I'm having an emotional affair

It's true. I'm cheating on Chicago. When I first moved here from Michigan nearly 20 years ago it was love at first sight--the people, the architecture, the energy. I remember standing in Union Station staring in awe. It was so majestic, and just so urban.

Now two decades and one kid later the bloom is off the rose, and I've started to sneak around and (shhh) explore moving to the suburbs. Nothing has happened, I swear. I have mostly just been checking things out online. And once I went  in person. I swear it was just once. OK, maybe twice.

My prior experience with Chicago 'burbs has been pretty limited. I have visited a friend here and there. I once met a guy from the 'burbs at a Halloween party. I kissed him on the roof of my apartment building because he looked like a young Matlock. (My best defense of this is to say nothing.) In the days leading up to our first actual date he regaled me on the phone with stories about suburban antics involving his stolen garbage cans. Or maybe it was just the lids? My friends nicknamed him Olive Garden. This did not bode well for our budding romance.

If you don't have a bad neighbor it might be because you ARE the bad neighbor...

Photo via williampaid.com

Are you a good neighbor? Everyone likes to  think they are, right? In fact, I would pretty much have always answered "yes" to this question, but looking back I'm pretty sure our condo neighbors didn't appreciate when, as newlyweds, Brad and I would regularly come home tipsy at 2 a.m. and engage in a good hour of living room karaoke (and no, that isn't a euphemism....we really did come home late and night and belt out a few off-key sets). The duet of  "Islands in the Stream" was a crowd-pleaser, I'm sure. But other than that I thought we were good neighbors, until we had two sets of downstairs neighbors move out of our two-flat in the last nine months.