Bloomington: The name of the place is TV addiction

Hi everybody or nobody or whoever it is that I'm typing this at, my camera jammed and won't work anymore and that happened a long time ago and I keep meaning to get a new one but I haven't so I haven't had any pictures. Not even ones of hampeas. But I feel like I should type SOMEthing on this blog because I paid for it after all!! Or something, I'm very tired today.

So okay: Babylon 5. When we moved to Bloomington, the husband and I decided to spend our dinners marathoning shows, since I have Instant Netflix and an insatiable desire for reruns. We've been going through all of Star Trek: The Next Generation (we're on season 7 now), and have also taken a turn through Doc Martin and The IT Crowd (the latter of which both of us have seen all of before, and the former of which I have watched all the way through more than once).

Which is all very well. But we're also watching Babylon 5.

And it is wonderful.

We just watched "Severed Dreams" in season 3 and I made a lot of unearthly noises. Here, I will tell you about my experience so far:

Season 1:

• haha oh aliens with longstanding grudges, so much wacky fun and seducing ladies
• haha oh Sinclair, you and your eyebrows and your theatrical delivery
• haha oh Dr. Franklin and dieting
• haha oh, that wacky Mr. Morden, what a harmless little guy!
• this is a lot like Star Trek, but with poverty!
• FINALE WHAT JUST HAPPENED

Season 2:

• WHO IS THIS JOHN SHERIDAN, HE DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH EYEBROWS TO RUN THIS SHIP
• oh my goodness why is he always smiling STOP SMILING
• I don't think I like this guy at all. IT WILL TAKE A LOT FOR YOU TO REDEEM YOURSELF, SIR
•  
• okay I love you
• LONDO NO
• NO LONDO NO STOP BAD LONDO BAD
• AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
• NIGHTWATCH
• CRAP
• crap.

Season 3 so far:

• AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
• hahaha aww Corwin
• AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
• 
• I LOVE THESE PEOPLE SO MUCH
• SO MANY FEELINGS
• I HATE EARTH
• WHY DO I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS I THOUGHT I WAS DONE WITH THESE AFTER LOST

Also, Vir for emperor of everything ever.

P.S. I'm in love with Dr. Franklin.

Bloomington: Employment

ugh you guys I like making money and all but I want my commute to change to a teleportation thing

these are actually delicious though

Bloomington: Shameless self-promotion

As a reader of my blog, I'm assuming that you are a person who personally loves to watch me fail publicly and mock me afterward because I'm so blisteringly arrogant most of the time.

Today, my friend, is your day!

Tonight at 10pm-midnight Pacific Time (1-3am where I am), I'll be starting my weekly music show on local community awesomesauce radio station WFHB, which you can listen to by either being in Bloomington, Ellettsville, Nashville, or THE INTERNET. Yes, my hateful pals, you can go straight on to wfhb.org and listen to me streamin' live!

You don't have to, it's cool, but I feel like I should let you know just in case you're stalking me or something. It's gonna be cool. And I'm not going to just play Stadium Arcadium on a loop for two hours, no matter how tempting it is.

And Jennifer, if you're reading this, I promise I'm going to send you my list soon; today is the end of two very hectic things, and as soon as they're over, I will have a second to breathe. PROMISSSSE <3

Bloomington: Winter is the new summer

By that, of course, I mean that it has become my new vote for Most Bizarro Season.

The trouble with living near college students is
that the cocaine just piles up outside.

I know, I know: this is how it's supposed to be. Highs in the forties, lows in the twenties, snow, rain, wind. Personally, I've never dealt with lows in the low forties for any extended period of time, and at this point, I'm bundling up in eleven pairs of socks just to get the mail, because socks are the only clothes I have in excess, as it turns out. (I got to read the 7-day forecast on the radio on Sunday. It brought a tear to my eye, but since that tear didn't land on a mixing board and electrocute me, I will have to forever live with that shame.)

