lines like "the boobies are coming," or the tantalizing text within, akin to male enhancement claims, "painless, simple and fun: you, too, can get a nipple in less than an hour."
Whatever the reason, there it is: I've been called lots of things in my life--egg head, bone, shameless, crazy legs, iron lungs, Lady Godiva, meanest mom in the whole world, but never spammer. Until now. Your mamma is a spammer!
Ok, enough about the spamming; it's only making me frustrated, and hungry. I'll resume my self-vetting tomorrow. And since there's a potentially toxic full moon out there tonight, and I've been warned to watch my tongue, I'll post this tamale. For now, the ice storm has passed through, the sun appeared to blaze fugaciously in a partly blue sky--something we haven't seen for a long while around here--and all the little icicles that hung like sabers from the eaves of the bird houses have melted. Ever since seeing that Grey's Anatomy episode where Sandra Oh's character takes an icicle in the belly, I've worried for the little birds that flit unaware around the icicles. It's time to try to find the moon.
But I don't have a whole lot to hide. Not anymore. And since I've recently been tagged as a "spammer," no doubt due to all the mass e-mails I've had to send out this year in order to keep friends and family updated about my cancer treatment and new girls, I've come to realize that there really is no such thing as privacy anymore, not on the web, e-mailing or blogging or browsing, not in this little town of mine, walking or meeting a friend or hiding out behind the evergreens, not in my testosterone-filled house, taking a shower, writing, doing my nightly yoga-so-I-can-sleep-without-waking-up-with-sore-hips, not really anywhere. There are spies everywhere, it seems, reading our emails, overseeing our online searches and purchases, sending spy chips home with us in our espionaged merchandise, and making rash judgments about what's okay and what's not. And all in the name of security, to quell the paranoia and anxiety that has justifiably sunk its teeth into the way we think about our identities, whatever they may be.
When I first heard that I had been identified as a "known spammer," (and on some big important all-caps-acronym-infested database, no less), I felt really bad, as in bad-girl bad, as in "Kids, don't expect any presents from Santa this year; your mamma has landed on the naughty list, and he doesn't give presents to children of known spammers." Clearly, I had done something wrong. And I was being punished. But I was confused. I don't send out spam. Why would what I send out be considered spam? Wasn't spam bad? Was I bad? It was the witch thing all over again. Spammer tag in tow, I suddenly felt a little like I had cooties (first, it was cancer cooties, and now spammer cooties, plus I still have those other cooties left over from having impetigo when I was in grade school) and everyone was staying clear of me. Let's isolate her; that'll surely do her in. No communication, no emails out, no emails in: a death sentence for those of us living on the edge of the abyss.
E-mail for me this past year has been a real lifeline, to the bigger world out there, to the notion of possibility, and most importantly, to the friends and family that have seen me through some of the toughest days of my life. I used e-mail to tell those people closest to me that I had cancer, that I was scared, that I was being brave, that I needed their help. I used it to receive that help, encouragement and support and love and good healing juju that I could not have done without. I still need it, still need to know that people are out there, that it's not just all the environmental groups wanting me to sign another petition getting through, because, oddly enough, those emails do get through in an avalanche of obligatory charitable requests, but all those dear friends and family members, too, with a warmth and wisdom that has the capacity to diminish the distance between us, ease the ache of loneliness, and restore my sense of surety in this world. I need them to get through, and I need to get through to them. Snail mail is cool and nostalgic and certainly has its place but is slow and expensive and, let's face it, not the most environmentally friendly option there is when you want to send a message out to the masses.
Without that connection, with Comcast blocking my emails from going out and others from coming in, life has felt uncertain, and I've felt untethered, adrift. I'm isolated as it is: homeschooling leaves little time to get out and about with friends or other adults, and living in this quiet rural area, where there are no sidewalks to take you and connect you to friends and neighbors, where the wind rushing through the hollows of evergreens and rippling across the meadows of dried grasses and corn stalks are often the only outside voices you hear, and where the communities do not always intertwine inclusively, while lovely, has not always been easy. E-mailing, then, being able to easily send a greeting, receive encouragement or news from afar, or share the latest hilarious political banquet of humor, has softened the rough hewn edges by making the complex web of interpersonal networking, that rich, broad, intermingling of lives, instantly accessible. Take that away, and you've stranded me on a deserted island, lost in every sense of the word. It's no wonder that my sense of isolation has grown precipitously sharp over these past months. We all know that the ability to stay connected is directly reflected in our overall sense of well being.
I've tried to make sense of it, reading all about the process of blacklisting and talking to Comcast customer service reps for hours on end, and they've promised me that someone today will call and clear things up, but so far, no one has called. So what to make of all this? I've determined that there are several possibilities: given the fact that the first Comcast rep I spoke with last week said that he had discovered a "fake account number" where my name should have been, there's a possibility that someone is using my address to send spam, real spam, as in that nasty, fake, canned hammish stuff that you truly don't want in your inbox or on your dinner table. A second possibility is that someone no longer wanted to receive my updates, momentarily forgot that zilrendrag is actually a real person named liz gardner and not some online sex shop selling nipples and boobies, and reported me as spam. And finally, and this perhaps makes the most sense, is that all those misguided, overzealous Comcast spies saw suspicious, spammish patterns in my group emailing, to a buying club I'm trying to get off the ground, to Luke's and Dominick's soccer teams, to family members about the inherited traits survey homeschool project the boys and I have been doing, to kith and kin with updates on my treatment and reconstruction, and so shut me down without investigating it properly. Perhaps it was more than just the periodic mass e-mailing, perhaps it was the mysterious, slightly alluring subject lines like "the boobies are coming," or the tantalizing text within, akin to male enhancement claims, "painless, simple and fun: you, too, can get a nipple in less than an hour."
Whatever the reason, there it is: I've been called lots of things in my life--egg head, bone, shameless, crazy legs, iron lungs, Lady Godiva, meanest mom in the whole world, but never spammer. Until now. Your mamma is a spammer!
Ok, enough about the spamming; it's only making me frustrated, and hungry. I'll resume my self-vetting tomorrow. And since there's a potentially toxic full moon out there tonight, and I've been warned to watch my tongue, I'll post this tamale. For now, the ice storm has passed through, the sun appeared to blaze fugaciously in a partly blue sky--something we haven't seen for a long while around here--and all the little icicles that hung like sabers from the eaves of the bird houses have melted. Ever since seeing that Grey's Anatomy episode where Sandra Oh's character takes an icicle in the belly, I've worried for the little birds that flit unaware around the icicles. It's time to try to find the moon.
1 comment:
Hi Liz,
What is the best way to email you now? I want to get your mailing address, I have something to send you! Hope you are surviving the storm.
Love, Maribeth
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