LITTLE 5

Last weekend was Bloomington’s Little 500, an annual bicycle race precipitated by the biggest party week of the year. During the week undergraduate attendance drops by nearly half, the school newspaper publishes op-eds about why Little 5 is the greatest college party in the whole U.S. of A., and kiddy pools and beer pong tables materialize on every block in preparation for the weekend. As early as Tuesday it is not uncommon to see sloshy teenagers slip n’ sliding on hefty bags or playing a beanbag game known as “cornhole” in their front yards. There is an almost constant level of squealing. At about 11am on Friday I was riding to campus and passed a house party spilling out into the street. Girls in fluorescent shorts and matching sorority-designating purple t-shirts milled about and a guy on the porch wearing an empty Natural Ice box on his head did a robot dance to Kanye West. Did I mention that Ludacris performed at one of the Fraternity houses at some point?

I spent most of the weekend getting work done on the deserted campus and puppy-sitting for the charming but spoiled Oscar (below), who refused to walk like a normal dog and insisted instead on being carried everywhere.

On Friday the anthropology department held its Skomp Lecture, featuring a fascinating woman who studies human skin color and argues that it cannot be used to classify people into groups or races because similar colors have evolved many times in many places. She spoke optimistically of our first “moderately pigmented president.” Afterwards there was a departmental reception (baby quiches, wine, and awkwardness!) and then a graduate student party that I wanted to escape from the second I arrived. Though I am not looking forward to packing my bags I am ready to leave again. A good thing, as my summer travel plans promise to feature Austin, St. Louis, Seattle, San Francisco, D.C., and possibly South Carolina and Alabama and that's all before I leave for China early in the Fall.

More on all of that later, but first, for all of you that don't enjoy the rare pleasure of living in a college town, a few pictures of the Little 500 festivities (and their aftermath). I tried to take them surreptitiously with my phone, fearing drunken reprisals and harassment. Collective inebriation emboldens college students to yell insults and provocations at total strangers, and after a week of riding my bike around town and being honked at, directed to the race location, and repeatedly regaled with "go little 5 woo-hoo!", I didn't feel like encouraging them.