TOO CONNECTED? TRY CELLIBACY!
To me, this is a great idea!! No cell phone for 2 months. Connect with people face to face. I like it.
I am not a huge fan of cell phones or texting. Yes, I have one and yes, I do use it every day. But I turn it off a lot. Frankly, I don't like the whole idea of being that connected. Maybe it's because I hide out in bed a lot lately since my health got worse. In fact, I usually only have my cell phone on when my kids are not with me. When they are with me, who cares really.
In early 2001 I was with my parents (who were still alive then) in Scottsdale. They babysat my girls one evening and gave me their car keys and asked me to go pick up groceries at the local Fry's.
When I finished my shopping I got in the cash only line. The woman in front of me was a well-dressed lady with a loaded shopping cart... and a cell phone glued firmly to her ear as she blathered away to her cell-friend. LOUDLY.
In the space of a few short minutes, I heard all about her date from the night before including their mattress olympics and an all-access verbal picture of size, shape, color, duration and sounds of same. She, like many cellphone addicts, apparently thought there was a cone of silence around her. There wasn't.
Now to top this picture off, this same woman, despite the huge sign stating cash only over the cashier: finished checking out and whipped out her checkbook. Yeah, that's right. Then proceeded to argue with the red-faced cashier boy until he gave in and took her check to get her out of the store.
And not once did this woman put down the cellphone. As I crossed the parking lot with my purchases I saw this same cellphoner drive past me. Cell still glued firmly to her ear with one hand on the steering wheel.
So Amy, I wish you luck! Please prove to the world there is life without a cellphone! My kids asked for cell phones for the holidays. At least they still believe in Santa enough to be angry at him for not delivering!
The project is called “Cellibacy”, but as comedian and advocate Amy Borkowsky explains, “It’s not about giving up sex. I’m giving up something much harder than that.” On January 1st, Borkowsky will attempt to ring in 2008 with a lot less ringing, as she officially turns off her cell phone service for sixty days, becoming America’s first advocate for moderation in cell phone use.
“Your peak minutes shouldn’t have anything to do with yelling into a phone.”
“It’s not like I O.D.’d on cell minutes and started foaming at the mouth, and friends and loved ones didn’t stage an intervention,” explains Amy, who first explored her love-hate relationship with the phone on her hit comedy CDs, Amy’s Answering Machine: Messages from Mom. “I’m doing this because I really question how being so dependent on my cell phone is affecting my quality of life.”
Like a lot of people, she wonders how it evolved from a smart thing to have in an emergency to something convenient for outgoing calls but not essential, to such a constant attachment to her ear that “my face practically has a tan line in the shape of the VX8300.”
She also notes that the so-called communication device often keeps her from truly communicating, citing the familiar scenario of sitting at a restaurant table with her friend while they’re both on the phone the entire time. “Something’s wrong,” she insists, “when you answer your call waiting and hear, ‘Hi, Amy. Were you gonna finish those fries?”
Amy’s experiment in cell-free living is also inspired by the growing number of studies that potentially link cell phone use to everything from cancer to hearing loss to memory impairment. Though concerned that cell phones may be this generation’s cigarettes, she points out that today the Internet makes it far less likely that the research can be hidden. “Amazingly,” Amy observes, “things have evolved to where you can now use your cell phone to go online and look up how dangerous your cell phone is.”
For particularly urgent situations during her sixty-day cellibacy, Amy will allow herself half a roll of quarters — exactly twenty quarters — to use for payphone calls because, as the self-described cell phone addict explains, “If cell phones are my addiction, I figure payphones will be my methadone.”
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