All this is to say that oops, it's been a long time since I updated my blog, and I blame the fact that my fingers are half-frozen and not up to doing much more than hitting the play button on Hulu. I hope you're buying it.

Speaking of which, I'm finally reaching that stage in my TV-watching cycle where I'm out of things I want to watch. I finished Doctor Who again, The Office really isn't that good anymore, Community's getting shelved, Doc Martin is probably over forever (SUCH A GOOD FINALE, have we talked about this?), Downton Abbey's season finale was the most depressing thing, and I keep trying to watch Once Upon a Time but I strongly dislike the faces of two of the lead people and really I only keep watching for Raphael Sbarge and the hidden Apollo Bars and things. My task for you, dear readers I don't have anymore: give me your Instant Netflix picks. Right now. Skip the rest of the post, go to the comments section. It's not going to get any better.

And he was delicious.

For those of you who disregarded my instructions and continued to read anyway, GO YOU! You get a list of foods that the husband and I have tried to make lately.

• Toaster Strudels (Boston Creme. Delicious, but my frosting decoration looked vaguely... cave art-ish).
• Carrot casserole (because we don't like getting repeat invitations to Thanksgivings).
• Vegetables au gratin (made up that word. Anyway, it was good stuff the first day, but there's only so much broccoli in cream you can handle, you know).
• Gingerbread without ginger (presented without further comment).
• Limited Edition Sugar Cookie Pop-Tarts (buy them now and eat them toasted and you can thank me later).

 Hi. Anyway. Instant Netflix, please? Or Hulu? Or whatever? I love rewatching Arrested Development as much as the next person who loves rewatching Arrested Development, but I can't keep this up much longer.

Did I forget to mention that I'm not above hypocrisy when Maura Tierney is involved?

Bloomington: A direct result of living in a culture that ingests too much sodium is that my sugar tolerance is not so high

oh sweet mother of Baldr what have we done

Bloomington: Suckas.png

I am never going outside again because everything is awful.

It's 41 degrees outside (5 degrees if you're a Celsius type) and has been raining for two days, and I'm starting to feel like a Californian.

I've never liked identifying as a Californian before, because California is a big place, and San Francisco is a weird, tiny place, and I can only ride buses and therefore can't really do much in the southern half of the state.

Perhaps I have been hasty.

Yesterday, I went outside. It was cold and wet and dry and horrid, and I shivered from inside my sweater/sweatshirt/gloves/boots until I overheated completely over the course of about fifteen minutes. By the time I got to a bus, I was sweating. I let my fingers freeze in a desperate attempt to cool the rest of me down, but two stinging hands later, I was still simmering and trying to avoid any extra movement.

The way home was much more action-packed, and after a successful run for my return bus, I found myself not only out of breath, but coughing for a good fifteen minutes from the cold air. I didn't start yelling about how it was consumption, and that was another struggle.

The diagnosis: I'm a Californian. I can run from it all I want, but my lungs know what my heart will not admit. Cough cough.

The file name for this is "suckas.png." Sometimes my plans backfire.

Not pictured: "Thomas Kinkade was here" graffiti.

I think everyone has pretty much picked up on this fact; we went with a faculty member to a state park in scenic Lawrence County, home of some astronauts or something, and comparisons to Muir Woods may have made the husband and I seem like snobs. Fine. So mote it be. Frankly, I don't know if I care much about what the staff of Spring Mill State Park think about me, because they sell boxes with the Confederate flag on them, and I will not be supporting them at any point in the future.

But some things are consistent from state to state; food exists in Indiana very similarly, if not identically, to how it exists in California, and I still want it. All of it. Now.

And so, with the help of my husband, the alter ego of We-Can-Just-Improvise Man, exciting things have happened on the edibility front.

1. Round foods have been attempted.

We tried to take down doughnuts and bagels in one day, and in doing so created rapidly expanding, deep-fried things that were delicious and tasted vaguely like doughnuts after we rolled them in sugar. There was much rejoicing. I needed them pretty badly, too, since I finished StarCraft II that day and emotional support in the form of sugar was extremely necessary.

