Omega Point

A decade in the life of…

Jan­u­ary 1, 2000
The Y2K bug does not result in air­planes falling from the sky, stock mar­kets crash­ing, or nuclear mis­siles launch­ing on their own. Pun­dits decry the waste­ful spend­ing of bil­lions to ensure noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant hap­pened. IT depart­ments world­wide sput­ter in bewil­der­ment. “But! But!”

Octo­ber, 2000
I come out to a few select friends and fam­ily. My par­ents imme­di­ately fight over which one of them is most accept­ing of it. It later turns out the answer is “neither”.

Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001
The Amer­i­can Cen­tury comes to a close. The sub­se­quent decade sees West­ern civ­i­liza­tion dig its heels in, ineptly seek­ing secu­rity and short-term gains at all costs. I watch CNN for 6 months straight.

Octo­ber 23, 2001
Apple releases the iPod. I fail to see what the big deal is. Investors dis­agree sig­nif­i­cantly on this point.

Decem­ber 20, 2002
“Sec­ond Life? What’s that?” I ask as I click the link. “What a stu­pid name!”

Feb­ru­ary 1, 2003
I move to Van­cou­ver on an ill-advised whim. The next three years are…interesting. To this day, I still wake up think­ing cock­roaches are eat­ing dead skin off my face.

Jan­u­ary 14, 2006
Some dude cuts most of my face off and totally goes to town on my skull with power tools. For­tu­nately, he was a doc­tor. I can breathe through my nose now.

August, 2006
As a part-time con­tract LSL devel­oper, I am paid in US dol­lars. Cur­rency fluc­tu­a­tions force me to give up LSL devel­op­ment in favour of work­ing a min­i­mum wage retail job. I like it a lot better.

Novem­ber 18, 2006
I man­age to get pub­lished for the first time. It is not exactly my finest work.

Decem­ber 20, 2006
I’ve just been told about this new CMS that’s sup­posed to be pretty good. “Dru­pal? More like Poo–pal!” I exclaim to a cir­cle of blank, embar­rassed faces. Nice.

April 21, 2007
A lab test indi­cates I may have can­cer. Sub­se­quent tests indi­cate I have stress. I con­sider rem­e­dy­ing both by hav­ing alcoholism.

July 22, 2008
My Palm Treo dies. I buy an iPhone. Unfor­tu­nately, every­one I know can be divided into two camps: Peo­ple who already have iPhones and peo­ple who don’t care that I am now the coolest per­son ever.

August 15, 2008
I learn my knee pain is likely to be the result of osteoarthri­tis. At such an early age, the impli­ca­tion is that I will not be able to walk in 10 years.

Sep­tem­ber 1, 2008
I am told I do not have osteoarthri­tis after all. As such, I am likely to con­tinue walk­ing for some time. “Your knees look great,” the doc­tor says, peer­ing at the x-ray. “Say, how much exer­cise do you get?”

Jan­u­ary 1-Dec 31, 2009
I endure a great deal of bull­shit. My friends are kept appraised of the situation–to their dismay.

And that’s what I did dur­ing the aughts. How about you?

Catherine Dyke Marches

Yes­ter­day, I kicked off my Pride week­end¹ here in Van­cou­ver by head­ing to Com­mer­cial Drive for the 6th Annual Van­cou­ver Dyke March.² Sweet.

I’ve writ­ten recently about why I like the Dyke March: its inclu­sive­ness, the sense of com­mu­nity, the cute girls… but mostly, it’s an oppor­tu­nity to feel nor­mal with­out being normalized.

Despite pop­u­lar rumours to the con­trary, Cather­ine Win­ters is not a com­bi­na­tion of Angelina Jolie as Acid Burn in Hack­ers and Kather­ine Moen­nig as Shane on The L Word. I’ve never been arrested by the FBI, I don’t bring a different–or even the same–girl home every night to my les­bian bach­e­lor pad, and I’m not the great­est pro­gram­mer ever. It’s true, I’m afraid.

In fact, I’ve only been in a styl­ized, cyber­punkesque sword fight at most three or four times. (I know, right?)

