It wasn't that we disliked Chinese food. Later on, Dad got in the habit of stir-frying, and I remember that pretty clearly. His stir-frying endeavors were enthusiastic, but not always strictly successful. An adherent of the Iowa "More Isn't Enough" school of cookery, he overloaded the wok to such an extent that nothing was ever truly stir-fried; the best one could say of it was that it had been stir-simmered. And he made heavy use of five-spice, which is truly the plutonium of gastronomy. (Ralph Nader once said that a pound of plutonium, ground into dust, could kill eight billion people. Critics of this theory cry "Bullshit! A pound of plutonium could only kill two million people!" That's a relief. For a while I was getting really worried.) It doesn't take much five-spice to make everything taste like five-spice, and dad shoveled it in by the tablespoon. Weeks later I could still taste it, and I later estimated the half-life of five-spice was about twenty days.
What I'm really saying here is that I don't know what the fortunes in fortune cookies were like back in the golden days, when cars had fins and Ike's ghost beamed paternally down at us. There is some argument that fortune cookies are actually Japanese in origin, sort of a shotgun (or Shogun) wedding of independently-existing cookies and fortunes at some temple in Kyoto. This could be true. Any viewing of anime must surely lead one to the conclusion that Japanese culture is capable of producing almost anything.
But mostly I wonder if the actual fortunes in the cookies were different in the Olden Days. Were they actual fortunes? Actual testable predictions of events yet to transpire? Like the California Psychics, only without a 1-800 number? I like to think so. You will meet an enigmatic stranger. That would be kind of fun. Or maybe they would be vaguely ominous, like Beware of Pomeranians, leaving you to wonder if they were referring to the dogs or the people. Or maybe they'd be strangely self-referential, like Help, I'm trapped in a Chinese fortune cookie factory!
I don't know. But what I do know is that the three most recent fortunes I've gotten in Chinese restaurants have been unsatisfying. The discovery that multiple Chinese restaurants all used fortune cookies made by the same company unsettled me - the notion of fortunes being bought and sold wholesale seems to cheapen the whole endeavor, just a little. This suggests that somewhere in the sprawling Chinese Fortune Cookie works, there is one guy at a desk writing fortunes, and he's starting to get a little bored and complacent. "Nobody reads this crap anyway," he says as he copies and pastes in random text. But I read them.
So let's look at my most recent fortunes.
A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.
Huh. You might want to double-check with the skipper of the Exxon Valdez on that one. And I might point out that a smooth sea never made me spill coffee on my shirt either. This one has a distinct consolation prize quality about it, as though it feels sorry for me and is trying to buck up my flagging joie de vivre by chucking me on the shoulder and offering some small-potatoes consolation like "Well, at least you didn't lose both eyes..."
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
And if this was really true, we'd still be drilling holes in people's skulls to let the evil spirits out. It turns out that what we believe to be true often turns out to be total crap, and when we realize how wrong we were, we feel pretty stupid. But in a way, this fortune does provide one useful service: it seems to sum up the entire body of post-modern thought in one sentence. It may be wrong, but saves one a good deal of time and bother. Don't bother with Harvard, guys, here's post-modernism in a single sentence.
Alas! You are the apple of my eye.
This one really bothers me, mostly because it sounds so embarrassed about the whole thing. It's like it has a crush on me, but it finds that crush distasteful in some way. I like you, but you always embarrass me in public. I like you, but my friends think you're a loser. I like you, but I wish I didn't because you always smell like Beef-A-Roni. I like you, but honey, nobody cares if the Ringworld is unstable or not.
But I guess it isn't a total loss. At least now I know what my lucky numbers are. All eighteen of them.
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