When I was younger I used to troll through our household garbage to find boxes, cardbord…anything I could use to make crafts of all descriptions. I was that kid. The craft kid…the one with kinking shears and a frighteningly large assortment of construction paper and sparkles to match. In hindsight, my creativity was insane. How I thought of things to make week after week is beyond me. My favourite creation was the shoebox apartment. I made a lot of them and stacked them on top of each other. An apartment building of sorts. I was always fascinated with making real life things small enough to match the scale of a shoebox. I don’t know why I ever made them, I never had dolls small enough to fit inside them. I hated Barbies. Someone bought one for me when I was very young. I used to chew on her left foot. By the time I got to the shoe box apartment stage my Barbie had matted hair and couldn’t wear a pair of shoes. So my apartment complexes were left empty (but ever so beautiful).
I haven’t lived in an apartment building in 13 years and at the time I was probably too young to think about anything but cookies and the Saturday morning cartoons but it occurred to me that apartment buildings are very intimate places. I study, cook, eat, sleep and use my bathroom 3 feet away from the next apartment where people are doing the same thing. Most days I can hear them turn on their taps, their showers, their TVs and most of their conversations. So far I haven’t said a word to my neighbour but I know what he watches on TV (everything), when he goes to bed and how long he showers in the morning. It serves as a reminder that there are people around me (that other people exist)…something I never had in my suburban house back in Toronto where the walls of the next house were at least 10 feet away from ours.
