breakfast for dinner

Angela Chase used to say that walking into someone else's house for the first time is like entering another country. And I think she's right. Someone else's house has its own language, customs, rituals, smells... And if you think about it, a house is also, in this case, a home. And a home perhaps is in fact someones sanctuary. How strange in a way to enter into another's sanctuary whether by invitation or mere happenstance. Do we then become tourists? Travelers? Walking into someone else's house is like stepping into an open portal into an entire universe...the intimate, private, vulnerable world that's unique of them and only them.

I suppose I should clarify that Angela Chase is in fact a fictional character from My So-Called Life... which is probably one of the best, yet underrated, and too soon to be canceled 90's television shows of all time. Angela Chase had never been to another country but her sense of entering into someone else's house was spot on.

And this idea transforms particularly when finding yourself alone in someone else's house... it's as if the house takes on a life and a personality of its own. The house now feels different, regardless of how many times you've sat on that very couch or danced in that living room or eaten pancakes at the kitchen table... void of its owner the house becomes something new, yet undoubtedly devoted to the keeper of the sanctuary. And you are no longer a tourist or a traveler or a mere visitor... you become a sort of surrogate. Just as you're asked to take care of the house, the house takes care of you. And, man, I don't mean for that to sound so cheesy, but I think it's like the ideas of space in Laban Movement Analysis. Now, forgive me as I nerd out for a moment...

Motion is essentially connected to the environment; we consider spatial pathways and patterns. Whether consciously or not, we take the spaces in which we exist and live and move through on a daily basis into account as we move and function in, through, around (etc) them... Architecture is, among other factors, based around the consideration of bodies moving through that space performing whatever practice or function intended. And thus, the space either facilitates or inhibits certain activities, motions, and senses of moving/being. I wonder how this house puts its impression on the bodies which enter and exist here? I wonder in turn, how those bodies impress upon the space?

Walking into someone's house for the first time is like entering a foreign country. Staying in someone's house for an extended period of time is like attempting to make that foreign place feel like home... yet no home you've ever really known. And I wonder if it's completely impossible? Or will your own private universe begin to invade that of this new space over time? Thus creating something new?

Or maybe I'm just a bit loopy from an outside filled with snow covered trees and over caffeinated, head phone wearing tunnel visioned east coasters... and this house that should feel like a quiet peace, feels empty and lonely and strange.

But then again, I haven't eaten breakfast alone in this house. Breakfast can be incredibly telling. Breakfast in a house holds power. Until then...