It was 11:00 p.m. on May 6th. I went to get a card at the store and the damn place didn't even have Mother's Day cards! I mean, what kind of a 7-11 was this, anyway? And they call themselves a convenience store. I had to drive another mile down the road to the 24-hour Vons! The nerve. These days we just can't get things fast enough or easy enough. On American currency, the phrase "In God we trust" should be replaced with "Give me convenience or give me death." We need everything now. With the internet, fax machines, pagers and cel phones, we have gotten used to getting information and entertainment immediately. We have grown impatient with waiting, reading, even watching. Television and film have all taken after the MTV school of jump cuts. The news is full of sound bites. Has the media cultivated our short attention span or has it simply given us what we desire? The demand for immediacy has spawned the convenience culture. We don't seem to have the time or inclination to make a salad anymore. So we buy it pre-packaged. We don't have time to brew our own coffee so we stop at the Circle K. Microwave dinners. Fast food. An indispensible part of the convenience culture is disposability. After all, it's much more convenient to use once and throw out. Conversely, it's an incredible inconvenience to safety pin diapers together, and then wash and fold and reuse them. Terribly inconvenient to replace old razors with new ones. Too much trouble to wash silverware and plates. There was a 'bit' on Seinfeld once where Elaine grabs a pre-processed bottle of juice in convenient packaging for individual consumption. She takes a swig and makes a face. She looks at the label, which reads, "Shake well." She rails against the shaking. She says, "I am so tired of all this shaking! I refuse to do it anymore!" And Jerry looks at her, picks up the bottle of juice, shakes it lightly and says sarcastically, "Yeah, I can see how this could be a real annoyance." While perhaps a little exaggerated, this is the direction we're headed. Where the simplest manual labor is just too taxing. We won't be satisfied until absolutely no effort is involved. We say that we are so attached to our conveniences because they save us time, a resource we have precious little of these days. But if the email and the pagers, fax machines and fast food save us so much time, where is that time going? Are we spending more time with loved ones? Less time at work? This doesn't seem to be the case. Where will it all end, I wonder. When will things become convenient and easy enough? Maybe when we can live virtual lives, forever strapped to a machine that simulates our lives for us. When all we really have to do is sit back and enjoy the show. Copyright 5/99 Jennifer Chung. All rights reserved. Thanks for your unusually long attention span. Back to IceBox