Still, while I may tend towards the femme/lipstick side of the scale these days, I’ve never exactly con­sid­ered myself par­tic­u­larly straight-acting–whatever that means. For some rea­son, some peo­ple are still sur­prised to learn I’m gay though. In a way, it’s actu­ally more irri­tat­ing than my baby dyke phase^[3] when I buzzed my hair and was assumed to be a les­bian by pretty much every­one I met. At least then, I knew where every­one stood.

In fact, after I decided that maybe being gay and tall didn’t nec­es­sar­ily imply “butch”, I didn’t actu­ally fig­ure out how to come out to any­one for a while. I hadn’t done it since I was a teenager and even today, I’m out of prac­tice. In fact, I still tend to assume every­one just knows at a glance. It’s always quite jar­ring to me when acquain­tances ask about boyfriends or expect some com­mis­er­a­tive ban­ter about men: “You know what guys are like!” “Um, sure!”

Some­times I don’t bother cor­rect­ing any­one, and I won­der at times, if that’s being dis­hon­est. Maybe. Then again, most of the time it isn’t rel­e­vant. What I’ve never become con­fi­dent about is my abil­ity to tell when it is.

As I pointed out to a friend over cof­fee recently, I hadn’t actu­ally ticked the “Inter­ested in Women” check­box on my Face­book pro­file until a few months ago. On the one hand, if we’re friends on Face­book, you prob­a­bly already know that about me. Still, what if you don’t? Almost nobody assumes “I don’t know” about people’s sex­ual orientation–that’s sim­ply not how our soci­ety works. Instead, we assume a default of “straight”. In the absence of that bit of infor­ma­tion, some­one would have an inac­cu­rate pic­ture of who I am.

So what’s the rest of that pic­ture? Well, I’m loyal to my friends. I like cof­fee. I’m into graphic design and web devel­op­ment and user inter­ac­tion and typog­ra­phy. I read a lot of nov­els and like rid­ing my bike. That’s what defines “Cather­ine”, not who I am–or am not–attracted to. That said, my sex­u­al­ity affects who I am in a sig­nif­i­cant way, just as my height does. I see the world dif­fer­ently as a les­bian than I would if I was straight.

I won­der at times if I’m putting too much of myself out there when I share my thoughts about this kind of uncer­tainty. My over­shares usu­ally involve bod­ily func­tions, so I can’t use my usual tricks to fig­ure out if this is get­ting too per­sonal. At the same time, it’s impos­si­ble for me to write about queer top­ics or events with­out get­ting into my per­sonal experience–and I do want to write about them.

So that said, how did the Dyke March go, anyway?

Good! Except it was really hot out. That’s def­i­nitely my least favourite part, hon­estly. I man­aged to escape with­out a huge sun­burn, thank­fully, but I still got more sun than I prefer.

I got to McSpad­den Park early and chat­ted with a few women before my friends arrived. By the time it was ready for us all to walk up Com­mer­cial, there were a thou­sand women clus­tered under the lim­ited shade pro­vided by the trees at the edges of the field. “No, you all have to come over here,” the emcee shouted into her megaphone.

Mable Elmore, cur­rently the Mem­ber of BC’s Leg­isla­tive Assem­bly for my rid­ing, LGBT and Fil­ipino com­mu­nity activist, tran­sit union orga­nizer, and for­merly my bus dri­ver, opened the march. When talk­ing with friends, I’ve been quite enthu­si­as­tic about her, (“You grew up in a big union town, huh, Cat?”) but sadly, we’ve never met.

The weird­est part of the day came at Grand­view Park once we’d arrived: some­one actu­ally rec­og­nized me. By reputation.

I finally found a friend and her “les­brar­i­ans” ban­ner, com­plete with Venn dia­gram indi­cat­ing the inter­sec­tion between “librar­i­ans” and “les­bians”. Frankly, I’m guess­ing her illus­tra­tion was con­ser­v­a­tive about the overlap.

She intro­duced me to a cou­ple of the other les­brar­i­ans: “And this is Cather­ine, the Dru­pal devel­oper I was telling you about!”

“Wow, Dru­pal!”

“Dru­pal!?” my friend said. “Pfft, Cather­ine also invented Sec­ond Life–”

That is not even close to being true,” I said.

“Sec­ond Life? Wait, Cather­ine Win­ters?”

Yes, seri­ously. It was the most impressed any­one has ever been with me. So that part was pretty rad.

