Houses on top of houses

Posted on January 18, 2016 by betsybeadhead | 2 Comments

I have noticed that I really am interested in houses on top of houses. Not apartment complexes, but separate houses built one on top of each other, almost randomly, stair-stepping up a hillside. I looked on Pinterest and discovered there are several such house-collections (Villages? Towns?) all across the world.

I’m not sure why I like this, since I value privacy and certainly didn’t like sharing walls with other people when I lived in a townhouse. You hear (and sometimes smell) everything your neighbors do. Sometimes the noises are very disturbing to the point that perhaps the police need to be called.

So why do I like this? I decided to dig deeper using these images.

The last picture I found was a big part of it. This is in Santorini, Greece.

Steps on the outside of a building, attached to the wall. Something very intriguing to me here. You can come and go without anyone in the house knowing. Private access. You share a house, but not a life. Not all is revealed.

Yet also part of what I like with these large collections of houses is how does anyone get home? What is the “road” and what is your neighbor’s roof? Sometimes the two are the same.

This is in Masuleh, Iran

Closer –

Here is Kandovan village, near Tabriz, Iran. It was constructed from a cave system.

This is in Turkey – Ortahisar.

Here is El Aleuf, M’Zab, Iran. While not stacked on top of each other, it is still intriguing to me because the walls are all shared, like one house grew onto another. It looks like a nest or a hive, rather than a planned thing. More organic.

Then there are shanty towns, barrios, favelas in Brazil.

One got painted – it is Santa Marta. The people are still very poor, but at least their houses are beautiful.

This is Cinque Terre, Nanarola, Northern Italy

This is on the Amalfi coast, Positano, Southern Italy

These are all Santorini, Greece

This is a Buddhist monastery, Phuktal, in Ladakh, India

Here are some similar ideas, of housing complexes that no longer exist. They are further from the main idea, but still close enough that they say something to it.

This is Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong

and this is Derinkuyu

How do you get home? What is it like to share walls and roofs with people? How well do you know them? Does living close create community? Or are people so close that they crave distance?

I like the ideas I’m reading about communal living, intentional communities, and cohousing.

I don’t think these are that at all. I think for most of these villages/towns they were unintentional – a lot of people wanted to live in the same place. Some had no choice – they were very poor and built wherever they could. Sharing a wall or a roof meant you didn’t have to build one. Some of these are very wealthy places – highly desired tourist destinations as well. Some are slums.

Yet they all share the same idea – shared houses, stacked on top of each other. No distinct roads or easy ways to get to your home.

How would you draw a map? How would you tell others how to get to your home?

Maybe that is part of the point – it is so hard to get there that you can get lost inside it, never worrying about people visiting you. You are hidden in plain sight. The very nature of it means that you have privacy, in a seemingly counter-intuitive way.

(All pictures are from Pinterest.)

Resolution. On gossip

Posted on November 25, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Making a real resolution to stop saying anything negative or stop gossiping is like making a resolution to stop drinking. It is turning from something bad to something good.

But the problem is that all my old “drinking” buddies are still drinking. All the people who still like to gossip and say negative things are still going to come up to me and try and drag me into it. I can tell them that I no longer want to be part of that life but it doesn’t matter. They haven’t made that decision that they don’t want to be part of that life.

So what they’re doing is what they’ve always done. They don’t realize that they are weakening my resolve. They don’t realize that when they try to get me to gossip that it is like trying to get me to drink. I tell them I’ve sworn off the stuff and they still don’t get it. They don’t know how to be my friend unless they are gossiping. So sometimes it means that they don’t talk to me at all.

I’m sad for them, that they don’t know how to talk in a healthy manner.

Gossip isn’t just speaking negatively about someone. It is repeating what someone said without them present. It is spreading information that didn’t need to be spread. If I have a private conversation with someone, I don’t want to hear about it from someone else. They weren’t in the room when the conversation happened. If they weren’t invited when the conversation happened, then they shouldn’t have it repeated to them.

In the privacy of your back yard.

Posted on January 4, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

There really is no privacy anymore. Forget everything about the NSA. Just hanging out in your back yard is a public event.

