Not to sound melodramatic, but it just seems like the recession is really changing the way some people live. My apartment building seems like party central during weekday days now. Halls are filled with the cacophany of TV cartoons, soap operas, talk shows, and blaring stereos, all of which easily penetrate walls, floors, and ceilings. Either a lot of people are out of work or they work at home and enjoy lots of background noise. And people are up all night, blaring stereos, the same noise, till all hours of the morning. You ask someone politely to please turn it down a bit and they mumble and slam the door in your face. And the other day I smelled pot coming from someone’s apartment, again, during a weekday day. This used to be a professional building, with lawyers and journalists and the like as residents. Now everyone’s rude and antisocial. Maybe the middle-classes are starting to get a small sense of what those in poorer communities have had to deal with: hopelessness, frustration, anger, boredom…
