Unfortunate Cookies

I really love like Chinese. Food, that is. But I hate dislike the hard, dry, bland, mangled and bent-shaped complimentary treats. I hereby refer to these treats as Fortune Cookies! You know, the ones that come with predictions that either make you feel good about your prospects in life, or irritated and want to punch and cause much misfortune to the person who writes the sayings. Who writes them anyway? Fortune Cooks?

Ok, why the peeve with fortune cookies? Well, again, they’re bland, dry and hard. They’re tasteless - both the cookie and the fortune/saying, but especially the piece of paper. In case you haven’t noticed, the newer and more improved versions of the treat come with the tip of the piece of paper sticking out from one side of the cookie. Why? Apparently some people had been munching on the treat and suddenly find that there’s a piece of flimsy waxed paper in their mouths..hahaaa...  The mishap is often the result of assuming that everyone will crack open the cookie to read the fortune first. Truth is that there are still people who do not read, but eat their fortunes...inadvertently. It’s like chewing on a sticker while munching on an apple or other fruit from the store.

As for the fortune (saying) itself, though it’s usually inspirational and motivational, it can also become ambiguous at best and/or annoying or irritating at worst. If the “fortune cooks” want to be credible in their predictions, why don’t they write one that says “You will experience heartburn in the next two hours,” or this “You have just consumed more noodles in one hour than your deceased distant  uncle did in his lifetime.” (Unless of course your uncle was Italian and lived in Spaghettiville.)

And then there are those who collect the sayings/papers with compulsion, believing that their lives will be greatly enriched just by reading hundreds of them, and without any conscious effort and work on their part.

But sometimes the sayings are ambiguous or too general that they can be interpreted in a negative way. Instead of fortunes, they become misfortunes. Here’s one that I got in a more recent outing at an Asian restaurant: “Unveil your ideas, be ready to act on them.”  Wow. Do fortune cookie makers understand that maniacs, crooks, murderers, robbers, pshycos, etc. have access to these things? Do we really want a terrorist to “unveil and act on his ideas?”

Well, even for normal people (like me! ...hahaha) these fortunes can be depressing if not cryptic, annoying and contradictory. For example, there was this one: “A friend asks only for your time not your money,” True alright, and quite profound, unless you’re someone, like Bill Gates, who believes that time IS money. LOL!.

If there was a remote region of the universe where this fortune cookie business represents reality, one of the great possibilities then is the fact that a “misfortune” is likely better than a “fortune”. In other words, there can be more motivation in the negative than the positive. For example, when someone gets something like: “Next week you will be in jail,” I’m sure that person will try his best not to find himself in such a predicament. His actions will all be preemptively good and law-abiding. Right?  Welllll...hmmm...maybe ... until you get a saying like this -

then what? Don’t write any more, or keep writing? Well, let’s put it this way, if you have just read the above "misfortune," you’ve already proved it wrong.  LOL! ....

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A trivia:  Name the things that you can both eat and deleat (delete).  Cookies!  Hahaa ...(This trivia is my own, not from a fortune cookie.)