The Indicator x The Student: “AMERICAN SHOPPING LIST”

In this piece from The Indicator, Clara Chiu ’27 offers commentary on the contemporary American psyche.

Before you leave, don’t forget the butter, the quart of chicken broth, the onions and parsley — we’re almost out of milk, too, and patience; we need thyme for seasoning and rosemary for remembrance, because when the silence becomes real, the creeping uncertainties draw you back: it’s the fact that a cookbook is a product of trial and experimentation, just like chemotherapy thanks to Heinrich and Sweet, but we don’t talk about the MGH anymore — it’s funny how some acronyms leave your mouth jagged, AKA, HIV, IVF, WCNSF, here’s another packaged thought, just sentiment folded into language, but it’s funny how your language isn’t deemed “literary” enough, why you use alliteration as a crutch, how you toss one coin in the fountain but pocket two for some solipsistic self, selfish, self-ish, the fact that a hyphen can dehumanize, the fact that “I” contains both a sentence and a person, a life sentence — to serve for life, life served on a plate compliments of the chef (add salt to the list — Diamond Crystal — that’s what all the professional chefs use now), but who can really remember when the bullet echoes around the schoolyard, when, crouched under their desks, the children are more hunched than the chief of state, 1 2 3 eyes on me, quiet, pipe down, pipeline, school to prison, put them in jail because the best way to rob someone is to take their time, which is why, behind bars, they pour you dissociation from a bottle: here’s a cup of faith, don’t let it spill; it’s strange how we only ruminate on old things long discarded — maybe we’re moths, drawn to the fire, and in the torchlight, she says Give me your dreams, your traumas, and I’ll bet them against the House; 4 5 6, remember manners are a litmus test for culture — we don’t eat cows, we eat steak — but you’re a nowhere man, an invisible man, a man unheard and therefore unseen, don’t worry, here are pills for happiness, and if that doesn’t work we have installed a multi-million dollar net to break your f a l l — 7-8-9, sorry, the visiting hours to see the trees are over, but from noon to four you can buy a postcard of the sea — it’ll be a rare collector’s item soon, the color blue is going extinct; 10/11/12 — it’s hard to count to twenty-one when the names don’t fit nicely on a memorial plaque, memorialize, memory, moment, morality, congrats! you’re young enough to have a kid but not a body, young enough to learn that freedom is expensive; but here you can buy knowledge cheap: truth for a decade of debt; now look down — it’s all turtles, really — your discontentment is dizzying, you need to stop, halt, red light, green light over the water, green-light the next execution, wish you were here, but really it’s amusing how, even after a hundred years of solitude, we still turn to the silver screen in search of gold, gold rush, golden age, golden potatoes — you need about 1.5 pounds of those for stew, peeled and chopped, and I almost forgot we need carrots and tomatoes for the salad, and avocados, but make sure to get the organic kind — I don’t want those pesticides clogging up my system, I swear, sometimes it feels like they’re trying to poison us.