Ill Fortune
Had Chinese food today with my recurrent lunch companion, Nick, and he rightly complained about fortune cookie messages that are declarations of fact, rather than actual fortunes, which are properly defined as "foretellings of one's destiny." For instance, "You have a magnetic personality." Not a fortune. Probably not even true, given most personalities.
Nick's today said, "You like Chinese food." What kind of a wise-ass cookie is that? He had just polished off a pound or two of MSG; of course he likes Chinese food. (Perhaps it's not a joke; perhaps it's meant to open the eyes of someone who has just been forced to eat Chinese food against his or her will.)
The real reason I bring this up -- I know, it hardly seems I need a reason, given how fascinating this is -- is that I've been meaning to share this particularly bizarre fortune, which I received a few months back:
Mend the first break, kill the first snake,
and conquer everything you undertake.
What an incredibly strange sequence of advice, and how not in keeping, tonally, with my makeup. I felt like someone had switched my fortune cookie with Genghis Kahn's, and he was somewhere reading this:
Worry a lot about things you can't control,
and let that worry keep you from getting much done.
Nick's today said, "You like Chinese food." What kind of a wise-ass cookie is that? He had just polished off a pound or two of MSG; of course he likes Chinese food. (Perhaps it's not a joke; perhaps it's meant to open the eyes of someone who has just been forced to eat Chinese food against his or her will.)
The real reason I bring this up -- I know, it hardly seems I need a reason, given how fascinating this is -- is that I've been meaning to share this particularly bizarre fortune, which I received a few months back:
Mend the first break, kill the first snake,
and conquer everything you undertake.
What an incredibly strange sequence of advice, and how not in keeping, tonally, with my makeup. I felt like someone had switched my fortune cookie with Genghis Kahn's, and he was somewhere reading this:
Worry a lot about things you can't control,
and let that worry keep you from getting much done.
Labels: Favorites
posted by JMW at 8:31 PM
2 Comments:
I don't read my fortunes anymore, because a couple of years ago I got one that said, "You are the greatest person in the world."
I mean, where could you go from there?
I actually got that very same fortune cookie message a month ago. I thought it was pretty damn deep for a cookie.
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