As for pho­tos, no, I didn’t bother tak­ing my cam­era, and my iPhone is not well-suited for out­door shots in incred­i­bly bright direct sun­light. There aren’t many on Flickr either, as it hap­pens. I guess the crazy social media cir­cles I usu­ally run in haven’t totally spread to Vancouver’s les­bian com­mu­nity yet.

I know there plenty were pho­tos taken, mind you. While walk­ing up the Drive, my friend noticed a cou­ple dudes with fairly serious-looking video cameras.

“Wait, are we going to be on the news?” she asked.

I assured her I felt this to be extremely unlikely.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Well, the media tends to not be sure how to describe the event…”

“Hmm?”

“Well, ‘Dyke’ is kind of a slur…”

“Ha!”

True enough, there’s hun­dreds of sto­ries about Vancouver’s Pride Parade in Google News today and three about the Dyke March. So maybe next year.

[1] The rest of it will be spent being a tired old lady and going to bed at 9PM.

[2] Proof I can be wrong about things:

Girl: “Is this the first one they’ve had?“
Me: “No!“
Other Girl: “Like… the sec­ond?“
Me: “It’s the eighth, I think.“
Most Enger­getic Emcee Ever: “WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL VANCOUVER DYKE MARCH!“
Them: “Ha!”

And then they kept men­tion­ing that! It’s like I have some kind of reputation.

[3] Dis­claimer: while I had a phase–and it was a phase for me–where I thought I had to iden­tify as butch in order to be a “real” les­bian, I do want to clar­ify that I’m not speak­ing of androg­y­nous or butch les­bians in gen­eral. This is strictly my own per­sonal expe­ri­ence of fig­ur­ing out my sex­ual iden­tity and the impli­ca­tions thereof. It took me a while to feel com­fort­able with the idea that I wasn’t betray­ing any­one by being true to myself. (And hey, I’m still com­pelled to write this foot­note, so maybe I’ll get there fully one day!)

Pride by any other name

As a quick aside, one argu­ment I’ve heard about the Gay Pride Parade recently is that if its pur­pose as an activism tool has ended in North Amer­ica, maybe it shouldn’t be called “Pride” any­more. Hon­estly though, we have vir­tu­ally no hol­i­days or tra­di­tions that make any sense when viewed from their orig­i­nal con­texts. Seri­ously, Guy Fawkes Day? Valentine’s day? April Fools’ Day? Look­ing for authen­tic­ity in hol­i­days is pretty futile, in my opin­ion. They are what we want them to be, and they’re sig­nif­i­cant because we cel­e­brated them last year and the year before that, not because our great-grandparents observed them exactly the same way as we do.

Frankly, in a thou­sand years, when Pride has become all mixed up with St Patrick’s Day and every­one car­ries a genet­i­cally engi­neered blue cucum­ber because that’s tra­di­tional, the ori­gin of the day’s name–whatever that may be by then–is just going to be a weird bit of trivia men­tioned on the news on years when they need hol­i­day filler.

So there.

Critical Pride Part 2: Midnight Mass & the Dyke March

As a fol­lowup to some of the dis­cus­sion result­ing from yesterday’s post com­par­ing Pride and Crit­i­cal Mass, I thought I’d extend the metaphor to my pre­ferred alter­na­tive events: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Speak­ing per­son­ally, Pride is gen­er­ally not gen­er­ally my thing: it’s loud, it’s hot, and the parade, at least, is not really par­tic­i­pa­tory. I don’t like watch­ing things, I like doing things. One of the things I like doing is the Van­cou­ver Dyke March.

Rather than a spec­ta­tor, I find myself tak­ing the role of a par­tic­i­pant, walk­ing up Com­mer­cial Drive with friends, amongst a fairly laid-back crowd, where one is more likely to see women with strollers than thongs. Hon­estly, I like the fact that it’s a smaller event, as well: for me, there’s a much greater feel­ing of com­mu­nity than I feel at Pride.

But back to Mid­night Mass. (“That’s a Catholic thing, right?”) Some­times! In this post, how­ever, Mid­night Mass is Vancouver’s answer to LA’s Mid­night Ridazz group: a reg­u­lar late-night ride through LA — with a num­ber of reg­u­lars num­ber­ing in the thousands.

