Bloomington: Pictures of food and run-on sentences

"There was a dead cockroach in my office today." -my husband, in the middle of dinner


As we've heretofore explored, Bloomington is a place of rural charms, of American dreams and chirping crickets (seriously, WHEN DO THEY STOP??), and I am thrilled to be the first San Franciscan to ever be here for any other reason than school (I'm assuming. I've tried very hard, but can't think of another feasible reason for moving from San Francisco to pretty much anywhere in the Midwest besides Chicago, in all seriousness), because it means I get to chronicle the town from outside of the university.

The only football stadium you can see from space.

I use the term "outside" loosely, as the university campus takes up about a seventh of Bloomington's land area, and the rest of the town mostly exists to feed off of students' (and/or their parents') hard-earned (or whatever, no judgment here) cash. But I do live near the International Food Mart (where International may here be read as Asian, which serves my mochi needs just fine, thank you), so I consider myself one of the worldlier residents of Bloomington, even if my apartment complex has the word "campus" in it.

Also, I lived in Berkeley, so yes, I am going to pass judgment on all y'all's farmers' markets. Shortly.

Anyway, living in a place so dominated by its university has weird moments, like when you're in the far northwest corner of town and you turn around... only to see that the stadium looms just as large as it does when you're standing right in front of it.

(My husband points out that UC Berkeley's football stadium actually holds more people than Indiana's, but I lived adjacent to the Berkeley campus and never once saw the football stadium. Protip: the real difference is hills. Where ARE they??)

It's the kind of thing that drives me to homesickness, which, in turn, drives me to seek out things that I never thought I missed. I've been to one farmer's market in my life, and yes, it was magical, and I bought some lovely parsley and a CD from a very legit opera singer. I get about two points of street cred for that, right?

I hope so, because I'm trading each one of those hard-earned street cred points for two bullet points that make up a list of things I never thought I'd see at a farmers' market:

• People selling sausage
• Tables of Republicans

No one was even almost yelling. Are we sure there were politics involved?

Free green apple popcorn is still weird, though.

But there are some distinct upsides to living in a college town. Almost all of them involve the free food that the Student Union gives out indiscriminately just before the school year starts.

On the free food day in question, I started out feeling slightly guilty whenever I went back to get seconds on free food, but then realized that I could mitigate said guilt by lingering by the tables I liked until they offered the food to me themselves. The greatest trick the Devil played on mankind was convincing them he hadn't already been to their free food booths, as the saying may or may not go.

I didn't even want pickles. What is my problem?

Also, perks to being a faculty wife: orientation-type dinners where everyone ignores you and it makes you feel like you want to make some kind of dreadful power play and the voices say "yes, cause a scene, don't let them ever forget you AGAIN" and you try and suppress it because you're used to blending in, you've worked in tech, no big deal, but oh no, there is no power here and you MUST HAVE THE POWER and you drink your lemonade at a feverish pace, trying to drown out the murderous thoughts in your mind and then oh hey never mind I think I see the hummus

Bloomington: Catalyzing the inner hipster

If there's one group of people I have always chosen to scorn rather than to try to understand, it's hipsters.

Up until now, I have lived only in San Francisco and Berkeley. Both places are havens for Pabst-swilling irony junkies. As a native San Franciscan, I have spent a fair amount of time being a snob about this, railing about the gentrification of the Mission District and sneering my way down Valencia Street. You know. As I do.

Arguably, complaining about this makes me a hipster by default, but I like to think that I don't actually take myself that seriously. To quote Ellie on some episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation that happened ages and ages ago, whatevsies. None of this mattered when I was in San Francisco, because when I'm in San Francisco, I'm not too fussed about labels and what people think and such.

Nothing says "hayseed" like stunning fountains.

Enter: The Midwest. I am now in the Heartland, which I now know (or decided) is called the Heartland because it pumps all kinds of people and corn through the arteries of the United States, creating huge clots in places like San Francisco and... I don't know, what other cities are there? New York or something. That big one in SoCal that we're all scared of. (Just kidding?)

