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"A Juggernaut of change has occurred out there since my incarceration. I still cannot understand how a person receiving a telephone call is expected to pay for it. Such a thing in my day would have seemed absurd. Ridiculous. I cannot understand why there hasn't been a consumer revolt against it. Yet, when I mention it to friends on the outside, they look at me as though I was the crazy one. I would never even considered the existence of such a concept except I saw a "free incoming call" advertisement as a special benefit of some telephone company plan. So you have to pay for someone calling you? And they pay too? Wow. Then there is the oddity of old classic movies that are not rated and therefore we inmates cannot watch them. The Department of Corrections only rents PG 13 and under so if a movie is not rated, we cannot see it. It's hard to imagine that Doris Day or Cary Grant or Gene Kelly or Jimmy Stewart or Katherine Hepburn ever made a movie that would offend our sensibilities or stir up moral turpitude. Does no one rate them because they are uniformly excellent and innocent? Of course, this juggernaut of change includes prepared cookie dough. What is the point? To share quality time with your children by opening a package and positioning pre-made cookies on a baking sheet? Why not just get some Pepperidge Farm and sit down and hold a conversation? Or have an adventure and go to a real bakery? Do they still exist? Pizza has also become amazingly complex: multiple crusts, multiple layers, multiple fillings. I don't remember a cheese and pepperoni pizza needing all that extra help. Then there is coffee! Never mind the yuppie '80s and Starbucks. Have you seen the new Philips machine? It creates "coffee that feels as good as it tastes." Has anybody cradled coffee foam recently? When I fantasize about luxuriating in cashmere, coffee foam does not come to mind. Apparently, a great cup of coffee must go well beyond cappuccino, latte, mocha or frappe. We are now in frappucino land. People no longer use fresh ground beans from a sculpted Braun coffee grinder or show off a trendy French coffee press. Now you place one little sachet that could be mistaken for a moisture-control bag in a goose-necked machine to make a cup of perfect frappucino. (How do you work out the logistics of this high maintenance coffee for a dinner party? It would take 20 minutes to give everyone a demitasse.) Please don't misunderstand. I'm not complaining. I'm in awe. I feel certain if I could indulge my modern consumer urges, bred into me by the television, I would live in debt at the mall or megamart or where ever the most stuff needed my money. No, I am not complaining. I am staggered. Stunned. Amazed. Fearful. Everyone wants to get away and relax, but everyone buys more and more stuff that attaches. I can remember when the point of jumping in the car was to get away-to drive at high speed over serpentine roads listening to music-releasing the tension of whatever was being left behind. Now nothing is left behind. In fact you buy cars to carry and bring as much of your home or office with you as possible. And when you get in your car someone probably monitors you by satellite and draws up an algorithm of your driving habits. It is sobering to consider that you may be more closely monitored and logged through your toys than I am in my simplified cellular existence. Confronted by that juggernaut, I want to know is it still possible out there to drink a cup of coffee that tastes as good as it smells, throw together a handful of fresh ingredients and make your own pizza pie, go for a walk in the Blue Ridge or get pleasantly lost without GPS? Is it possible we have sold our freedom to sate the craving of new and improved? Is it possible the juggernaut of desire has seized control of our lives? How do you live and not get swept away?" (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, December 9, 2004). Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional
Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. This column is one of a series, published
under the general heading 'Glimpses
from Inside.'
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