(On that note, I wish they had kept Glynnis Talken as Kerrigan's voice, because I have no problem with Tricia Helfer and all, but I do have problems with Change, and I don't know. I didn't think she did the job EXACTLY THE SAME as Glynnis Talken, and it made me sad because I waited twelve years for this thing yo.)

But the bagels were disintegrated.

After the doughnuts, we had exciting bagel times, and managed to actually make bagels that looked like bagels. And tasted like bagels. And were amazing... like bagels.

They lasted about a day. And then they were gone.

What was my point? Oh, yes. Bagels are delicious and if you put a little canola oil in oatmeal with cinnamon and apples, it tastes a little doughnut-y anyway, so yeah, it's delicious.

2. Pizza and dessert are not mutually exclusive.

It's pretty easy. You just roll out enough crust dough to cover a baking sheet, grab a little extra to create a barrier between the pizza part and the dessert part, throw pizza stuff on one part, and break up a candy bar on the other part. When you take it out of the oven, you throw peanut butter on the candy and stick it back in the oven and take it out again five minutes later.

Then, you take a moment to smell the pizza. And it is a beautiful thing.

End food section. Begin TV section. Why were Downton Abbey, Doc Martin, and America's Next Top Model so depressing this week? And why did this have to be the week where all the NBC shows were on break? Aiya.

Bloomington: Unemployment is my favorite kind of employment

That's not entirely true, nor am I entirely unemployed, because I have friends who let me do little telecommuting things every once in a while, hallelujah! and so I can do SOMEthing to keep my mind from turning into a jellyfish (although how cool would it be to be all "you guys, I've got nothin but a neural net! Suck on THAT!").

Anyway, working is good, money is good, thinking is good. But I am, as my mother would (and often has) put it, a bit contrary at times, so I've also done as much as possible to move my brain in a mush-like direction, or at least to keep it fat and happy, as it were.

No one thinks you're clever, Apocalypse.

I've spent a lot of time on Instant Netflix, which you probably already knew or could have guessed. After finishing The Cosby Show, I began to watch the 90s X-Men cartoon from beginning to end, because aside from the first episode, which my brother and I can basically recite from beginning to end and a lot of Storm battle cries and Jean Gray actual cries, I don't remember that many specifics.

The specifics, as it turns out, all point to one conclusion: X-Men was a weird cartoon.

Not that this is a bad thing! There's a lot of good, hearty dark stuff thrown in there, a lot of salient plot points that I didn't think they'd actually put into the cartoon from the comics. Plus, of course, Jubilee's voice actor was Loonette the Clown on Big Comfy Couch, so ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

MARY JANE THINKS YOU'RE A LOOOSERRRR

But good, hearty dark stuff can just get so dark, and so I've sort of drifted away from X-Men for the time being. I tried moving on to the 90s Spider-Man cartoon, which I remember as being absolutely hilarious.

And sometimes, it is. But by the last season, it's just as depressing as X-Men, but with more of a focus on Peter Parker's internal angst. And guess which season I started with?

(I brought this upon myself. I should have known that Peter wouldn't be talking to his gargoyle friend Bruce in the Hydro-Man episodes. Stupid Hydro-Man episodes. Even my mom gets creeped out by the Hydro-Man episodes.)

Oh, hey, Hank is being judgmental, try to act surprised.

So I gave up on that, too. I tried to remember what other things I actually used to do with my time during the summer, and I remembered that Royal Pains exists (in spite of its blatant disregard for how thoroughly they developed the sexual tension between Divya and Evan in the first season, because apparently overarching plot lines and relationships on summer shows mean absolutely nothing these days). So I watched the entire summer season in two days and it oozed in and out of my brain very quickly, if we're going to get all graphic about it.

