Five Years in Chicago

On a personal note, today marks five years now that I've been living in the city of Chicago. In that time:

• I have had a total of eight roommates, and lived with (at various times) four dogs, five cats, one corn snake (and a freezer full of dead baby mice), and an indeterminate number of fish.
  
  
• I have had four apartments. My current abode is my first of those four to be south of Wilson Avenue.
  
  
• I have had three jobs.
  
  
• I have gone from having no friends and all the time in the world to surf the internet at home and watch baseball to someone who has friends, and now has no time to surf the internet (outside of work) and catches, at a guess, 14 innings a season. Go Cubs! This is our year!*
  
  
• I have seen the CTA standard fare rise from $1.50 to $2.75 (as of this coming Saturday at midnight, unless the state legislature pulls off a miracle). Thanks Mayor Daley!
  
  
• I have voted for Mayor Daley twice, despite his frequent mismanagement of this city, because of a lack of a good option to replace him. I also voted for a Republican for the very first time because I couldn't stomach the thought of voting for Todd Stroger, and my very first Green Party candidate, because I couldn't stomach the thought of voting for Rod Blagojevich or Judy Baar Topinka.
  
  
• I have gone from being someone who illegally downloaded almost all of my music with my turntable gathering dust in the corner, and who considered a trip to the record store a rare luxury, to someone who works part time at a record store to pay for what I spend on records (as in records, not as in CD's or mp3's).
  
  
• I shook the hand one of one future president after he gave a speech in a cafe in Rogers Park.
  
  
• Lived on the same block as the former abode of one famous Chicago poet.
  
  
• I have ceased to want to move back to New York: whereas I was once fantasizing about it constantly and considered it only a matter of time, there is now no city that I know of that could convince me to leave this one.
  

*It really is our year. It's the 100 year anniversary of being cursed. In 2008, the goat is going down.