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