Notice how people put their houses so that the public area is in front and the private area is in back. Nobody puts a deck or a pool in front of their house, facing the road. That is unthinkable. It violates unspoken rules.

The front yard is what you show to the world. The back yard is where you live.

People driving by can’t see your back yard. All the good stuff is back there. They only get to see it if you invite them to your house.

It is part of the reason people don’t put their bedrooms in the front room. When you open the front door to a person’s home, there will most likely be some chairs and a couch. The dining room will be next, and then the bedroom will be last. The house progresses in levels of privacy. The outside of the house is the same. What you see first is public. What you see last is private.

Except none of that means anything anymore. Pull up any internet mapping service and you can see anybody’s back yard, sometimes from multiple views. Sure, it isn’t live. Some of the photos are from a couple of years ago. But there is still an invasion of privacy.

Having mapping services does make life easier, certainly. It is really helpful when I’m travelling somewhere to be able to see what the place looks like from the street and from the air. It eases my fear about travelling to a new place to know not only how to get there but also what to expect when I get there.

But the more I think about it, the less I like the idea that everybody can see everything. Mapping was great when it helped me. Mapping is weird when it involves my home. It is kind of like how I felt when I was in elementary school and I found a book of ethnic jokes. Boy, were they funny, until I got to the section on Irish jokes. Then it wasn’t so funny because I’m of Irish descent. The shoe was on the other foot, if you will.

What can we do? Not much. Be mindful, sure. That is what we are all learning from all of this recent news about personal information being made public, or at least not as private as we thought. Everything we do can and will be recorded in one way or another. Our lives are being lived in public, whether we want it or not.

I don’t think it is something to freak out about. After all, the very organizations we would appeal to for help are the very ones that are creating the issue.

Don’t touch the pregnant woman.

Posted on October 29, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

What is the point of touching pregnant women that you don’t know? Why is this seen as acceptable? Then, why is it OK to touch and pick up their infant children?

Recently a law was passed in a state in America that says it is illegal to touch a pregnant woman’s belly without asking. I find it is sad that there is even a need for such a law. It just doesn’t make sense for a person to touch any stranger. Why are pregnant women excluded? Why are they seen as community property?

I’ve never been pregnant. I’ve had a lot of friends who have been pregnant and everyone says that their bellies were touched by strangers while they were pregnant.

You just don’t touch strangers. It just isn’t done. Being pregnant shouldn’t be a reason to worry that strangers will break that unspoken rule.

Going up to a child and touching her is bizarre too. I’ve seen plenty of strangers get right up in the faces of small children. I’ve seen plenty think it is OK to pick them up. There have been enough situations with children being kidnapped; you’d think people would realize this isn’t a great idea. Then there is the idea of germs. Babies get sick a lot. There is no reason for a mother to have to tend a sick baby that got that way because somebody with a cold had to cuddle with her child.

It is safest to only touch a person if you have asked. Then again, why do you feel it necessary to touch a stranger at all? Now, sometimes there are situations where you have to be touched by a stranger – say, at the doctor’s office.

My favorite doctors are the ones who ask if they can touch you. In part, you have given them permission to touch you by the very fact that you are there asking to be helped. It is like going to the mechanic and expecting him to fix the car from a distance. They have to get involved. But it is still kind for them to ask. It also puts you at ease, and that will make the interaction better. It will make things more difficult if you are tense.

So, unless you are a pregnant woman’s doctor or close friend – don’t touch her belly. If you are one of those two things, ask beforehand. If you aren’t one of those two things, don’t even ask if you can touch her belly. There is no reason to touch her. That is really weird.

Privacy

Posted on July 19, 2013 by betsybeadhead | 1 Comment

I’m a very private person. This may sound odd coming from someone who writes a blog. I also have a very public job. I work with and in front of strangers half the day at work. I try to serve each person as fully as I can. I try to serve them as if they are Jesus in disguise. I try to serve them as if I am Jesus.

It is overwhelming.

I’m grateful for the time off the desk to be calm and quiet. I’m grateful for the activities I have off the desk that require a different kind of attention.

I’m really quite the introvert. I fake being an extrovert.

