A Grocery List

In the Facebook comments to my last blog entry, Kristina challenged me to write an interesting entry about a grocery list. Actually, she was kidding, but I'm going to try anyway.

First, some advice for grocery lists:

1. Don't make yours until you've received the care package your mom sent up with your brother that's been sitting in his dorm for a few days, because otherwise you might buy apples and then have twice as many as you need.
2. Just include a line for the "Buy 1 get one Free" box at the front of Publix. It's practically irresistible. Who knew I needed graham crackers until they were there, tempting me with their bland peanut butterability. They should just call those boxes their sirens. Or, they could just install a normal siren. But that wouldn't lure me as much.

That said, here is the only grocery list I've made this year:


It might be hard to see clearly. I have a difficult time uploading pictures that are left with sufficient resolution. But there are several things to notice about this list:

1. Shopping is not the only thing I do with my life. There are, as you might notice, other notes on the page besides the column on the upper right describing what all I need.
2. Cooking is not the only thing I do with my life, either. This is the only shopping list I've made this year because half of it wasn't food items. In fact, after the candle-burning-gone-wrong incident last week, I only realized yesterday that there's still some wax left on the actual burner, and that cooking gourmet scrambled eggs wasn't going to happen until we cleaned it. Needless to say, I have yet to use the stove.
3. The word "socks" is capitalized and given priority. That's because when I was in China people thought that Americans eat cheeseburgers as much as Chinese eat rice--that is, every day. So me wearing socks that went halfway up to my knees wasn't a huge misrepresentation of American fashion, though my sister disagrees:
4. I use legal pads a lot. That's because spiral notebooks eat up my books and I need a divider. So this legal pad accompanies my backpack pretty faithfully.

But now you're asking, what is all this stuff that's on Will's grocery list? And I'm not surprised. I am a fascinating shopper. I buy things like tacks to hang posters with (which didn't work, but I was really impressed because in America people understand English and I know the word for "tacks": it's "tacks"). I employ logical statements: (cereal and milk) OR (bagels and butter). I went for cereal and milk, of course. And butter.

What you should be asking, though, is what else is important enough to invade a grocery list's domain? I'll tell you:

1. A rough map of Gainesville. It only has three roads on it because that's all I know of Gainesille. And that's if I have the legal pad with me. And have already gotten lost going to Target once this year because I didn't know that Archer was the road that curved off SW 13th, but have made up for it with a beautifully curving Archer on my map.
2. Notes about Dubliners, James Joyce's first book.
3. A quote about being a genius.
4. Homework assignments for various classes in various stages of completion.
5. Notes for the speech I gave at the re-entry meeting for people who studied abroad last spring.
6. A critique of Buddhism's "Eightfold Path."
7. A quote from my Chinese culture teacher, on how to reconcile what he says about Buddhism with the book's contradictory summary: "Maybe I am correct, because I am from China." Teachers don't use the word "maybe" in America.
8. A link to http://freerice.com, a fantastic way to save the world, improve your chances of knowing what words like "macerate" mean ("to soften"), and look like you're paying attention during class.
9. A girl's name from one of my classes. I write people's names on my tablet according to where they sit in reference to me. I think "Christina Iglesias" (spelling my own) sits behind and to the left of me. In some class.
10. A line celebrating my mastery over Chinese culture class: "Dunhuang--I've been to the whole slide." Since all we do in that class is go through a powerpoint with no power or point and then watch more than an hour of a kungfu movie reinforcing Asian stereotypes.

And that's my grocery list, and several lists about my grocery list.