When I look at the Mid­night Ridazz site, the first thing that stands out to me is a shout-out to an LAPD offi­cer that escorted them on a recent ride:

The Mid­night Ridazz would like to extend a sin­cere thanks to the LAPD and espe­cially to the offi­cer (whose name we did not get) who recently helped to escort our ride through the streets of Los Ange­les. We are all part of the neigh­bor­hoods we ride and we sup­port the LAPD!

Hear­ing this mes­sage from a loose group with a strong DIY, anti-commercial per­spec­tive is likely sur­pris­ing for any­one expect­ing this to be Crit­i­cal Mass at night, but the Mid­night Ridazz’ site describes the ride as both anti-confrontational and apo­lit­i­cal as well.

Respect for space, dri­vers and the sleep­ing res­i­dents of the neigh­bour­hoods through which they ride is also a core value of Vancouver’s Mid­night Mass com­mu­nity: In this post to Vancouver’s Mid­night Mass Live­Jour­nal com­mu­nity from 2007, one par­tic­i­pant shares his con­cerns about the ride becom­ing too rowdy.

We don’t need to ride 6 peo­ple abreast and block 3 lanes of traf­fic. There are only like 20 odd peo­ple; this isn’t Crit­i­cal Mass. We really should keep over to the side and just take one lane. It is all we need.

I can appre­ci­ate this because it’s not jus­ti­fy­ing, nor crit­i­ciz­ing Crit­i­cal Mass. The point is that this isn’t Crit­i­cal Mass. Rather, the author is just point­ing out the dif­fer­ences between con­duct expected among the small crowd present at Mid­night Mass and what was observed.

“So Cather­ine, if you’re skep­ti­cal of both Pride and Crit­i­cal Mass and a fan of both their smaller, less-flashy coun­ter­parts, does that make you some­one who just hates things because they’re popular?”

You hush. The Dyke March has its roots in some­what more con­fronta­tional pol­i­tics than the Pride parade, orig­i­nat­ing as a protest both in favour of les­bian (and later, bisex­ual and trans­gen­der) rights, as well as against misog­yny within the gay rights move­ment of the 80s and 90s.

(Also, yes, yes it does.)

So, if you’re inter­ested, the Van­cou­ver Dyke March begins walk­ing towards Grand­view Park from McSpad­den Park at 12 noon this Sat­ur­day, August 1st. I hope to see you there!

Mid­night Mass Van­cou­ver occurs every sec­ond and fourth Thurs­day of the month, start­ing from Grand­view Park at 12 mid­night. I am usu­ally in bed by this time.

Orga­niz­ers of both events rec­om­mend show­ing up early to meet fel­low participants.

Critical Pride

On his blog this morn­ing, Buzz Bishop posed the ques­tion: Are you proud of Pride?

In his post, Buzz asks if the imagery we’ll see in Vancouver’s Pride Parade this Sun­day is really the best way to demon­strate that gays are just like every­one else. This reminded me of another famil­iar argu­ment, about Crit­i­cal Mass: are 3000 peo­ple on bicy­cles block­ing com­muter traf­fic really help­ing the image of cyclists?

Hon­estly, Buzz does raise a good point, though it’s hardly a new argu­ment, going back to the exclu­sion of activists we would today con­sider to be trans­gen­dered in the imme­di­ate post-Stonewall era.

Still, as I wrote in Buzz’s com­ments, it’s a debate I feel is pretty well moot at this point. As of last week, it’s been four years since we for­mally enacted gay mar­riage nation­wide here in Canada, an anniver­sary that totally passed me by due to no men­tion what­so­ever in the media. Peo­ple don’t care.

At the same time, though, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that Cana­di­ans are very cau­tious not to offend. At all. Ever. (We’re very passive-aggressive, though.) The prob­lem I have with this is that it’s fun­da­men­tally dis­hon­est. Frankly, as much as I like not hav­ing bot­tles hurled at my head should I choose to hold my girlfriend’s hand in down­town Van­cou­ver, it would be nice if peo­ple adver­tised their hate and intolerance.

“Cather­ine, stop blog­ging while drunk,” you might say.

