When Even the Fortune Cookies Bail
Today, I ate at a Chinese restaurant for lunch and experienced a thing that makes me say (a paraphrase from the Christian Slater movie Broken Arrow): I don't know what's worse - not finding any fortune at all in your fortune cookie or having this happen so many times that I'm beginning to think it's my thing. (i.e., Elizabeth Taylor gets married a lot, Missouri weather is obnoxious, Serenity gets fortune cookies without any fortune in them.)
That's right. It was completely empty. Nada. Even a blank piece of paper might have been more promising. I believe the universe is trying to tell me one of three things:
1. You're going to die early.
2. You make your own future.
3. Somebody at the fortune cookie assembly line in Minneapolis was totally phoning it in.
Permently
I am basically unwilling to believe the first and way too Eat, Pray, Love to settle for the third, so I'm going with the second - which, come to think of it, is basically a line from Back to the Future III, so it must be true.
Here's what I'm going to do about it. First of all, I didn't eat the cookie. I couldn't do it. I mean, it's not like when they give you a single instead of a double in the drive-thru. That's something you can compromise on. Eating a fortune cookie without a fortune in it felt more like buying a life insurance policy that expires next Tuesday. Next, I think I'll beef up that goals list I visit every now and then. Did you know you're a million percent more likely to accomplish a goal if you write it down? (It's not really a million. I exaggerate. That really is my thing.)
So I'm going to get on that right away. I'm going to think about tomorrow and ten years from now and that day in the future when I'm accepting an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. From my own book. I'm going to write the thank-you speech while I'm at it. And it will say thank you to stereotactic radiosurgery for zapping that little tumor in 2014, which definitely extended my life by an amount immeasurable by me (since I refuse to google certain things about my on-again-off-again disease), and that fortune cookie I opened on January 23, 2014, which clearly stated, Your future is a vast, unwritten page. And you are destined to write it.
