My Cherished Spouse and I ate Chinese food last night, topped off with the customary fortune cookies. Mine said
The wise thing to do is not be yourself.
Huh?? What happened to “Adventure is opportunity”, “You will go on a journey”, “A stranger will bring luck” and all the other ginger-crystalled little bits of consolation that usually come with these things? Did this cookie just insult me, or does it hold some obscure Confucian wisdom that I really should contemplate more fully? And if the latter, where did this mundane little morsel get the presumptuous idea that it should actually pose such a profound question?
Anybody else ever get an unusual cookie fortune like this?
I work at a chinese restaurant and we recently had a differend brand of fortune cookie than normal… they had very odd fortunes- some insulting, some actual fortunes, and some that were just weird.
My favorite was a very strange grizzly bearded dude (who actually fell asleep in the restaurant… with his portable DVD player playing heavy metal music videos. but that’s another story.) whose fortune said, “you look very pretty today.” Another one said something like, “don’t listen to fortune cookies”
I liked those. They had Chinese words on the back instead of “lucky numbers.” I’ll have to see if there are any left and see what the brand was
Years ago, my Mom took the family out for my birthday. We got into one of our (generally good-natured but frequently pointed) disagreements about some aspect of life. When I opened my fortune cookie it read “The person you are with is not going to pay for your meal.”
When I was in college I found you can use a paper clip to pull the fortune out of the cookie before eating it. After I got one out I read it and it said something that started with “Friends are…” I crossed off the rest of it, wrote in “a waste of tiem” and put it back in…Hillarity ensued…eventually.
A friend of mine worked in a Chinese take-out place. He got a bunch of cookies custom-printed to say “Death and destruction shall haunt you for the rest of your days” and mixed a few into the bucket every month. Someone might be messing with you.
At our campus open house last month, one of the alumni donated some fortune cookies to the marching band’s BBQ. We thought, fortune cookies? WTF? They had our motto in them, and were pretty cool.
“Far and wide, many have tried, but none have done it better. Cal Aggie Marching Band Picnic Day 2006”
One time I had a fortune that said something like, “A good way to stay healthy is to eat more Chinese food.” I have to say, that is the most shameless (but also delicious) fortune I have ever seen.
Penn and Teller’s book How to Play With your Food comes with pre-printed fortunes that you’re encouraged to substitute for the real ones when appropriate. Their selections include “that lump is cancer” and “smart-ass skeptic… monkey-man will MAKE you believe.”
One of my friends got a fortune that said “You will die early.” In 4th grade during lunch. I remember the moment vividly.
This particular kid was active in sprint car racing and later moved on to stock car racing - so he actually was at rather high risk compared to the rest of us.
I like to look at my fortune and say, “That wasn’t chicken!”
Can’t recall where I first heard it.
I ate at a Chinese place once, and on a whim – a total whim – I said, “you got any funny fortune cookies back there?”
The women said, “are you sure you want them?” (naturally, I was intrigued)
She gave us cookies with fortunes that just said things like “Go fuck yourself” and “Fuck you”. They weren’t even jokes on the cookie theme. Just insults.
I recently got “A secret admirer will reveal his affection for you.” (bolding mine) While I’m secure enough in my masculinity/heterosexuality not to be offended by it, it seems strange to have a gender-specific fortune cookie.
Maybe the subtext of your fortune was “Fortune cookies are for GIRLS! Eat steak, girly-man!”
We love Chinese food, so I get plenty of fortunes. It’s too bad most of them are so unmemorable. I did get a cookie not long ago that had the Lost numbers as the suggested lotto numbers! I meant to keep that one, but I don’t know what I did with it.
I never actually thought about the creative opportunities of cookie fortunes (stodgy restaurants may be responsible for that). Judging by the ads here, it’s not hard at all to order custom fortunes. Come to think of it, though, the special ones probably cost more. The restaurants may simply be frugal.
