M and I been watching a fair bit of Orange is the New Black these past couple of weeks and the more I watch it, the more it feels like I’m reliving my Japanese university dormitory days. The toilet paper rations, the group showers (and baths!) and the make-shift cooking appliances that could electrocute you in the blink of an eye, all remind me of those blissful fourteen months I spent in a very confined space with a lot of bitchy girls. It could have been four years in that hell hole, but I was pardoned early and managed to move in with my boyfriend.
Come to think of it, the girl’s dormitory I lived in when I first went to Japan which came as one of the ‘perks’ of my job in a hot spring hotel was actually more like a true prison experience, due to the fact that there were bars on all the windows and we got locked in at midnight…like literally locked in from the outside…and then the door was unlocked in the morning at 6am so we could go to work…at 6am (that was the very non-fun part). There was some scary lady with a key on the inside who was supposed to open the front door in the event of a fire, but all the fire doors were locked and it was pretty much a death trap. I guess if things got desperate we could have bought all the cans of coke from the vending machine just inside the locked door and used them to put the fire out though.
Oh, how I ❤ Japan and its vending machine saturation but very loose OH&S rules.
I’m interested in how ‘true’ the prison life depicted on OITNB actually is. Other than the scary possibility of being made into some bitch’s wife and the rampant lesbian activity, it seems like a pretty fun way to pass the time. It reminds me of high school and a Japanese dorm all rolled into one. Maybe it looks much more attractive to me than it actually would be because I have a prison fetish, but still, I can think of worse ways to pass a year or two other than a work assignment, 3 meals a day (even if there is a used tampon in my bun) and reading and chatting with some ‘interesting’ people.
In my prison-dorm I had 2-3 cellmates all with super weird habits, work assignments that involved cleaning pubes out of shower drains, toilet paper rations, 3 showers between a gazillion girls and weird rules about changing rooms that meant we had to move all our stuff to a new cell every 3 months (it was kind of like the COs tossing all the cells every quarter…) and I had to make my own food and pay for the privilege! I do have to confess that the toilet stalls had doors, but do I get some sympathy points for them being squat toilets? If all that ain’t worse than prison, I don’t know what is.
If you haven’t seen the show, I recommend it. I particularly like Chapman – even though she started to lose it after 48hrs in solitary (girl ain’t got no gumption…lol.)
a subtle time 
Would you handle *bend over and spread* each time you moved through the prison? As they are subject to that at every turn. How about pre packed food given in the morning and thats to last until the next day, some cereal, some milk, some slices of bread and cold meat and some veg for you to cook on a stove which is controlled by the screws, cutting those veg up without a knife because you cant have one. No privacy at all, 10 minute phone calls and lock down for anywhere between 1 hour to 48, just sitting in your cell doing nothing.
i know which i would prefer.
I’m weird about losing my freedom – it’s a big turn on for me, but I don’t know what my reaction would be if I *really* lost my freedom. I know I do like my privacy though and I think having zero would make me want to cut my wrists pretty quickly.