October 21, 2005
"Sometimes I envy people who are in prison simply because they have a lot of free time to read."
Me too. Though I go on to worry that the place is too noisy and chaotic. I'd be in women's prison, of course, so it might be okay. And if I could have high-speed internet access and permission to blog...
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20 comments:
It sounds nice, but think of all the "Yeah, but you're a felon" comment trolls your blog would get.
Imprisonment is just another word for not being allowed to blog.
Beldar: I don't want to be a lawyer in prison! I want to be a blogger in prison! Or just a writer, to be published later.
This prison-wish is a desire to have time to oneself, locked in a room with only reading and writing to fill the time. That is, of course, largely achievable in real life. Perhaps I should move to an exquisitely small apartment, a cell, and minimize my possessions as if it were a prison!
It's the journey, not the destination.
Ann, hypothetically, what would you do to put yourself in prison? It would have to memorable, and perhaps something to give you a reputation before you went...Can there be blog crimes?
Would you be the first to live shiv-blog?
A friend of mine who, early in her law school career, realized she hated law, but was too failure-phobic to drop out used to say, as we toiled away at document review and the like, that she gladly would have spent the three years she "wasted" at the law firm to pay off her law school debts instead in a debtors prison, so long as they allowed her sufficient reading material. I found her logic difficult to refute.
Ron: Well, considering the whole "criminalization of politics" trend, I'm picturing myself violating some criminal law just by blogging.
Hmm. I really don't think a prison cell shared with a woman named Wanda Bob was what Virginia Woolf had in mind, when she asked for:
A Room Of One's Own
Cheers,
Victoria
I always tell people that I wish I could book a one week prison vacation with a travel agent -- provided I could have a cell to myself and all the books I wanted to bring with me. You wouldn't have to worry about cleaning because there isn't any clutter in your cell; you'd have lots of time to read and write and think about things quietly; you wouldn't have to cook; and you'd get one hour of exercise a day (far more than I usually get). You'd come back after a week having accomplished some intellectual pursuits AND having lost a few pounds --
Just think about how welcome that would be after a few weeks of trial, or any other sustained period of mental and physical self-neglect.
sounds like you want a dorm room for professors.
How many professors would appreciate an on campus dorm like setup of single room apartments with communal kitchens , work out rooms, entertaining/conference room, and wi-fi? (but nice private bathrooms, no need to suffer too much)
(come to think of it, I think the brand new UC Merced has on-campus simplified semi-communal housing for staff as part of the plan)
Funny that when describing a monastic life style the first example that comes to mind is prison.
The appeal of the prison is being prevented from doing everything else. To compete with the prison-wish, you need something that would deprive us of all the distractions. But how to keep freedom? Maybe a sort of rehab-like setup. Maybe one-room cabins in the woods, where you don't have a car, but they bring meals around to you once a day.
But the professors' dorm idea is interesting! It needs to be a sort of academic (or artistic) monastery.
"Maybe one-room cabins in the woods, where you don't have a car, but they bring meals around to you once a day. "
Like Thoreau! Didn't his mom bring him his meals every day? ....I was so disappointed when I learned that. Not very romantic.
ewww, ick (that seems to be my refrain lately)
Maybe those trysts with his mother WERE romantic (regarding Thoreau at Walden)
Noisy and chaotic at a high pitch -- ugh. Like the birdhouse at the zoo.
Maybe a theme park called Thoreau World, with mother characters who bring around a hot dinner (and a bagged next day breakfast and lunch) each evening at 6). You just get a cabin in the woods. No TV, but WiFi.
Ruth Anne: Yes, I should do that! Good blogging topic too!
You know, I started to go on a retreat once. It was a group of Episcopalians, in the early 1980s. We were in a van driving to the place and a woman started to smoke. I asked her not to smoke and confided that I was pregnant. Everyone in the van told me I was being unreasonable. I gave up and asked to be let out. As they let me out on the West Side Highway (where I, a pregnant woman, would need to walk a long deserted block with my suitcase to get to a place where I could hail a cab), one woman told me that I ought to think about how Christianity requires me to be unselfish. I've had kind of a bad attitude about retreats since then.
Thanks, Ruth. This was just before the problem of second-hand smoke became more widely publicized. I'm sure the van folks felt terribly guilty whenever those stories came on the news. What galls me the most about it is that they didn't help me with my bag and get me into a cab.
The truth is I don't really need to go anywhere to find time to read and write. I already spend an immense amount of time doing that. I really need a vacation where I'd be forced to do something else.
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