(no subject)
My shotgun life
Architecture, some have said, is like frozen music. I don’t necessarily agree with that, and I am not sure if I understand the exact meaning of it, either.
Much simpler than that, architecture tells you a hell of a lot about the city you live in, and the people who live in it, for that matter.
It doesn’t take much psychological skill to sense that people who live in a city that does not have any buildings built before 1950 will be different from the people who live in an urban landscape that originated centuries ago.
Over two years ago, equal portions of love for a man who wasn’t good for me and a distinct but rather unfounded hatred of my hometown brought me to New Orleans, a city that I vaguely associated with saxophones and jazz in general.
Weeks after I had decided to move there, my mother, who has always had a talent for thinking slightly farther ahead than I, gave me a travelers guide of the city I was soon to live in. I would like to be able to say that it prepared me mentally for what was to come, but that would be a lie. The truth is: looking at pictures of buildings and places is very different from living in them.
After a short but unpleasantly eventful exploration of on-campus housing, I moved into what is here commonly referred to as a shotgun.
A shotgun is a house that resembles a tunnel, with each room leading to the other, so that if you shot a gun from the front door, the bullet would fly through the air, all the way to the back door. Allegedly,the reason houses were built that way is air circulation- if you open both the front and the back door, a breeze will cool down the house. Much more likely, this is a blatant lie that was invented by someone who wanted to explain away the sheer insanity of building places that way. There is no breezes in New Orleans, which renders the shotgun architecture a pointless method of ensuring that no one living in such a house will be able to claim even the slightest amount of privacy.
Lifestyles and people’s demands certainly were much different back when these houses were built. Hundreds of years down the road, lives and people have changed, but the houses are still there. So we are left with what our forefathers thought was a good idea, and try to make the best out of this ill-fitting solution. And much like a sibling wearing their older brother’s hand-me downs, we can’t help but wonder how we got stuck with this.
Two years into living in a shotgun, there are many situations that I can look back to and use to illustrate why living this way when you are young and have to share a place with roommates is a bad idea.
What’s shocking is that the lines between normal and shotgun-specific occurrences have become blurry and hard to distinguish for me. Is it normal to walk in on your roommate masturbating on a biweekly basis? To hear them have sex? At one point, I had accepted it as a rather mundane part of my life, but I have a suspicion that most people would not feel the same way. Waking up to a shadow pushing their bike through your room at 3:30 am is also something that a lot of people would find hard to deal with. I just roll over and yawn.
I started out sharing the house with a couple, but four months into the three of us living together their relationship broke apart like most things in life: with a loud bang. Jeff moved from Emily’s bed into the living room, which is in the very front. I was sandwiched in between them.
A temporary situation grew into a permanent one, and soon all of us accepted that yes, you can live together after ending a four year relationship, provided you are poor enough to make that option attractive. Equal portions of them having drunken break-up sex and drunken fights made for many nights of me waking up to screams in the nighttime, and eventually, it all blurred together.
It lasted over a year, and when Jeff finally moved out, I had forgotten that the entire time, his stay in the living room was supposed to have been temporary.
The house became Emily and I for a few months, guys came and went, the bikes were now stored in the front room and no longer pushed through our rooms at night, and I was once again able to walk into the living room without seeing someone sitting in front of a computer with their hands down their pants.
Then Emily left two months before the lease was up, so it was just me and the house, and while I kind of felt like the man who stays at the bar long after his friends have found better places to be, I enjoyed the quiet solitude and being in a house that was too big for me.
Soon, that peacefulness should come to be ruined by the same rationale that had allowed us to accept having Jeff live in the front room.
When my landlady announced she was coming into town and needed a place to stay for a few days, a week at the longest, and that she would lower the rent for that month if she could stay with me, I did not think twice. I should have.
Because this morning, it dawned on me just exactly how inappropriate it is to be sharing a shotgun with anyone but people that you also share genetical traits or all-surpassing love with.
I wake up to the landlord talking to her dog. She always talks to the dog, and the dog is sick and throws up 5 times a day. When she is gone, I am the one cleaning the dog’s puke off the kitchen floor. They walk through my room, not without her stopping in the middle of it and lengthily explaining the reason why they are going to the vet. As if I hadn’t been a witness to this creature’s ailments for days.
