I spent too much time this past semester playing UNO and spying on my neighbors.

Looking back, it’s hard to say how many games of UNO my girlfriend Rachel and I played during the course of the semester, but I would have to guess it was more than a hundred. Rachel won most of the time.

As for the other aforementioned activity, technically I wasn’t spying on my neighbors. I was spying on my girlfriend’s neighbors.

Last semester, Rachel had a little studio apartment near Loyola University Chicago, where we were both going to school for the semester. The apartment didn’t have much of a view and just looked out onto the back alley of her apartment building, but you could see the windows of all the other apartments across the way.

So on those lazy afternoons, while Rachel was occupied with her studies, I would watch her neighbors through the window and wait for something to happen. It wasn’t professional spying, as I had no binoculars. My gaze would drift from window to window as I checked each room for signs of life.

I would hope for a fight or some wild sex, but usually the neighbors just studied and chitchatted. It was boring, but I never gave up hope and kept watching. It was like “Rear Window” with no murder.

I couldn’t see the most interesting neighbors through the window because they lived across the hall, but I could hear them all too well. They were a lively enclave of college girls, who would “woot” and party and carry on, especially on Thursday nights.

When they would go in or out of their room I would listen to try and catch a bit of juicy dialogue.

“I must not be drunk enough. I still feel ugly,” I overheard one night, quickly followed by, “Wait a minute. Are we driving?”

Before you label me as a perverted voyeur obsessed with children’s card games, let me say I would neither have played so much UNO nor spied on my neighbors had I not been displaced. Chicago was a wonderful city to explore, but all I was really doing there was waiting until I could go back to New Orleans. I turned to my UNO and spying only to help distract myself from the heavier realities of why I was where I was.

I’m not the only one whose eccentricities were brought out by displacement. Everybody had to find his own way to kill time.

My friend Monika watched every episode of Laguna Beach and learned to knit.

Erica, on the other hand, was so bored in Houston that she started renting foreign films. Now she’s a huge Ingmar Bergman fan.

Another friend, Barret, studied at a seminary school for the semester and would occasionally go out to visit Walker Percy’s grave. One time, he tells me, he even took a nap right there in the graveyard.

Now we’re back and the wait is over. There’s more than enough work to be done to keep everyone busy.

I will miss those girls next door, though. They sure knew how to party.