Cultural Experiences Right At Home

Seven months ago, I moved into the largest apartment building I’ve ever lived in, with about 75 units.  (Previous housing situations for me have included: living with four other people in a 3-bedroom house until I was 20, living in a very large house with 25 other guys while I was in college, living with a married couple [not my parents], living with another married couple [my parents], living in a hostel with a rotating cast of other people, living with my brother, living in a quiet 4-unit apartment building, and most recently living by myself during a comfortable house-sitting gig.)

During these past seven months, I’ve become annoyed with some of the people around me. But I’ve also been fascinated enough to realize that a few of them deserve to have something written about them.  That’s what I intend to do in the next few posts.  Maybe this will force me to be a little more outgoing and engaging with my neighbors, as I try to understand them in order to better write about them.  Or maybe I won’t grow, but continue to hide away in the comfort of my apartment in order to avoid dealing with these strange people.

OK, I’m only half serious about that.  Sure, some of my neighbors have peculiar personalities and behavior, and some make me angry or uncomfortable, but many are also kind and friendly.  It’s possible for us to find common ground and get along well, even though we’re culturally different from each other.  Yes, most of us are Americans, and there’s not a lot of variation in our ethnicities, but we come from diverse economic classes, which I’ve realized is a type of cultural difference.

This apartment building is in a low-rent district; one of the lowest in the county.  And if that and the cars in the parking lot are any indication, most of the people here are probably in a low-income class (the one Lexus really looks out of place).  But not all of us are originally from the same economic class, meaning we don’t have the same experiences, values, or outlooks.  So we behave differently. (Even if we all came from the same class, there would be differences; they’re just more apparent between the classes.) That’s why interacting with each other is often uncomfortable, intriguing, and always a cultural experience.