My landlady is hard to ignore. When I was fixing myself breakfast the other day, she gave me a detailed account of her allergic reactions to her ex-husbands sperm, and nonchalantly mentioned that she had to douche after sex.
What shocked me more about this experience than the content of what she said was that I actually had to step back and outside of myself for a moment to become aware of how bizarre it is to have your landlady share such information with you.
By virtue of living in a house that requires you to walk through each others rooms to get in, out, or to the bathroom and kitchen, it has become quite ordinary for me to know things I’d rather not. I had grown accustomed to knowing when Emily was having sex, how often Jeff masturbates, and I am sure they had found out things about me they did not really want to know.
So I started to think that the places we live in, the houses we inhabit, shape us as much as, and sometimes more than, we shape them. Talk to anyone in New Orleans about shotgun life, and they most definetly will have an interesting anecdote or two to tell.
The high-rise apartment complex I grew up in had its share of peculiarities, like riding the elevator with one of the old chatty ladies who have lived there since 20 years before their husbands and children left.
People in New York City and San Francisco know that the real estate business and the porn industry share one trait, namely functioning according to the rule of supply and demand. And though they complain about it, ultimately they put up with paying $2500 for that one bedroom, and if I could afford to pay that much, I would gladly blend in with the crowd of New Yorkers that sit in bars and complain about how much their rent is.
Then again, could they ever understand the charm of rows of boldly painted shotguns crammed together like the beads of a necklace? The appeal of a place inhabited by people who are nosey and in each other’s business but at the same time do not let that mentality affect their extravagant and insane lifestyle? The beauty of old black men sitting on their front porch when you leave the house, and being at the same exact spot when you get back home 4 hours later?
The life of the shotgun is endemic to New Orleans, and I have come to think it plays a huge part in making its residents the eccentric breed they are. And for the most part, I enjoy being a part of it. But sometimes I wish I was more like my shotgun, because houses don’t have ears.
Architecture, some have said, is like frozen music. I don’t necessarily agree with that, and I am not sure if I understand the exact meaning of it, either.
Much simpler than that, architecture tells you a hell of a lot about the city you live in, and the people who live in it, for that matter.
It doesn’t take much psychological skill to sense that people who live in a city that does not have any buildings built before 1950 will be different from the people who live in an urban landscape that originated centuries ago.
Over two years ago, equal portions of love for a man who wasn’t good for me and a distinct but rather unfounded hatred of my hometown brought me to New Orleans, a city that I vaguely associated with saxophones and jazz in general.
Weeks after I had decided to move there, my mother, who has always had a talent for thinking slightly farther ahead than I, gave me a travelers guide of the city I was soon to live in. I would like to be able to say that it prepared me mentally for what was to come, but that would be a lie. The truth is: looking at pictures of buildings and places is very different from living in them.
After a short but unpleasantly eventful exploration of on-campus housing, I moved into what is here commonly referred to as a shotgun.
A shotgun is a house that resembles a tunnel, with each room leading to the other, so that if you shot a gun from the front door, the bullet would fly through the air, all the way to the back door. Allegedly,the reason houses were built that way is air circulation- if you open both the front and the back door, a breeze will cool down the house. Much more likely, this is a blatant lie that was invented by someone who wanted to explain away the sheer insanity of building places that way. There is no breezes in New Orleans, which renders the shotgun architecture a pointless method of ensuring that no one living in such a house will be able to claim even the slightest amount of privacy.
Lifestyles and people’s demands certainly were much different back when these houses were built. Hundreds of years down the road, lives and people have changed, but the houses are still there. So we are left with what our forefathers thought was a good idea, and try to make the best out of this ill-fitting solution. And much like a sibling wearing their older brother’s hand-me downs, we can’t help but wonder how we got stuck with this.
Two years into living in a shotgun, there are many situations that I can look back to and use to illustrate why living this way when you are young and have to share a place with roommates is a bad idea.
