Life in the Windy City: Moving Out, Moving In

Although finally found an apartment and I’m now nicely settled, with a new address and phone number and high-speed internet access, I didn’t simply click my heels together three times and wake up in my bed in Chicago. I had much help in packing, moving, and then unpacking (twice—more on that later) my stuff. I want to thank—again—the friends in Lansing who showed up Saturday morning to help move boxes, chairs, a desk, a couch, and a massively-large entertainment center. Tom, Eric, George, Bill: what would have taken almost half a day by myself only took a few sweaty hours with your help. Thanks again.

I would also be remiss if I failed to mention that my father did about half of my packing for me. I had made a decent start on putting stuff in boxes, but time was running out, and I had made plans to visit my friend John (aka Janko—that’s YAN-ko) in Flint Friday evening before the big move on Saturday. Luckily, on my last pass through Paw Paw, I picked up Dad so he could come to Lansing and drive my car to Chicago. When I went to Flint, he stayed in Lansing to pack my kitchen, my living room, and anything else I hadn’t already stashed in a box. Thanks, Pops.

So we packed the 24-foot rental truck on Saturday morning, I took the guys out to lunch, and then Dad and I headed to Paw Paw. I planned on storing things like my couch and that massively-large entertainment center in my folks’ extra garage. There was no way all of the junk I had accumulated over the years was going to fit in my Chicago studio. The trip to Paw Paw was uneventful, if a little slow: I couldn’t get the truck to go any faster than 55 miles per hour. I figured the engine had a governor in it, for insurance reasons. It wasn’t until the next day, when Dad drove the truck on the first leg of the Paw Paw-to-Chicago journey, that I realized how essential overdrive was to getting the truck to go faster. What did I know? My Saturn is a stick. I’m used to shifting gears all the time. But when I get in an automatic, I expect that putting the damn thing in “drive” should pretty much take care of everything. Well, now I know. At least I was reasonably sure the Budget truck wasn’t going to break down on me like the last U-Haul truck I rented five years ago (the clutch burned out, stranding me in the left-turn lane of a busy Lansing street for over two hours while I waited for a tow).

Once in Paw Paw (which is about 20 miles west of Kalamazoo, in case you were wondering) Dad and I unloaded at least half—if not more—of the stuff the guys loaded on the truck in Lansing. I have always been a bit of a pack rat, and I knew I was moving into a small apartment: I took up a whole corner of the garage with my stuff.

“You see how I stacked your boxes and things so you can easily take stuff out?” Dad asked. “And not put anything else in?” he added with a grin. Don’t worry, Dad. I don’t have enough room in the new place to accumulate anything. It’s so small I feel kind of like a dog in a crate: I can’t make a mess, or I’ll have to live in it all the time.

We completed the move to Chicago on Sunday, August 15. I drove the second leg of the trip, from Indiana to Chicago. It’s a good thing I took note that the truck required a clearance of at least 13 feet 6 inches: I never realized how many low-hanging overpasses there are in Chicago. The L tracks near my place were just high enough—13 feet, 6 inches—to allow me and the truck through.

Unloading took about an hour. I had much less to unload than I had to load, and my brother-in-law drove out from Aurora (“The Land of Wayne & Garth”) to help. During the unloading, while I was commenting on the proximity of my new place to DePaul, the L, a Blockbuster, several movie theaters, and such, Chris casually said “Have I mentioned lately how much I hate you?” with that tell-tale dry tone and faux-exasperation that told me he was making the kind of joke based on the slightest shred of reality.

“Because I’m close to the L?” The elevated is cool, but hardly envy-worthy.

“That. And DePaul, and Blockbuster and two miles from Wrigley Field . . . just the whole ‘living in the city thing.’”

And then I remembered: when I had first told Chris that I was moving to Chicago, he had commented how everyone in his suburban high school had dreamed of moving into the city after graduation. Chris went to a suburban college, met my sister, got married, and had two kids. It’s a good life, but it’s not city life.

So: the coolest thing about moving to Chicago? Brother-in-law envy.

We were moving more boxes. “So, Chris, how far away is Wrigley Field, again?”

“Two words. Seven letters.”

Yes, living in the city is going to be fun.

Life in the Windy City: Finally Settled

I have finally done it. In a city of almost 3 million people and 227 square miles, I have finally settled into my own 220 square feet. It’s a studio apartment in the trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago (if you didn’t get the email with my new address, please email me at cer7173@comcast.net and I will provide you with both that and my new phone number). It’s on the ground floor, which means my one window has a stunning view of the shrubbery and the ankles of people who walk by. My blinds stay mostly closed all of the time. Did I mention that it’s small? But it’s my own little corner of Chicago, and just having a place to stay—any place—is an incredible weight off my shoulders.

