So, I have this thing where I like to look into people’s windows. I guess you could call me a voyeur, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. I don’t like looking at people; I just like to look at their stuff. <\/p>\n
That sounds consumeristic, I know, but that’s not how I mean it. <\/p>\n
I’m talking about cruising down a quiet neighborhood street and quietly peering \u2014 for just a second or two \u2014 into each open window and taking stock of the room inside. How it’s arranged, what’s in there, what’s on the walls, what’s on the bookshelves, whether the TV is blaring a football game or sitting quietly in the corner, the color of the walls, the angle of the room’s layout, all that stuff. <\/p>\n
It’s probably totally creepy, I know, but I’m not the only person who does this. <\/p>\n
I remember very clearly from my childhood our ritual drives to Jackson; we would take the same route through Henderson every time, and there were always three houses my sister and I would observe closely because they had such interesting things peeking out of their open windows each time we’d pass. The first was a ranch-style house with a large floor-to-ceiling window in the dining room, through which we’d see a distinctive white wicker dining room set, which my sister \u2014 then a teenager \u2014 always talked about trying to duplicate in her future houses (she has thus far never had a wicker dining room set that I know of). Then there was another ranch-style home with several large picture windows whose heavy drapes would occasionally be drawn back to showcase the large white Greek statues inside. We were always a little bummed when we passed and the curtains were closed. The third house was a split-level modern Tudor with a large, paned window between the two levels. You couldn’t really ever see inside the house, but the big window was kind of a thrill in itself. <\/p>\n
As I get older, I understand more and more this thing I’ve got for windows (in your mid-twenties everything has to have a phucking philosophical backbone). It’s essentially the same thing I have for books: The ability to sneak up to something and open my eyes and see things completely unexpected, completely unlike the things I would create if left unprompted. In an empty yet decorated room, I get to invent stories using a cheat sheet. The stories are brief and incomplete, but they are stories nonetheless, built on a thousand tiny clues left unwittingly by the inhabitants of a reality I’ll never actually interact with. So, in a sense, I get to make up a million little stories every time I pass by open windows. I see the soft glow of a Tiffany lamp, set against sage-green wall paint and stark, white built-in bookshelves stocked with encyclopedias and mass-market paperbacks, and I start to imagine the upwardly mobile middle-aged couple housed within, and exactly what they’ve got their TIVO programmed to snatch (American Idol, House, and Law&Order<\/i>), and the kinds of toys their children have (cleanly gendered and probably name-brand). And then, perhaps, the next time I pass by that same open window and see that same Tiffany lamp and that same sage-green wall paint, I can invent an entirely different story. An elderly couple \u2014 professors, both of them \u2014 who are so proud of their great-grandaughter, the mass-market paperback author, that they buy every piece of dreck her publisher puts to market. <\/p>\n
Every glance into a window gives me the chance to make up a new story. And the best part is, it never matters if I’m right or wrong or even close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I have this thing where I like to look into people’s windows. I guess you could call me a voyeur, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. I don’t like looking at people; I just like to look at their stuff. That sounds consumeristic, I know, but that’s not how I mean it. I’m talking about cruising down a quiet neighborhood street and quietly peering \u2014 for just a second or two \u2014 into… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-its-true--im-crazy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-lx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}