I like fake Chinese food: General Tso’s chicken, in particular. It’s just so salty. I am getting hungry just writing about it. The SAC sells some tasty fake Chinese food that sneaks its way into my diet every now and then. I always take a couple of fortune cookies when I get my SAC Chinese food since I have an uncontrollable urge to have my future explained to me in cryptic sentences typed on small pieces of paper.
There was a time, when I was a kid, when the fortunes I received were chillingly clairvoyant. When I was ten-year-old living in Houston, I ate a fortune cookie that informed me about my impending nuptials. The marriage ended up being annulled after five days due to some unpleasantness, but the cookie had alerted me to what was afoot. This was the golden era of cookie fortunes. However, their quality and accuracy has been on a decline since that time. When I get true fortunes these days, they are lazy and ambiguous:
Some sort of thing will happen to you in the near future.
However, if this were my only complaint, I probably would not be typing in anger. I don’t know if anybody has noticed, but fortune cookies have become awful preachy lately. Instead of distributing future predictions, these cookies contain little edicts describing what the consumer should and should not do. Below are a few choice examples:
Attend to business today. Leave that street-side flower alone.
Spend some time alone.
Take a supportive role to benefit the group dynamic.
You can always trust in the judgment of the collective.
Stillness Vs. Motion: It is all relative.
I don’t like being told what to do, especially by food. I need to know what to expect in my future, and this food product is my only possible source of information. I think Temple should boycott the fortune cookie companies until they go back to their Eastern European roots and give us cookies containing predictions. And while we are trying to change how these companies do business, we should force them to stop putting unusable Chinese expressions on the back of the fortune paper. How many times will I ever need to use the expression “already married” in Chinese? Answer: approximately fourteen.