No, I’m seri­ous. I want to know who to avoid. I want to know who’s trust­wor­thy and who’s biased against me. It may not be pop­u­larly accepted that we’re all prej­u­diced, but I’m sorry, we are. Frankly, humans are a bunch of xeno­pho­bic jerks. Our abil­ity to pigeon­hole “the other” is why, as I men­tioned to @_lisas on Twit­ter this morn­ing–in the course of explain­ing why I’m freaked out by birds of all things–there’s a sin­gle species of human sur­viv­ing today.

Everyone’s a lit­tle bit racist. Sure, we’re taught that it’s wrong, but I think this leads less to dis­cus­sion and edu­ca­tion, and more to big­ots becom­ing clos­eted themselves.

So… obvi­ously my friends are cool with it. Very few of the peo­ple I know are homo­pho­bic in the least. But I don’t date a lot. I haven’t had a girl­friend in… well, let’s just put it at “a while”. Very few peo­ple I know have seen me totally mak­ing out with girls. Doing so wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily pro­voke a homo­pho­bic reac­tion, more “Cat does PDAs? Since when?”

Would my land­lady be on board with my being gay? Prob­a­bly not, but it’s never come up. She’s con­tent to assume that my extreme height is what has pre­vented me meet­ing a suc­ces­sion of hor­ri­ble, chainsmok­ing boyfriends to bring home to the hottest 300 square foot apart­ment ever known to mankind. But at the same time, it’s not like I would bring boys there if I was into that sort of thing either.

Last year, I remem­ber her express­ing skep­ti­cism about Obama and his abil­ity to han­dle the finan­cial cri­sis, which I pre­sumed to be of the usual Cana­dian vari­ety: “Can you believe he doesn’t sup­port single-tier health­care!?” It turned out that, no, she liked McCain bet­ter. I had def­i­nitely never heard this view expressed by any­one in Van­cou­ver. I real­ize I’m stereo­typ­ing, but there is a bit of a cor­re­la­tion there.

The major­ity of Cana­di­ans are in favour of gay mar­riage, with an over­whelm­ing major­ity at least being on board with some sort of “sep­a­rate but equal” equiv­a­lent. The most con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment of my life­time has stated the mat­ter is set­tled. That may be debat­able, but it’s just not some­thing we’re spend­ing time on.

At the same time as this was going on at Buzz’s blog, there was a con­ver­sa­tion occur­ring on my Twit­ter feed about the VPD advi­sory regard­ing the esti­mated 3000 cyclists par­tic­i­pat­ing in this month’s Crit­i­cal Mass. (Mind you, I’m highly skep­ti­cal about the like­li­hood that so many peo­ple will brave 30° Cel­sius weather just to irri­tate com­muters and climb up on top of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.) Still, the eter­nal “yay, Crit­i­cal Mass”/“stop being ass­holes” debate rages on.

You know what? I sup­port the Bur­rard Bridge bicy­cle lane project — which seems to be work­ing out just fine at this point. (I do agree with Van­cou­ver City Coun­cil mem­ber Andrea Reimer, how­ever: “Enough about the Bur­rard Bridge.”) I sup­port the con­struc­tion of increased cycling and tran­sit infra­struc­ture. We need bil­lions of dol­lars more for tran­sit and mil­lions more to improve bike lanes.

But is Crit­i­cal Mass the way to con­vince other peo­ple to get on board with this plan, nec­es­sar­ily? Yeah, prob­a­bly not. I actu­ally do under­stand the “now dri­vers know how we feel!” argu­ment. But, dude? No they don’t. Now they hate cyclists even more. And the dri­vers who didn’t ever con­sider cyclists much? Yeah, they remem­ber that it took them two hours to make their 20-minute com­mute home after a long week.

And ulti­mately, this acts against my inter­ests as a cyclist.

At the same time, Crit­i­cal Mass looks like a lot of fun. It’s just fun at the expense of other people’s day. And I’m a staunch believer in the idea that we’re all enti­tled to do what­ever we want until such time as what we want inter­feres with oth­ers’ abil­ity to do what they want. Also, sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

So how do I pair my this with my moral out­rage towards post-Stonewall activists fight­ing for “straight-acting” gay and les­bian rights 30 years ago, or my posi­tion that it was was wrong and ulti­mately self-defeating to delib­er­ately exclude the rest of the LGBT community?

