But be careful getting coffee. I think these people want to shoot us.

I'm close enough to moving to Boston that I feel like I can almost literally see a scrolling number marquee counting down the seconds until BC-Day. It's a pretty dramatic piece of mental imagery, that scrolling marquee. It's a tense symbol, the exact opposite of, say, a rainbow or an open road. I suspect that people who are or were seasoned movers (like military brats or, I dunno, buffalo herders) would scoff at the stressed, borderline-funereal seriousness with which I'm mentally treating my half-cross-country move. But as someone who has never really left her bubble, even exciting educational prospects and a generally sunny attitude aren't quite enough to keep my gut from feeling anxious and bummed at the prospect of relocating.

It's not helping that I still can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that exactly two months from now, I'll be giving up my citizenship to Chicago, and in three months, Illinois. Three months, then five years. Five years. 2016.

*clucking chicken*
...
Moving on.

After having lived in The City now for about a year (and I do love living here), I feel like I now have tentative claim to join that ultra-cool, swaggering, sunglasses-wearing, chic-dressing, CTA-Pass-wielding clique of Urban Dwellers. See my nose, up there among the skyscrapers? I know what it's like to be bored on the L. I've been to beaches other than North Avenue. I know the names of a fair number of neighborhoods, and their associated demographic profiles. I don't gawk at the skyline. (That's a lie. I do. Anyone who doesn't is soulless. Or blind.)

Interestingly, after having gained this knowledge--the knowledge that distinguishes a City Mouse from a Country Mouse--I feel like, for the most part, I've simply graduated from Crotchety School. The City-specific lessons that a City has to teach you are, I've found, not character-building, but rather like a medically applied leech to your empathy center. Illustratively, living in The City has taught me:

• not to make eye contact. With anyone. Ever.
• that it is never inappropriate to honk, loudly and often, no matter how early the hour, how domestic the neighborhood, or how temporary the obstruction
• that unfamiliar people who approach you are probably mentally disabled, in need of money, and are best avoided
• that my car can never be parked in the same place for more than a week or something [expensive and perhaps boot-like] will happen to it
• that everyone else drives too slowly and are clearly ignorant, befuddled tourists
• that everyone else drives far too fast and are clearly impatient maniacs 

Now, I'm not saying that living in the city for too long will necessarily make you a worse person... just that, over time, perhaps it might, in some ways, make your everyday approaches to at least some situations not completely unlike that of a sociopath.

Just kidding. Sort of. Go Cubs.