San Francisco may be a drop-off point for hipsters, but this whole region is their spawning ground. And I'm beginning to understand why they happen.

Firstly, Bloomington is a nice place. The people are nice, there are relatively few drunks on the street before nightfall (read: one, ever), and the housing prices are ridiculously low. The campus is lovely, and Indiana U has, from what I understand, a good set of general systems and professors and classes and such.

Here are some less thrilling things that I have noticed in the past two weeks:

Shel Silverstein wasn't kidding around.

1. This place is not meant for pedestrians. Sidewalks tend to a. end or b. fail to exist on a majority of streets. We had a particularly spectacular adventure on our first day in which a shuttle dropped us off one block away from our hotel and we had to drag our luggage across fields and construction zones and a bypass in order to get there. I'm still cleaning the pollen off of one of my bags, bless its little zippered heart.

Complicating the issue is how infrequent the buses are. There are nine bus routes in Bloomington Transit, and over the summer, at least one of them doesn't run. Others come once every forty-five minutes. Do you see my problem?

My inner pedestrian rages. Here I am, trying to get around without guzzling all the gas in the world, and what do I get for my troubles? Probably Lyme disease or something.

God should know better than to stand between
me and my Doritos at this point.

2. I'm a little uncomfortable with the fact that there are, um... inspirational books on display in the middle of CVS. I've never had a problem with books like Know Your Bible or Amazing Grace or Horse Tails from Heaven before, but there's something about having them purposefully shoved between me and my cough drops that really unnerves me. It's not a religion thing. It's just... books in my CVS. It looks wrong, somehow, like someone just left it there.

I dislike disorder in my drugstore. I like separation of church and state. And I really like when there are no horse books with deep philosophical messages in the space where I buy my nail polishes, if that's all right with everybody.

Also, I miss Walgreens. Nowhere else seems to have that super cheap Jordana brand makeup that I like to use because of aforementioned super cheapness.

What does this have to do with hipsters? I guess there's a lot less cohesiveness in this post than I'd hoped. Anyway.

3. These. Stupid. Crickets.

ALL DAY EVERY DAY BUZZING LIKE IT'S A FREAKING ELECTRICAL STORM AND ALL I WANT TO DO IS TAKE A NAP AND WHY CAN'T YOU ALL JUST BE NORMAL AND SMALL AND ONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT AND IF THE WINTER KILLS ME AFTER ALL AT LEAST I KNOW IT WILL TAKE YOU DOWN WITH ME

 Anyway, I'm turning into a hipster. And it's hot. And we all know that San Franciscans are biologically ill-equipped when the temperature exceeds 65 or goes below 50, so my brain's half-gone. Hug hug kiss kiss.

Bloomington: The Republic doesn't exist out here

Pppppbththth my photos won't upload, sorry folks. It's driving me nuts, because I really want you guys to see all the acres of cornfields! Spoiler: they look like cornfields. But maybe I could show you pictures of all the new Pop-Tart flavors we've unearthed on this journey (four!) and also the campus that takes up about 95% of the town of Bloomington, Indiana. Or whatever. You guys don't come here for text walls, you come here for DAZZLE! And I promise you that I will deliver... eventually. I don't know what happened; I think the SD slot on my photo upload-y gadget got sick of me jamming my memory stick into it (not a euphemism) or something. I will fix it or find another method of uploading or something. I pwomise. And also promise.

Boston: A sample of the cover letters I write when the jetlag hits

To whom it may concern,

As Thomas Edison once said, “Administrative assistants are all butts,” and I tend to agree. Nonetheless, I would like to apply to become one.

Let me explain: there are few portions of the human anatomy more useful than the human butt. Think of the time you spend sitting throughout the day. Now, think of how sucky that time would be if you had no butt. Nothing but bones! BONES! Bones. It would be painful. There are nerve endings in those bones, you know.

Like butts, administrative assistants cushion any good administrative skeleton, reducing allover pain and allowing for relaxation. This is especially true of the pelvic region.