I don’t know. I’m judg­ing his­tory from the per­spec­tive of some­one who didn’t live through it, who just inher­ited the world activists worked towards a gen­er­a­tion ago. And frankly, that’s dan­ger­ous. Today, it may seem obvi­ous that includ­ing bisex­u­als, effem­i­nate men, butches and trans­gen­dered peo­ple has always been the right thing to do, but I have to con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that I can even assert that posi­tion today because of the fact that they were effec­tively booted out of the move­ment decades ear­lier. Which is actu­ally really depressing.

So, would a 21st-Century-style Pride parade and LGBT move­ment have flown in the early 1970s? The spec­ta­tors and par­tic­i­pants def­i­nitely wouldn’t have been the same, but the fact of the mat­ter is, if you think The Queers are doing things to the soil, nobody’s going to con­vince you oth­er­wise with a float cov­ered in incred­i­bly ripped guys wear­ing thongs.

So maybe that’s not what Pride’s for any­more. Maybe it’s just a party. As Buzz’s com­menter Eter­nal­Cana­dian points out, hon­estly, what’s the dif­fer­ence between Pride and Mardi Gras or Carib­ana?

Edit: Also see Crit­i­cal Pride Part 2: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Catherine Winters in… The Case of Too Many Catherine Winters!

Recently, there’s been a lot of media inter­est in a woman named Melissa Huck­aby — though not that Melissa Huck­aby — and what it’s meant for her to be con­fused with an accused mur­derer and sex­ual preda­tor: media atten­tion, van­dal­ism, death threats, etc, etc. Scary stuff.

I, on the other hand, share my name with a num­ber of mod­er­ately Googleable women, none of whom seem to be ser­ial killers or skin­heads or any­thing ter­ri­ble like that at all. That said, the most promi­nent ones tend to be fairly embarass­ing. So who are they? A cou­ple other Cather­ine Win­ters have writ­ten embar­rass­ing books, but that’s thank­fully a lot bet­ter than it could be. No, my fel­low Cather­ine Win­ters are pretty harmless.

The first Cather­ine Win­ters’ story is pretty tragic, however:

Nine-year-old Cather­ine Win­ters was last seen around noon on March 20, 1913. A fam­ily friend named Dan Mon­roe spoke to her as she walked along the town square toward her New­cas­tle, Indi­ana home. On that day, the schools had closed due to an out­break of measles and Cather­ine had spent the morn­ing play­ing with her pal Helen Stretch. As she skipped toward home, she wore a “red sweater coat,” a white straw hat, and a black and white checked ging­ham dress. She had brown eyes and light brown hair.

They never found her. At the time, it was a huge mys­tery — was she kid­napped by gyp­sies? Did she run away? Her dis­ap­pear­ance was cov­ered in a 1913 silent news­reel.

Of course today, we can all guess what hap­pened and it’s pretty hor­ri­fy­ing. I really can’t fault her for hav­ing the same name, par­tic­u­larly when she met such a tragic end.

Sec­ond to her is a Cather­ine Win­ters who is also pretty hard to be irri­tated by. Cather­ine Win­ters of Lin­don, Utah is 12 years old and plays the flute really, really well. I fig­ure she doesn’t need crazy peo­ple pick­ing at her for being good at stuff, so I’ll forego link­ing to any of the sites that list a lit­tle too much per­sonal info.

Cather­ine, if you ever read this:

• Tell your par­ents to think about pass­word pro­tect­ing some of those pho­tos of you. Flickr is a good option for this.
• Don’t let high school get you down in a cou­ple years. In my expe­ri­ence, Cather­ine Win­ter­ses don’t like high school.

So, with the excep­tion of Cather­ine Win­ters who dis­ap­peared in 1913 and Cather­ine Win­ters who plays the flute, the rest are kind of lame:

There’s Cather­ine Win­ters, who in 1983, wrote a sin­gle entry in the 1980s Sweet Dreams series, How to Talk to Boys and Other Impor­tant Peo­ple. I’ve had peo­ple ask me if that one was mine. (“Yes. Yes it was. I was a pub­lished author when I was 2 years old.”) I strongly sus­pect that this is the Cather­ine Win­ters who wrote for Young Miss mag­a­zine in the early 1980s. If it is, today she’s writ­ing for Health.com and is not as lame as pre­vi­ously asserted. Either way, it’s sur­pris­ing that some­one as pro­lific as this Cather­ine Win­ters could be eclipsed online by a book writ­ten 25 years ago.