I used to feel bad about this. It meant that my home was my refuge and I’d spend my off time there, alone with my husband. He is an introvert too so it works out. I felt that perhaps we were missing out on life somehow. We didn’t have friends over, and we didn’t go out with friends. We stuck to ourselves.

I’ve decided to change that a little. I’ve decided to push my boundaries a little. I think it is important to spend time with friends, so I’ve been making “playdates”. I’m creating a “salon” at my house. It is a space where we can get together with a few people at a time and have tea and philosophy.

Partly the trick is to pick good friends who understand that I get a little overwhelmed, friends who understand that I can’t stay up too late. I might turn into a pumpkin, you know.

I asked Jesus into this, because I feel it is a weakness, this being so private and guarded and I introverted. He pointed out that he spent a lot of time alone.

So I’m in good company.

I’d rather have a few good friends than a lot of sort-of friends. I’d rather have friends who are comfortable with me and I’m comfortable with them. I’d rather know people who I don’t have to wrestle the house into shape in order for them to visit.

If I have to turn myself into something I’m not, then they aren’t really friends with me, the real me, anyway, right? It would be putting on a show – like selling someone something that isn’t really what it is advertised to be. I don’t wear makeup, or dye my hair. I am what I am. So I should be the same about my house.

Nametag

Posted on July 12, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I wear a nametag at work. I guess it is better than wearing a uniform. It identifies me as an employee, as someone helpful.

But I hate wearing it. I’m all for people knowing I work there. I’m for people asking me questions. I also stand behind my actions so I don’t care if someone feels the need to call downtown to the Main library and complain that I wouldn’t let them do something which is against policy or illegal.

But I do mind the over familiarity this encourages. I don’t like strangers calling me by name. That seems like a huge boundary violation to me. This may not be a problem for other people, but it is a problem for me. Perhaps it has to do with how I was raised, where my space, my thoughts, and my body weren’t mine. I was stolen from in many ways as a child. It has taken me many years to come to terms with the amount of damage that was done to me, intentionally or not.

Or perhaps I’m not alone in feeling creeped out when someone I don’t know acts like he knows me.

I’m glad that my legal name is Elizabeth, but I go by Betsy. So there is a layer of distance there. It isn’t an easily guessable nickname either. It is a way of differentiating. When a stranger says “Hey, Elizabeth” I know they aren’t real. I know they only have my name from my nametag.

They think they are being personable, but they are actually being the exact opposite. They didn’t get my name from a person (me), they got it from a piece of plastic.

It is important to call people what they want to be called, if you want to be personable. I knew a guy named Michael who would get really violent if someone called him Mike, or Mikey. It was too intimate, too casual, too familiar for him to handle. He once told a story about slamming a guy’s head into a table for calling him Mike, after being told not to.

That is a bit extreme. He has anger management issues. But hopefully you get the idea. Names matter.

We don’t have a naming practice in the average American culture in that you get to pick your own name. It isn’t really yours, so much as something that was assigned to you. But it is yours, in that it differentiates you from everybody else in your family.

Sometimes people will call me by another variant of Elizabeth – I’ll get Liz, or Lizzy. I think this is a terrible nickname. I hate how it sounds. And also – it isn’t my name. Why would I respond to it? You might as well call me Donna. Once again, people are trying to be familiar and they haven’t been given that permission.

The bad part about my job is that I am expected to be friendly with everyone. That in and of itself isn’t bad – it is where that goes. I think people are interesting, and I like being friendly with people. I don’t like it when they assume that my being friendly with them means that I am their friend.

Because I’m not. I’m not their friend. Sometimes I am, and sometimes I enjoy it when they come in. I enjoy talking to them. Those are the people who get “Betsy” as the name to use.

So, be mindful when you use the name of someone who works at a store. When you use their name because you’ve gotten it from their nametag, you aren’t being friendly. Oftentimes, you are at an advantage. Often, they don’t have your name. It isn’t friendly – it is a power play.

Here, I use Betsy, because I’m being very personal here. I’m sharing myself. I’m trying to be as real and as open as possible. And, well, it goes well with Beadhead, which has been my nickname for over half my life. So, in a way, I have named myself, and I have given you permission to use my “real” name.

Writing a blog is very public and very private at the same time.