January 23, 2008

Opting Out

A few days ago I received an email reminder from a group organizer about a presentation at the Quaker center Pendle Hill. (Hope it rocked, Becky!) Yesterday I and the other email list members received an email that read, in part,
"please take my name off the [name of mailing list] list. I'm not connected to that world anymore and don't need or want to be on the mailing list. "
This has been sticking in my craw. It's hard for me to imagine resigning from an email list because I'm no longer connected to the world it represents. Unless it was a list that had to do with the developmental stages of our son, maybe. (I'm sure I did unsubscribe from some toddler-related listservs once Mr. D had made the shift into full-time boy.) But something like this, where a person opts to leave some piece of their identity behind (either queer or Quaker, I'm not sure which in this case), is hard for me to imagine. I think I am less about shedding skins and more about gradual accretion of affiliations. What think you?

(In other news, Mr. D had a great visit
with his MD cousins this past weekend.
Can photos be far behind?)


2 comments:

Nancy Bea Miller said...

I've opted out of many mailing lists, both email and real world. Sometimes something is not what I thought it would be, or sometimes over time my interests have shifted enough that the list becomes an automatic no-read. This sounds like a mailing list with which you feel highly personally identified, and so someone else's no longer finding it helpful/important/applicable would stick in your craw!

The only mistake here, in my opinion, is the opt-outer hitting "reply all" instead of just privately emailing the list secretary. Oh well!

Tracy said...

Yep. I am for fewer emails. If it no longer pertains, I want out. However, I think it's in your lovely craw because the person's wording was slightly...um...not nice-ish. It had a ring of, "get lost" to it. "Please remove me from your list" would have sufficed, without the implied judgment I hear in there somewhere between the use of the word "world" (like she dismisses the whole lot of you) and the "want or need" (overkill! geesh!)

I, however, DO want AND need pix of the D man and the MD cousins (I hear they're gorgeous, like their mom...)