[Update: May 28, 2009: Cather­ine Win­ters good-naturedly con­firms that she is, in fact, not as lame as other Cather­ine Win­ters have wor­ried and doesn’t sue me. (Thanks, Catherine!)]

There’s a “Kather­ine Win­ters Hair Salon” in Irv­ing­ton, New York. I’m not actu­ally sure of the spelling of her first name, but appar­ently, the pro­pri­etor isn’t actu­ally named Cather­ine Win­ters. I’m not totally sure where the name comes from. As of this writ­ing, there’s only one extremely neg­a­tive review avail­able on Google:

“If she didn’t give me a bunch of atti­tude for leav­ing and offered me a dis­count to come back when she got her ____ together I might have come back. I wouldn’t go back if she paid me.”

Finally, there’s the Cather­ine Win­ters who self-published a 48-page book called Being Sin­gle and Lov­ing It. In the author’s own words:

I wrote this book because I had expe­ri­enced some short­com­ing also in the area of being sin­gle and pray­ing for the right mate to come my way after my jour­ney on being sin­gle I am now hap­pily mar­ried to a won­der­ful hus­band but if I had not stood still just for a sec­ond I also would of miss my bless­ing. I hope and pray that my book would give you some things to con­sider while your wait­ing on God and soul search­ing for what you want your mate to be.

You know, a lot of peo­ple look down on self-publishing because it’s not seen as ‘legit­i­mate’ or because you don’t have ‘edi­tors’ or ‘proof­read­ing’ and can have ‘prob­lems’ with ‘gram­mar’, but to them, I say, balder­dash! I’m order­ing this right now.

So that’s the big four. Still, that’s not even count­ing the myr­iad Katherine/Kathryn/Catharine/Cate/Kate/Kat/Cat/Cathy/Kathy Winter(s)es out there! There’s too many to count, so I picked out a cou­ple enter­tain­ing ones.

• In 2008, New Orleans res­i­dent Mary Cather­ine Win­ters, a nurse at Omega Hos­pi­tal, (Yes, really!) gave $419 to Hillary Clin­ton.
• In 1976, British ice dancer Kathryn Win­ter won gold at the inau­gural World Junior Fig­ure Skat­ing Cham­pi­onships. At two sen­tences in length, she has the short­est Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen.
• Kathy Win­ters, NASA Shut­tle Weather Offi­cer, gets quoted in the press all the time and appar­ently has the author­ity to scrub shut­tle launches. I feel this more than makes up for going by “Kathy”.
• Dr. Kathryn Win­ters, a pedi­a­tri­cian from New Mex­ico, has at least one patient (or more likely, at least one patient’s par­ent) who likes her, but thinks her staff is rude.

Inter­est­ingly, Cather­ine Win­ters have a ten­dency to be fictional!

• “Cather­ine Win­ters”, “Cate Win­ters” and “Kate Win­ters” are all pop­u­lar names in a vari­ety of fan fic­tion: Twi­light, (Damn it.) Smal­l­ville, Harry Pot­ter, Boy Meets World, Doc­tor Who, and so on. The most bla­tant one of these, a Star­gate SG-1 Mary Sue seems to have disappeared.
• Hilary Swank played Pro­fes­sor Kather­ine Win­ter in the 2007 film The Reap­ing, which I have not seen. With a Rot­ten Toma­toes score of 9%, I have not made plans to do so. (Seri­ously, Hilary, who is your agent!? Most. Incon­sis­tent. Career. Ever.)
• Kate Win­ters is the pro­tag­o­nist of Gerri Hill’s novel Coy­ote Sky, cur­rently one of the top-ten books on Amazon’s ever-mercurial les­bian romance list. Unlike The Reap­ing, I have read this, and yeah, I’d say that rank­ing is fairly well-deserved. If your name is Cather­ine Win­ters, it might be weird to read though. I’m just saying.
• One of my per­sonal favourites: “Cather­ine Win­ters” is the alias cho­sen by the pro­tag­o­nist of het­ero romance novel Indis­creet by Mary Balogh.
  

