Jun 01 2002
Fortune Cookies
I never make dinner on Fridays. Instead, we get pizza or other delicacies from the ever-reliable Victor’s, or something like that. After I got my eyebrows waxed yesterday, I stopped in at Tai Chi to get some Chinese food. I’m not really a big Chinese food fan — I wouldn’t cry if I were told I could never eat it again — but I do love General Chu’s chicken. I have also seen it as Cho, Zhou, Zsu, and other exotic spellings, and have no idea who he was. Maybe General Chu’s chicken just means chicken in general. Anyway, Tai Chi makes a fabulous version, spicy and brown sugary and garlicky.
With the order came fortune cookies. I have always found them to be the most fun of all Chinese food, since I can never resist reading my horoscope or asking the Magic Eight Ball questions. It’s fun to think that these things can predict the future, but if they really could, just imagine how horrifying that would be. But I have noticed lately that fortune cookies don’t give you a fortune anymore, they give you proverbs. Proverb cookies are significantly less fun.
So instead of having something like, “Your tears will soon become smiles” or even, “You will meet a tall, dark stranger” or something like that, the ones we got had a rather nagging tone to them: “Idleness is the holiday of fools” (really fun for someone who is unemployed to get that one) and “Behind an able man, there are always other able men.” I thought it was bad enough being told to behave at the movies by those ads they run before trailers, without being told off by a cookie. Is the world such a rude place that we have to get etiquette tips from inanimate objects?