Chicken Gravy and Chinese Food

Chicken Gravy and Chinese Food

A friend recently said something to me that struck like a bell. We were talking about what life feels like here, and he summed it up perfectly: “You live in a place where chicken gravy is considered daring and Chinese food is considered exotic.”

That is the truth of Southeast Idaho.

Every day here feels like plain bran flakes—predictable, bland, and endlessly the same. People don’t want it to be different. They’ve grown comfortable with sameness, with routine, with the safety of never having to step outside themselves. Expansion of the self isn’t required; conformity is rewarded.

But let’s be real—chicken gravy isn’t daring. Chinese food isn’t exotic. Especially when it’s not authentic Chinese food at all, but the same handful of dishes spread across fifteen nearly identical restaurants. How can something be exotic when it’s on every corner? It’s not “different.” It’s just the same, dressed up with a little soy sauce.

Living here sometimes feels like watching fish swim in a tank. Do they realize they’re caged in, or do they believe that glass box is the whole world? That’s the question this place raises for me. Have people simply adapted so fully to the confines of routine that they can’t even see the walls around them?

Chicken gravy and Chinese food. That’s not daring. That’s not exotic. That’s just the illusion of variety, masking the reality of sameness. And it makes me wonder: how many of us are swimming in glass tanks, mistaking them for oceans?

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