  Lady Cather­ine Wins­more, a hero­ine of quiet courage, refused a forced mar­riage when rape left her with an ille­git­i­mate child. Exiled by her fam­ily, she poses as a young widow, Mrs. Cather­ine Win­ters. An inno­cent smile brings the unwel­come advances of another rake, the Vis­count Rawleigh, Rex Adams.

  That’s super. Not only do I appar­ently have a name that makes me sound like a char­ac­ter from a romance novel, I have a name that sounds like a char­ac­ter from a romance novel made it up. Awesome.

Who shares your name?

#Amazonfail

A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by hav­ing it shipped to her address in Wash­ing­ton to take advan­tage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offer­ing to US-based cus­tomers. I ended up sav­ing some­thing like $60. Sweet. Deal.

So, my first Ama­zon sale com­pleted, I was feel­ing pretty pos­i­tive about them. Until yesterday.

Sun­day morn­ing, I was alerted to news of a some­what poorly-planned deci­sion at Ama­zon: to bet­ter cater to America’s “moral major­ity”, Ama­zon decided to excise the pop­u­lar­ity rank­ings of LGBT books, delist­ing them from search results. Some authors’ books can only be found by search­ing for an unre­lated title and click­ing on the author’s name. Other authors’ entire selec­tions have been delisted.

Accord­ing to a thread on Livejournal’s Meta Writer com­mu­nity, Ama­zon has de-ranked such titles as Broke­back Moun­tain, Tip­ping the Vel­vet and Stone Butch Blues. This  begs the ques­tion: what on earth are these shel­tered, big­oted Ama­zon cus­tomers search­ing for that is going to make them get all red-faced and choke down vomit upon dis­cov­er­ing those books in their search results?

“Well, I never!” they’ll exclaim, spit­tle fly­ing forth, “I wanted to read about the non-gay his­tory of Broke­back Moun­tain! How was I to know it was fictional?”

In his blog post on the sub­ject, Raul (Hummingbird604) com­pares the move by Ama­zon to last year’s “Motrin Moms” deba­cle. He also raises the ques­tion, is Easter Sun­day a good time to be orga­niz­ing a protest? Absolutely. Is Easter Sun­day an okay time for Ama­zon PR to take the day off? Obvi­ously not.

Worse, Amazon’s responses have ranged from “yes, we de-rank adult con­tent” to “uh, it’s a glitch?” They haven’t demon­strated any cohe­sive strat­egy to man­ag­ing their response, and con­tinue to look worse and worse, the longer this goes on.

Since break­ing Sun­day morn­ing, the #ama­zon­fail and #glitch­myass hash­tags on Twit­ter con­tinue to trend highly a day later, invit­ing responses from Amazon’s competitors.

Amidst a flurry of sug­ges­tions that they hold a sale on LGBT books, Pow­ells Books’ Twitt­ter account notes that they will def­i­nitely not cen­sor the pres­ence of LGBT mate­r­ial on their site.

@cin­e­mae­stro That cer­tainly is dis­turb­ing. For­tu­nately, Powell’s will never cen­sor this mate­r­ial #ama­zon­fail http://bit.ly/3Me5Un

about 7 hours ago in reply to cinemaestro

@zenti­nal A GLBT sale sounds like a great idea to me. I will check to see if this is some­thing we can get going #amazonfail

about 6 hours ago in reply to zentinal

By Mon­day morn­ing, the main­stream media was already report­ing on the issue:

• Ama­zon blames ‘glitch’ for removal of gay titles from sales rank­ings, CBC
• ‘Gay writ­ing’ falls foul of Ama­zon sales rank­ing sys­tem, Guardian.co.uk
• Ama­zon web­site cen­sor­ship row, Chan­nel 4

Oh, and per Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’ advice: Ama­zon Rank

Update, April 13, 2:50pm:
An email from an Amazon.com spokesman, repro­duced by the Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer, describes #Ama­zon­fail as “an embar­rass­ing and ham-fisted cat­a­loging error for a com­pany that prides itself on offer­ing com­plete selection.”

The email goes on to say that a total of 57,310 books out­side of the Gay & Les­bian cat­e­gories were der­anked and that they’re in the process of rein­stat­ing them.

So what hap­pened? Did some mid-level man­ager enact some crazy new pol­icy? Can Amazon’s rank­ing and report­ing mech­a­nisms be gamed?