When I started this blog sixteen days ago, all I knew was that I (in theory) had a job and that I was definitely moving to Chicago. The past fifteen days have been busy ones, to say the least.

My first order of business was finding an apartment. I started looking on August 4. I’ve moved once or twice (or three or a dozen times or so) in my life, so I wasn’t too worried about the search. I’d go on line, check out the Chicago Reader website (which lists the most currently available rentals), decide on an upper limit I would be willing to pay for rent, and viola—I’d have a place to stay in the city. Well, I had never looked for an apartment in a city of almost 3 million people before—the third largest city in the United States. My first (and only, I might add) search in the Chicago Reader turned up 314 possibilities. And that was just in the 60614 ZIP code. Chicago has 28 different ZIP codes; over 50 different neighborhoods. I had given myself about four days to find a place and sign a lease. I had my work cut out for me.

Of course, I could instantly narrow my search in a couple of different ways. First, by neighborhood: there are certain places in Chicago I knew I would never want to live. Take Canaryville/Fuller Park. Not For Tourists Guide to Chicago 2004 (an absolute must for anyone visiting the city, resident or tourist) describes this pair of neighborhoods this way: “If Chicago ever hosts the Olympics, this will be the perfect neighborhood to host the shooting event.” Canaryville/Fuller was definitely out. Actually, the only neighborhood I ever really considered living in was Lincoln Park. My friend and fellow MSU teacher education grad, Anne W., lives there. I crashed on her futon many, many times during my apartment search. I sort of knew the area. I liked the tree-lined avenues, the wide variety of restaurants, bars, and little neighborhood shops. I would live within a few blocks of the L (actually within half a block, as it turned out, but more on that later). Second, I narrowed my choices based on cost. I wasn’t going to spend any more than a third of my monthly income on rent, and that was on the high end. Still, after all of this narrowing, I had dozens, if not hundreds, of choices left to me.

So I started making phone calls from Michigan. I had to re-interview for the job that Friday morning; I planned to base myself at Anne’s Lincoln Park flat Thursday night, go to my meeting Friday morning, and spend the rest of Friday hiking around the neighborhood, checking places out. Well, to make a long story short, I must have walked over ten miles in two days. I figured out early on that a combination of walking and taking the L was far more convenient than spending hours in traffic just to go a couple of miles, then spending another ghastly amount of time just trying to find a parking spot. Sure, there are some neighborhoods where street parking is easy to come by, but as a general rule of thumb, the closer you get to the lake, or the more commercial a street is, the harder it is to find a place to park without paying out the nose and/or going insane.

Between Friday and Saturday I looked at five places on my own, and about five more with the help of one of the many free apartment-finding services in the city. It didn’t feel like I had seen much of what was available until Saturday, when I finally looked at a couple of apartments that I knew instantly that I did not like. The multitudinous spider webs housing large, ugly-looking spiders (is there another kind?) in the atrium ceiling was a big turn-off for me at one place (and the “bedroom” was barely big enough for a queen-sized bed), and the gritty urban feel of the three places above a frozen yogurt shop at the corner of Sheffield, Wrightwood and Lincoln streets would have been cool in college, but I was looking for something . . . professional-looking, I guess. I had a new job. I was finally living a grown-up life. I wanted a grown-up-feeling apartment, but I didn’t want to live in the hotel-like atmosphere of a high-rise (stunning views of Lake Michigan be damned). And I didn’t want to live in a neighborhood where people pissed in the streets (witnessing said urination was the deciding factor against the 1200-square-foot apartment in Uptown, just north of the trendier, prettier parts of Chicago).

So, in the end, I eschewed square footage, lake views, and a deck, for my tidy little hole in the wall on Fullerton, across the street from DePaul University and half a block east of the Fullerton L stop. It’s tiny, but it’s close to the L and it comes with its own parking spot out back. Most importantly, it’s now home.

Big Move

This is it: I’ll be a resident of the great city of Chicago by the end of August, hopefully sooner. I’ll be teaching 9th grade English at X High School on the South Side of Chicago. (It's practically in Indiana, it’s so far south).

Although I haven’t signed any kind of contract yet, which means, I suppose, that some freak paperwork accident could still mean I won’t have a job come September, that I have been offered a job and accepted that job is all but a done deal. I was reluctant to make a broad general announcement before now, since, my luck being what it is, I didn’t want to tell everyone I had a job and was moving and then have the job disappear on me. However, now that I have had several short phone conversations with folks at X, and I’ve actually started looking on line for available apartments in various North Side neighborhoods, the fact that I have a job and I am going to move to Chicago has finally started to sink in—and I’m pretty darn excited about it all.

