Assignment task:
What Does This Essay Mean? Oh, hello, nice to see you, have a seat - let's stress-eat some chips together. Let's turn ourselves, briefly, into dusty-?fingered junk-food receptacles. This will force us to stop looking, for a few minutes, at the bramble of tabs we've had open on our internet browsers for all these awful months: the articles we've been too frazzled to read about the TV shows we've been meaning to watch; the useless products we keep almost impulse-?buying; the sports highlights and classic films that we digest in 12-second bursts every four days; that little cartoon diagram of how to best lay out your fruit orchards in Animal Crossing. Eating these chips will rescue us, above all, from the very worst things on our screens, the cursed news of the outside world - escalating numbers, civic decay, gangs of elderly men behaving like children.
Please, sit down. I've got a whole bag of Cool Ranch Doritos here: electric blue, plump as a winter seed, bursting with imminent joy. I found it up in the cupboard over the fridge, where by some miracle my family had yet to discover it - it had slipped sideways behind the protein powder, back near the leftover Halloween candy - so now I'm sitting here all alone at the kitchen counter, about to sail off into the salty seas of decadent gluttony. The next few minutes of my life, at least, are going to be great.