I dabbled in some other shows, most of which I've seen before. Psych, for example. NewsRadio, of which I never tire. I watched that movie You Again, which needed a million times more Betty White to be remotely worth the time I spent on it. Whatever.

But, dear readers, a ray of sunshine: TV is back.

Oh, hey, Martin is being judgmental, try to act surprised.

Or it's starting to come back, anyway. Doc Martin is back, REJOICE! It only ever lasts for what, eight episodes a season? But no one cares, because every episode is beautiful. Doc Martin is a perfect show. My heart broke and mended itself like... twice or something over the course of the first episode, in the best possible way. Everything else can suck it. And when does Lost come back? Just kidding, I'll never allow my heart to belong to any other TV show again, because they all end. Doc Martin is the last one. Ever. Full stop. If it ever ends, I'll probably go back to reading books; that's how much I hate the emotional ups and downs of the capricious world of television. No more shows.

Oh, except for one.

I don't quite know what to say about this.

America's Next Top Model has returned for its seventeenth cycle, apparently an All-Star cycle, and while the first episode was relatively lackluster considering what it could have been with so many past crazy diva types on it, I have high hopes. Between Lisa who peed in a diaper in cycle 5, Bianca who implored Saleisha to "check her thighs out in the mirror" in cycle 9, and Camille from the second cycle whose signature walk was supposed to make her famous, among other, ah... personalities, this cycle can't be anything less than ridiculous. And so, Top Model, you have my attention, which is, I think, exactly what you wanted, n'est-ce pas?

That concludes my TV adventures. I've also been playing video games; 1993's Eagle Eye Mysteries in London and the fourth edition or something of Oregon Trail are teaching me all the things I've forgotten since I last played them each a decade or so ago. Bless.

Eagle Eye Mysteries taught me that Hans Holbein was Henry VIII's court painter, and the British Museum is awesome.

Oregon Trail taught me that some people have too much time on their hands...

...and that some pioneers look like Robert Louis Stevenson.

In conclusion, you should all watch NewsRadio.

Bloomington: Attitude meets altitude

Don't start with me.

I'm trying to reregulate my sleep schedule, which has taken a turn for the worse since my husband started work. Currently, the pair of us wake up at 7, he goes to work at 8, and I go back to bed. Yesterday I spent 12 hours asleep total, and so here I am, blogging at 8:30 in the morning because I'm too tired to do anything else.

Wait no I mean stay on this page it's going to be full of quality.

Anyway, have I mentioned that Bloomington is flat?

It's hard to take pictures when there's so much sky.

I think I spent a lot of my childhood aware of the fact that San Francisco was full of hills. From the time I learned to walk, this was never in question. What I failed to understand was that other places are not the same as San Francisco. As you've seen thus far, my journey toward a full understanding of this has caused me considerable confusion, and I'm still not quite sure why anyone bothers to build cities where there is no ocean, for without ocean, there is no ocean, and will someone please explain to me why this happens but that is neither here nor there. I do miss the ocean. Every day.

Hills, on the other hand... I can live without 'em.

Aww, but just look how happy they are.

Or so I thought. At first, my legs were grateful for the break, especially with the amount of walking that must be done when I don't feel like paying bus fares (which is all the time. Hurrah, unemployment). Now, though, I am sitting and watching them jitter up and down on the adjacent chair, as if they think they're going anywhere today. The joke's on them, because no. I am tired and my exploding head syndrome has been acting up and I am sick of it. Adriane OUT.

P.S. This post was going to have lots of pretty food pictures but NO YOU HAVE TO WAIT I AM TOO TIRED.

P.P.S. I AM AN ADULT AND I CAN CAPS LOCK IF I WANT

P.P.P.S. xoxo

P.P.P.P.S. which reminds me, Top Model comes back next Wednesday! TEAM SHEENA 4LYFE!

Bloomington: Season 2, Ep. 11

There's one other thing that I've learned from sitting around the house and avoiding the 90+ degree weather, and that is that Mojovision was a really weird episode.

Ummmmm kay.

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.