No, I am not one of those crusader teachers who has dreamed of working in the inner city since I had one of those social-consciousness epiphanies while doing volunteer work during my second year of graduate school. To be honest, I never really wanted to teach in high school, period. I hated high school when I was there, a long, cliché-filled story that might one day find its way into print, but not today. I cannot stress in this short space how much high school filled me with dread and loathing. I hated it when I was a teen: why would I ever want to go back once I had won my diploma and my freedom? Short answer: I didn’t. No way in hell was I going back. I would sooner have plucked out my spleen with an oyster fork, cooked it in garlic and onions, and eaten it with a nice chianti.

And now I find myself, not only preparing to teach high school, but to do it on the South Side of Chicago. What the hell happened?

Short version: I got my master’s in English, I got married, I got divorced, I got laid off. Somewhere in there I started teaching English as a graduate assistant at Central Michigan University. I liked it. I imagined getting my Ph.D. in English and becoming the hippest young lit professor at some high-powered, big-named university. But when I finished my three years of grad school, I was tired, and I was worried: I kept hearing that two-thirds of all Ph.D. recipients last year were not working in their chosen fields. I didn’t want to spend all that time in school and not get a job. So I got married, moved to Lansing, Michigan, and worked as a telephone service representative for what was then Michigan National Bank. I really put that MA in English to good use, let me tell you.

Trish, the now ex-wife, was the reason for the move to Lansing. She had just finished her teaching certificate and had gotten a job teaching earth science in East Lansing. We moved. I worked. The marriage fell apart (another long story that will not be expanded upon here). But during that time, I had been able to teach night classes at a local business college, and had been able to meet some of Trish’s students by helping out with the school plays (Trish had stage-managed many plays in college, and I had helped construct sets for a few, as well). I discovered that teenagers weren’t as bad as I remembered them being. Some of them were actually kind of cool. And Trish was sick of my relative lack of vacation time, at least compared to the days she got off as a high school teacher. In summer, she wanted to travel, and I was stuck answering phones for the bank. Our solution: I would get my teaching certificate, so we could have the same schedule.

I took the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification in 2000. I started the paperwork to begin teacher ed classes at Michigan State University. Then we got the divorce. And the bank laid me off. Although my life was a trite shambles for about a year, I kept to the plan of getting my teaching credentials. I needed a steady job. Teaching at the community-college level was fun and engaging and rewarding, but the pay sucked. I could make more as a high school teacher. And get benefits! I was purely mercenary in my approach.

So I spent two years in the teacher ed program at MSU, and did pretty well, considering I managed to demonstrate a prodigious amount of tactlessness and insensitivity on my very first day of classes (another long story that will have to wait). My instructor has since written papers about my comments that day. The “axe” event is now immortal.

Poor social graces aside, however, the two years of classes, during which I also spent a year interning at a local high school, did something to me. I lost my hubris (what did I need teacher ed for, anyway? I had been teaching for five years already) and realized that, whatever else I did in life, I wanted to teach. I wanted to get that visceral thrill that anyone who has ever taught gets when you show someone how to do something, and then, after a little help, they can do it on their own. This is, perhaps, a gross oversimplification of the complex dance that occurs between a teacher and a learner, but the thrill is real. And I wanted to feel it, every day, if possible.

So I graduated, went to job fairs, searched the Web for a job—and discovered that Michigan has an overabundance of teachers. My sister, Anne, lives in Aurora with her husband and two young sons, so Chicago was always my backup plan. Now it is my only plan. And despite my worries about how on earth I am ever going to relate to a classroom filled with students who have had life experiences so very different from mine, I find myself getting more and more excited about the change in my life, and the challenges it will bring. At the very least, it will give me plenty of stuff to write about, and I’m going to write about it here.

Chicago isn’t nearly as exotic as Nepal (actually, I suppose that all depends on the perspective of the viewer), where my friend Nate is finishing up his two-year stint in the Peace Corps, but I’m going to follow his lead and record my experiences as a new teacher in an inner-city school on this webpage. I should also mention that my brother-in-law’s blogging efforts have also inspired me in this enterprise. This is likely to be the biggest adventure of my life so far, and I want to share it with anyone who is curious (like the friends who joke that, on the South Side, I’ll finally get to put my years of martial arts training to the test), anyone who is worried (like my parents, who, I’m sure, are worried about me getting shot), and anyone looking for the next great book about how teaching changed my life (interested publishers can contact me at the email address listed on my resume, which you can find here).

Thanks for reading.

P.S. To check out the bloggers who inspired me, go to Nate’s Nepal Page and/or Thilk's Random Thoughts.