Welcome home

The powers that be often prove themselves to have quite an unusual sense of humor, and in selecting a location for Bloomington, they have simply outdone themselves. It’s almost as if someone airlifted a bohemian, progressive, all-around badass town out of an undeserving, pretentious spot in New England and dropped it down in the middle of a cornfield in southern Indiana.

Bloomington’s own IU may have – according to the Princeton Review, at least – lost out to Florida for “America’s Number One Party School” this year, but there is one category it indisputably continues to dominate in, year after year, and that is “most random.”

Let me explain. Now, God-willing this will never happen, but just humor me for the next 350 words or so, OK?

Suppose MapQuest shut down and someone asked you for directions to Bloomington. Personally, never having been good at street and highway names, mine would be as follows: “Head east for a bit, hang a left at the ‘Hell is real’ sign on the side of the road, and keep straight through a few hours of cornfields until you hit Walnut.” Doesn’t really make you want to hop in your car and undertake the trek anytime soon, does it?

What even MapQuest can’t do justice, though, is to capture the instantaneous change that occurs once you hit the city limits of our humble corner of the world. As my friends who go to school in the Northeast love to remind me – thanks guys, by the way – Bloomington “is basically in the middle of nowhere.” So how did this whole IU business end up here, anyway? How did we actually find an area of Indiana that wasn’t flat? What about Bloomington has attracted such a high international presence? And why do 40,000 students, every year, find themselves absolutely in love with the place?

Personally, I can remember my first drive to Bloomington. After passing nothing but National Rifle Association billboards for a good 400 miles between my home in Memphis and campus, I was getting pretty worried, but as soon as I saw campus covered in snow and got a big, hearty welcome from pretty much everyone I met during my weekend visit here, I was hooked.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 BCE, the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree. Admittedly, religious studies are not my field of expertise, but bear with me for another paragraph or so for this: I have a theory that were a parallel experience to occur in the 21st century, it would probably happen in either the Arboretum or Dunn’s Woods. Just go there, and you’ll understand. These places, and Bloomington as a whole, are not normal – and I mean that in a good way. Bloomington is a progressive enclave, full of bright, unique, amazing characters that you’ll come to know and love. Sure, we might have a marginal football team – I won’t lie to you about that – but it’s balanced out by a far more than marginal town with a marked propensity to march to the beat of its own drum.

Welcome home.