High Rise Living
There's a high-rise complex across the street from me called Metropolitan Towers.
It's sort of a multipurpose building with rental apartments, condos, and corporate apartments, as far as I know.
Each floor has floor to ceiling windows, with vertical blinds on them, and the people often keep their blinds open.
As with many high rises, the floorplans are the same on each floor.
What's interesting to me is that although each apartment dweller in that building is essentially oblivious of his or her upward and downward neighbors, from my 12th and 13th floor equivalent height, I get a perfect cross section of the entire South corner of one of the towers, top to bottom, and many nights, out of the 13 or so floors with matching layouts, I can usually see around 6 or 8 people sitting on couches positioned in exactly the same spot, in living rooms which look very similar, watching televisions which are in exactly the same corner and tilted at the same angle, and, depending on the night of the week, often all tuned to the same channel.
A stack of televisions flickering and changing color at the same interval.
A stack of people getting up to go to the bathroom or refill their drink at the same commercial breaks.
A stack of rooms lit by the same eerie glow, sometimes from 6 in the morning up until 11 or 12 at night.
It almost makes me hope my television is destroyed in transit. At the very least, it makes me wonder how, from their point of view, I look, compared to my own human stack on this side of the street.
It's sort of a multipurpose building with rental apartments, condos, and corporate apartments, as far as I know.
Each floor has floor to ceiling windows, with vertical blinds on them, and the people often keep their blinds open.
As with many high rises, the floorplans are the same on each floor.
What's interesting to me is that although each apartment dweller in that building is essentially oblivious of his or her upward and downward neighbors, from my 12th and 13th floor equivalent height, I get a perfect cross section of the entire South corner of one of the towers, top to bottom, and many nights, out of the 13 or so floors with matching layouts, I can usually see around 6 or 8 people sitting on couches positioned in exactly the same spot, in living rooms which look very similar, watching televisions which are in exactly the same corner and tilted at the same angle, and, depending on the night of the week, often all tuned to the same channel.
A stack of televisions flickering and changing color at the same interval.
A stack of people getting up to go to the bathroom or refill their drink at the same commercial breaks.
A stack of rooms lit by the same eerie glow, sometimes from 6 in the morning up until 11 or 12 at night.
It almost makes me hope my television is destroyed in transit. At the very least, it makes me wonder how, from their point of view, I look, compared to my own human stack on this side of the street.