As someone who has worked in tech, I am particularly familiar with the pelvic region. I am, of course, referring to how small, crucial departments, like IT, support the backbone of a company. I am also referring to how many IT workers could rightly be considered buttheads, but that is another matter for another time.

What was I saying? Oh, yes. Hire me. I need a job. I can't imagine why; calling my former coworkers “buttheads” seemed like such a good strategy at the time.

All my butts,

Adriane

Helsinki: Quick, pretend I update this regularly

Previously on this blog...

-Cosby Show dreams
-How to develop diabetes in Finland without really trying

More of the latter today, and less of the former. I know that this is sad for all of us, but it's time to let go.

'Twas a truly torrid affair.

I've been in Helsinki for almost a week now, having been run out of Vaasa for being too odd to live (apparently eating half a box of raw Mämmi, a traditional Easter food made primarily of rye malt, molasses, and more molasses, makes you some sort of freak?) (or maybe my language course just ended and I was never actually run out at all, but it makes a better story?). In that time, I have done, to paraphrase the poet Robert Frost, craploads of things before I slept, including some paths less traveled by and some paths that probably lots of people travel by all the time.

Five hours of trains took me to Helsinki, where I immediately started griping about the humidity. Ah, it felt good to be back. Some standard-issue nature was photographed, some food was probably consumed, I saw Scandinavian Music Group in concert, and they were quite good.

HIS GREATNESS CANNOT BE CAPTURED ON FILM.
Or, at least, not by my crappy phone camera. Sad day.

Music times in Finland continued on Monday with Raphael Saadiq (HEARTS IN MY EYES), who is from Oakland and therefore basically grew up a city away from me and performs in the Bay Area all the time, and so maybe it's a bit ridiculous that I saw him for the first time in Finland. Maybe. Regardless, there he was. And I'm going to be shamelessly fangirlish here, but HE TOUCHED MY HAND FROM ONSTAGE GAHHHHH

gah.

It was enough to turn my then-boyfriend from an unenthused bystander to a very, very enthused bystander, so I consider it a success on multiple levels. (Also, Raphael did the final encore without a shirt on. For art. And music. And aesthetics. So many aesthetics.)

Deep in the Caribbean, SUCKAS

Enough. You, the reader, have little enough respect for me as it is. So! The next day, I got married. NO BIG DEAL, you say, PEOPLE GET MARRIED IN FINLAND ALL THE TIME. But we had a Monkey Island-based cake, and so we are the winners. AND WHY WAS I NOT INVITED, you ask, at which point I would urge you to quiet down, because it's late at night here in Helsinki. And also, you were, but you would have had to know where it was, as well as pay for your own plane ticket. Anyway, all the blue food coloring we used may or may not turn certain bodily waste green, so you're welcome (especially for that mental image). And we're all still twitching from the sheer amounts of sugar we consumed, so you're also welcome re: your health being that much more intact.

Post-cake, we spent three nights at the very fancy, Kalevala-themed Klaus K. hotel, where we had free breakfast every day and blew at least one fuse. SO WHAT, you say, ignoring my request that you quiet down, PEOPLE GO ON HONEYMOONS ALL THE TIME, AND YOU DIDN'T EVEN LEAVE THE COUNTRY IN WHICH YOU WERE MARRIED.

Ah, my apologies! Did I not mention that our breakfast took place one table over from Finnish actress Pihla Viitala, with whom I am more than slightly infatuated? I suppose I would have, had you not been yelling so much, but no matter. We will move on to pictures, if you will stop yelling.

The Sibelius monument from underneath looks like the inverse of the Death Star explosion or something.

The sad part is that my feet are actually more tan than usual.

My first thought when I stepped into our hotel room was about whether or not the bathrooms were any good. Jennifer, if you're reading this, I hope you realize what an impact you've had on me.

Suomenlinna: where a drunk guy told me I sounded like I was from Eastern Finland, and also that he loved all people everywhere.

Temppeliaukio: it's over behind the tourist buses.

Hesburger is for those of us who are too ashamed of our tourist status to go to McDonald's. (Alt: That time the Imperials ambushed me at Hesburger.)