What’s shocking is that the lines between normal and shotgun-specific occurrences have become blurry and hard to distinguish for me. Is it normal to walk in on your roommate masturbating on a biweekly basis? To hear them have sex? At one point, I had accepted it as a rather mundane part of my life, but I have a suspicion that most people would not feel the same way. Waking up to a shadow pushing their bike through your room at 3:30 am is also something that a lot of people would find hard to deal with. I just roll over and yawn.
I started out sharing the house with a couple, but four months into the three of us living together their relationship broke apart like most things in life: with a loud bang. Jeff moved from Emily’s bed into the living room, which is in the very front. I was sandwiched in between them.
A temporary situation grew into a permanent one, and soon all of us accepted that yes, you can live together after ending a four year relationship, provided you are poor enough to make that option attractive. Equal portions of them having drunken break-up sex and drunken fights made for many nights of me waking up to screams in the nighttime, and eventually, it all blurred together.
It lasted over a year, and when Jeff finally moved out, I had forgotten that the entire time, his stay in the living room was supposed to have been temporary.
The house became Emily and I for a few months, guys came and went, the bikes were now stored in the front room and no longer pushed through our rooms at night, and I was once again able to walk into the living room without seeing someone sitting in front of a computer with their hands down their pants.
Then Emily left two months before the lease was up, so it was just me and the house, and while I kind of felt like the man who stays at the bar long after his friends have found better places to be, I enjoyed the quiet solitude and being in a house that was too big for me.
Soon, that peacefulness should come to be ruined by the same rationale that had allowed us to accept having Jeff live in the front room.
When my landlady announced she was coming into town and needed a place to stay for a few days, a week at the longest, and that she would lower the rent for that month if she could stay with me, I did not think twice. I should have.
Because this morning, it dawned on me just exactly how inappropriate it is to be sharing a shotgun with anyone but people that you also share genetical traits or all-surpassing love with.
I wake up to the landlord talking to her dog. She always talks to the dog, and the dog is sick and throws up 5 times a day. When she is gone, I am the one cleaning the dog’s puke off the kitchen floor. They walk through my room, not without her stopping in the middle of it and lengthily explaining the reason why they are going to the vet. As if I hadn’t been a witness to this creature’s ailments for days.
My landlady is hard to ignore. When I was fixing myself breakfast the other day, she gave me a detailed account of her allergic reactions to her ex-husbands sperm, and nonchalantly mentioned that she had to douche after sex.
What shocked me more about this experience than the content of what she said was that I actually had to step back and outside of myself for a moment to become aware of how bizarre it is to have your landlady share such information with you.
By virtue of living in a house that requires you to walk through each others rooms to get in, out, or to the bathroom and kitchen, it has become quite ordinary for me to know things I’d rather not. I had grown accustomed to knowing when Emily was having sex, how often Jeff masturbates, and I am sure they had found out things about me they did not really want to know.
So I started to think that the places we live in, the houses we inhabit, shape us as much as, and sometimes more than, we shape them. Talk to anyone in New Orleans about shotgun life, and they most definetly will have an interesting anecdote or two to tell.
The high-rise apartment complex I grew up in had its share of peculiarities, like riding the elevator with one of the old chatty ladies who have lived there since 20 years before their husbands and children left.
People in New York City and San Francisco know that the real estate business and the porn industry share one trait, namely functioning according to the rule of supply and demand. And though they complain about it, ultimately they put up with paying $2500 for that one bedroom, and if I could afford to pay that much, I would gladly blend in with the crowd of New Yorkers that sit in bars and complain about how much their rent is.
Then again, could they ever understand the charm of rows of boldly painted shotguns crammed together like the beads of a necklace? The appeal of a place inhabited by people who are nosey and in each other’s business but at the same time do not let that mentality affect their extravagant and insane lifestyle? The beauty of old black men sitting on their front porch when you leave the house, and being at the same exact spot when you get back home 4 hours later?
The life of the shotgun is endemic to New Orleans, and I have come to think it plays a huge part in making its residents the eccentric breed they are. And for the most part, I enjoy being a part of it. But sometimes I wish I was more like my shotgun, because houses don’t have ears.