Rick and I picked up some food from Pei Wei for dinner. Mongolian chicken. Good stuff. Pei Wei is pretty much a no-frills version of P.F. Chang’s – same food, for the most part, although the menu is smaller. And they don’t serve desserts or a very large variety of drinks. The restaurant itself is just a simple diner-style setup, and lacks the whole “Chinese palace” theme of P.F. Chang’s. And judging from the take-out line at the restaurant tonight, most people take their Pei Wei food home with them.
And any time you eat Chinese food, whether it’s in a restaurant or at home, the familiar fortune cookie concludes the meal. But I’ve noticed lately that fortune cookies rarely contain “fortunes” – a fortune is supposed to provide some sort of portent into the future, right? They’re supposed to hazard a guess at your fate, your destiny, your eventual place within the microcosm. In fact, last year, right before the fantasy baseball draft, I DID get a fortune in a cookie that read, “you will be recognized and honored as a community leader.” I took this to mean that I would “lead” in the “community” of my fantasy baseball league and everyone would have no choice but to “recognize” it. And, of course, I was “honored” to accept Bryan’s money. So you see, sometimes those silly little fortunes actually DO know what they’re talking about.
But usually, the “fortunes” in my fortune cookies are more like suggestions… or like obvious observations… things like, “you smile when you are happy” or “the wise man reads to increase his knowledge” or “remove trans fats from your diet.” Tonight, the fortune in Rick’s cookie said, “the simplest answer is to act.” Um, okay. Not entirely sure what that means. And my fortune said, “don’t pursue happiness – create it.” So not only did I NOT get a fortune, but my cookie reminded me that any time I’m depressed about something, it’s my own darn fault. Gosh, thanks, fortune cookie!
In addition to the “fortunes” in these cookies, each slip of paper included a word on the back, in English and in Chinese, with phonetic pronunciation, presumably in an attempt to teach us fortune-cookie-recipients some basic Chinese. The word on Rick’s fortune was “store.” Okay, that seems pretty logical – I could see needing to know how to say “store” if I happened to be wandering around China and needed some gum or a soda or something. But the word on my fortune was a bit more confusing: moustache. Moustache??? Of all the words I might need to know at some point during an excursion to China, I would think that “moustache” would pretty much be the least useful. Unless I needed to say something like “the man who stole my bag had a moustache.” But what about words like “hello,” “goodbye,” and “thank you”? Wouldn’t they be more practical? Or am I missing something about the usefulness of “moustache”?
I would just like to see a REAL fortune in my next fortune cookie, even if it’s just something like, “you will eat chocolate cake for dessert.” Because then I could blame the calories on destiny…
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