When your private life isn't private

I live in an apartment. This apartment is about the size of your living room. This apartment used to be a house, but now, by putting locks on my door and a few new walls, and a kitchen, it is a freestanding apartment. The house, even before it was an apartment was old. Now my apartment is really old. Like before we all were born, old. If you have ever lived in an old house, you know that if you are in the back of the house, on the bottom floor, you can hear people whispering in the front of the house on the second floor. Kind of like an IMAX. Except they don't show movies in my apartment. But I can hear my neighbors. I sing along to their music, laugh with their jokes, and quote movies as they are watching them. I know when they leave for work each morning, and usually this is the noise that tells me it's about time to wake up. This is not that bad sometimes, unless 1. I'm trying to sleep, and it's 2 in the morning, 2. they are trying to have "private time". 3. I want to sleep and it's 12 in the afternoon. Also, they smoke, and I swear, I can't make this up, but the smoke comes through the walls along with the sound waves.

And the opposite is true.

I'm sure they get annoyed when I listen to NPR on Saturday or Sunday morning. I'm sure there are times when maybe they want to sleep, and I am watching a riveting movie, and of course, I never really have any "private time."

Which is interesting to me. The idea of privacy.

I really like the people that I rent from. The woman that owns the house lives on the bottom floor, and her daughter, who really takes care of everything lives in the other apartment on the bottom floor. They are very very kind. They brought me soup when I was sick, and they keep an eye out on my comings and goings. But one day I got a little annoyed at something that the daughter said to me, and I came up to my apartment and said something about it to a friend that was there with me, when I realized that my windows were open...which means that people on the porch hear everything I say. I speak in a normal voice, and it's like I'm sitting on the porch with them.

So when is my life private? When I know that people can hear everything that I'm saying, is there any place that becomes sacred to utter words spoken only into the silence? When there is no silence.

I think this is also interesting in light of the fact that I have an obsessive tendency to become engrossed in reality television. These are people that have CHOSEN to give up all privacy for the sake of what? The chance of money? Fame? A good time?

Have I chosen, in some way, to give up my solitude? What does that even mean? Does the concept of true community exclude the idea of true privacy?

No answers, just some thoughts from someone that was woken up, once again, to the sound of heavy boots descending the stairs this morning.